It seems to be silly season for big-name directors. First, Coppola’s Megalopolis and Steve McQueen’s Blitz: why? Now Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer: double why?
Conclave
Director Edward Berger won an Oscar for his last feature, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), but here he concerns himself with the more intimate and claustrophobic battlefield of the Vatican. The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died, and under the watchful eye of the Dean, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the cardinals gather to appoint his successor. No-one said it would be easy.
Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark is best known for taking her abstract sculptures off the pedestal and inviting people to interact with them. Dozens of constructions named Bichos (Beasts or Critters) (pictured below right) are hinged along the joins to allow you to rearrange the parts in seemingly endless configurations.
It’s always fun jabbing at the permanently open wound that is Anglo-French relations, now with added snap post-Brexit, its fading, but still frothing, humourless defenders clogging up Twitter and radio phone-ins even today. So it’s probably timely for Gallic-Gang Productions to resurrect Jean (La Cage aux Folles) Poiret’s farce Fefe de Broadway, adapted as French Toast.
If you’re looking for an advertisement for how crime doesn’t pay, Joan will do very nicely. Written by Anna Symon, this six-part series is based on the memoirs of real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington, whose light-fingered accomplishments earned her notoriety back in the Eighties. Some apparently referred to her as “The Godmother”, though they don’t here.
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.
If Angela Hewitt’s recital last night at the Wigmore Hall was a meal, it would have been two light, fresh – but nourishing – courses, followed by a big suetty pudding, splendidly cooked but sitting slightly heavy on the stomach.
Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.
Iconic is a word the meaning of which is moving from the religious world into popular culture – win a reality TV show dressed as a teapot, and you can be sure that your 15 minutes of fame will be labelled iconic across social media. Not quite what Andrei Rublev had in mind 600 years ago.