The Royal Northern College of Music’s production of Massenet’s Cendrillon has a particularly strong professional production team, and it shows. This is one of the most attractively spectacular operas the college has mounted for years.
Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to plunge back into the classics, as well as start discovering many underrated or forgotten directors, actors, DoP’s or film score composers.
What makes the documentary so good is his 100% personal approach – although he is touchingly modest and includes contributions from many of his professional colleagues. It is not a completist’s bible or an attempt at cinema-historical balance. Rather like David Thomson’s unreservedly subjective and opinionated Biographical Dictionary of Film, this is a treasure trove of enthusiasms, presented with a keen knowledge of what underpins the language of great cinema. Tavernier celebrates well-known directors such as Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean-Pierre Melville and Claude Sautet, but he focuses as well on lesser-known directorial talents such as Edmond T Gréville who split his remarkable career between England and France, and many of whose masterpieces, such as Menaces or Brief Ecstasy aren’t available on DVD.
The recurrent figure in Tavernier’s pantheon is Jean Gabin, the French acting icon from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, much more subtle than Depardieu in his depiction of the ordinary Frenchman. As Tavernier demonstrates with many carefully chosen clips, enhanced by an always eye-opening and thought-provoking commentary, Gabin was as fine an actor as any, not just the personification of a nation’s better self.
There are delightful quirks, such as his celebration of the tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine, best-known to British audience for his ironic self-referential role in Godard’s Alphaville, but a regular fixture in a series of often very violent gangster films of the 1950s, which Tavernier greatly enjoyed. He rhapsodises as well about Maurice Jaubert, the film composer, not least the score he wrote for Jean Vigo’s classic L’Atalante. In describing the way in which Jaubert managed to add a dramatic dimension to key scenes of the films he worked on, rather than just fill gaps, Tavernier gives us a lesson in film technique, just as he does in describing the outstanding work of other craftsmen working in the medium.
The film is never didactic, although always surprisingly informative. Tavernier’s exploration of French cinema is made entertaining by a wealth of revealing anecdotes – not least, during the making of Le jour se lève, designer Alexandre Trauner’s insistence that Carné and his producers build an extra floor onto the house (pictured above) which plays such a crucial part in the drama. What stands out perhaps most of all is an extraordinary generosity of spirit – this is a man who can speak about others in his profession with great respect, rare in a milieu where ego rules a great deal of the time. That generosity is contagious: this is a film where the man’s love of the medium is fully shared with his audience. Highly recommended to anyone interested in le cinéma français.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Journey Through French Cinema
French stylist Gaspard Royant has recorded at London’s garage-rock-central studio Toe Rag and been produced by Edwyn Collins. Both fit a worldview which encompasses collaborating with Eli Paperboy Reed, who crops up here on “Christmas Time Again”, a cover of Reuben Anderson’s wonderful, soulful 1966 ska single. Drawing a line between garage rock, Sixties urban R&B and soul with dashes of blues and nods to Lee Hazlewood, Royant is a Gallic cousin to Richard Hawley. Unsurprisingly, his first Christmas album is a knowing affair.
Scooping up tracks from Royant’s seasonal singles and marrying them to newly recorded cuts, Wishing You a Merry Christmas is cool, hip and opens with a swinging cover of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” drawn from Phil Spector’s 1963 A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records album. After this, the self-composed (“C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!” sets the tone for a ten-tracker which swims in less-obvious waters, even when a song is over familiar.
Royant’s take on John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” sticks to the template vocally but otherwise injects a gentle dose of Sigur Rós' textural blur. Eels’ “Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas” is rendered straightforwardly, but Wham’s “Last Christmas” is given a Roy Orbison-esque makeover. The album ends with a fine, moody, Chris Isaak-indebted run through U2’s “New Year’s Day”.
Tastefulness is a rare commodity with Christmas albums, but Wishing You a Merry Christmas has it in spades. As a similarly classy but new contribution to an easily maligned genre, file it alongside Paul Revere & the Raiders’ bizarre A Christmas Present...and Past, Psychic TV’s Pagan Day, Etiquette Records’ Merry Christmas album, Les Disques Du Crépuscule’s Chantons Noël - Ghosts of Christmas Past and the Ze label’s A Christmas Record.
