One of European cinema’s most dynamic storytellers, Jacques Audiard chose to follow his iconoclastic romance Rust and Bone and remorseless prison drama A Prophet with a film addressing Europe’s refugee crisis. The no less searing Dheepan won the Palme d’or at Cannes last year.
Like Prokofiev in his full-length ballet a century later, Berlioz seems to have been inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to bring forth his most compendious score. John Eliot Gardiner, who knows and loves every bar of light and shade in this great Berlioz kaleidoscope, offered even more of it than usual at last night's Prom.
Set at the beginning of the 1970s, Catherine Corsini’s Summertime (La belle saison) is a story of love in a political climate, one in which the post-1968 assertions of a changing society have infused the public context in theory but do not ultimately translate into liberation for the film’s two lead women characters. The restrictions of tradition, especially in the rural world in which the greater part of Summertime is set, finally prove too strong for their relationship.
Anyone looking for some psychedelic pop to at least give the illusion that we might now actually be in the middle of summer could do much worse than try out the debut album by Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers. Their 21st century twist on the Monkees’ good grooves is just what the doctor ordered, and Barth Corbelet and Del Vargas’s sun-drenched harmonies and catchy, fuzzy guitars are guaranteed to generate big smiles and some serious rump-shaking from even the most unconfident of dancers.
Nous avons Brexité but we are still welcome at the 47th Rencontres d'Arles. Each summer this beautiful French town gives itself over to an international photography festival which this year features around 40 exhibitions of varying sizes with countless lectures, parties, book signings and fringe events.
"He is one of the few pianists who will not make them sound like angry birds," said young pianist-animateur Víkingur Ólafsson in Reykjavík when I told him that in little over 24 hours' time I'd be hearing Pierre-Laurent Aimard work his way through Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux at dawn, in the afternoon and evening and close to midnight at the Aldeburgh Festival.
The Disappearance, shown in France a year ago, was adapted from a Spanish drama. Both shows had a more gender-specific title: Desaparecida or Disparue.
It was an exhumation waiting to happen. As the UK ponders trashing Europe, Eurotrash was summoned from the grave to remind voters what they’ll be missing if enough Brits put an X in the exit box. The Europe of Eurotrash is not grey suits and fisheries legislation. It’s a place where a ruling on the straightness of cucumbers is a gag waiting to happen, where pooches and porn stars stand for political office, where the then future Madame Sarkozy could be distinctly heard to ask, “Do you like my titties?”.
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryzsztof Warlikowski's fantasia on the Phaedra myth is more than twice that long, but it's worth every riveting or disconcerting minute thanks largely – but by no means exclusively – to the encyclopedic range of Isabelle Huppert.
In the middle of the last century the worst thing that could be said about a working-class housewife was that she had “run off with a black man”. Well, the Queen of France, no better than she ought to be, has had it off with a black man (in fact her pet dwarf). Last week’s opening episode of Versailles ended with Louis XIV (George Blagden) setting eyes on the resulting black baby for the first time.