Overleaf: watch the video for “(C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!” from Gaspard Royant’s Wishing You a Merry Christmas
No movie that folds Toby Jones of all people into a Gallic entourage headed by Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, the two as formidable as one might wish, is going to be without interest.
A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim). However, BBC Four’s new Saturday night import, whose first series was shown on Channel 4 a couple of years ago, is a French cop show which knows what it’s talking about and does the simple stuff right.
Modigliani was an addict. Booze, fags, absinthe, hash, cocaine, women. He lived fast, died young, cherished an idea of what an artist should be and pursued it to his death. His nickname, Modi, played on the idea of the artiste maudit – the figure of the artist as wretched, damned.
The myth of Modigliani, the archetypal tortured artist, was set in train while he was still alive and remains potent almost a century after his death. Every so often a few game academics try to put things straight, and now Tate Modern’s exhibition reappraises his considerable output not through the broken lens of his addiction, but in the sober daylight of his influences and milieu.
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this story of the declining days of the Sun King into a single royal bedchamber. However, there is one new element: it’s the first time the director has worked with professional actors, which at least ensures that his film's studiedly visual longeurs are handled with first-class Gallic thespian assurance.
Never more so than from French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud in the title role: he plays the 76-year-old fading monarch with an assurance no less absolute than the rule that the longest-serving king of France had exerted in life. Much has been made of the difference between Leaud’s very first screen role – in particular, that closing freeze frame of Truffaut's The 400 Blows – and the practically immobile intensity that he conveys here, and the contrast could hardly be more acute. It’s a bravura performance, which somehow compels attention over 115 occasionally agonising minutes, catching a sense of character in minute movements of the face or variations in exhalations of breath.
Louis has a pain in his leg; as it worsens, he is confined to bed; eventualy gangrene sets in. The process of dying is slow and laboured, and the principle action – hardly the right way of putting it – comes from the deliberations of the doctors who discuss and administer a variety of treatments (pictured above). However, Serra does achieve one scene in which the awareness of approaching death becomes transfixingly clear, as Léaud stares into the camera, unforgettably locking the audience’s gaze. It's a stark moment of contrast in mood, the breach of the fourth wall emphasised by the accompaniment of Mozart’s Great C minor Mass (there is no other incidental music in the film).
The silence and stasis is broken, to varying degrees, by Serra’s depiction of the court, or at least that element of it that appears in the anteroom of the monarch’s bedchamber. Comedy is probably not the right word (and satire not much more appropriate) but the stylised sycophantic attentions are memorable. His Royal Highness is applauded – Bravo, sire! – for every small gesture he manages, a flourish of the hat, or managing to eat a single biscotto. There are early innuendos that hint at past sexual liaisons, but by this stage his affection for his dogs seems more powerful than anything else. Part of the time his secret wife Madame de Maintenon sits inscrutably to one side, while another episode (main picture) brings a visit from his five-year-old successor, the future Louis XV. Don’t imitate me in architecture, or war, is the gist of his advice.
No wonder Molière gets a mention, with quacks like these around
Louis has a right royal caprice, calling urgently for water in the night, then refusing to drink it except from a crystal goblet. “Let me know when you’ve decided to cure me,” he harrumphs to his physicians. The doctoring is grimly comic, led by Fagon (Patrick D’Assumcao) who variously prescribes remedies like donkey’s milk, and tries to resist bringing in outsiders to consult – first from the Sorbonne, then finally a strangely accented charlatan from Marseilles whose elixir includes bull sperm and frog fat. No wonder Molière gets a mention, with quacks like these around. “We haven’t tried the jelly yet” is just one line that Serra and his co-writer Thierry Lounas might have borrowed from Carry On. Though the film’s title appears to preclude any need for spoiler alerts, there’s a touch of unexpected grotesque to its conclusion. (Hint, sausages.)
Such details are apparently based on medical testament, while the story itself draws on court remembrances, principally the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. After a brief opening scene with Louis in his Versailles gardens, it’s all interiors, which are a triumph for cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg, working exclusively with candlelight to produce a deeply painterly effect – sumptuously rich reds recall the Old Masters – and Sebastian Vogler’s production design. No praise is high enough (literally) for the film's perruquiers.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Death of Louis XIV
Only connect.
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him.