Jacques Tati is probably the most famous French comic of all time. Monsieur Hulot is one of those well-loved outsiders, rebels by default rather than vocation and melancholy clowns pitted against the conventions of bourgeois society and the false promises of progress.
The Royal Albert Hall is pretty big. It's a prestige venue, but everything is relative. For the overwhelmingly French audience, the first British headlining show by Johnny Hallyday was the equivalent of seeing Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard sharing a bill at the back room of the Dog & Duck.
Balancing cool calculation with a touch of Potiche’s farce, In the House (Dans la Maison) sees French director François Ozon return to the story-within-a-story structure and enigmatic imposter subject matter of Swimming Pool.
Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York, released on DVD and Blu-ray today, is the fifth feature written (or co-written) and directed by the French actress-filmmaker and her sequel to 2007’s 2 Days in Paris. It is, therefore, another hyper, chaotic comedy of Franco-American cultural discord.
It is said of many people, but for Diana Vreeland it was true: she remains fashion’s once and future queen. An enduring legend of a notoriously vicious and ephemeral world, the Paris-loving Anglo-American had a magical life as a heralded columnist and editor for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not blessed with what one may call traditional beauty, Vreeland understood style - proportion, colour, flair, flow and accent.
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.
The verdict may still be out on the BBC’s lavish unfolding drama, Parade’s End, but it’s already done one thing: to bring the name of its writer, Ford Madox Ford, back from the (relative) oblivion where it has been since his death in 1939 (not least thanks to a script from Tom Stoppard). The novel for which he is best known, The Good Soldier (with its immortal opening line, “this is the saddest story I have ever heard”), has always hovered on various lists of best-ever books, but often rather in the lower ranks.
Even though their names are bound together in the portmanteau title, the directors of the four short films that make up RoGoPaG - Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti - don't go for any sort of narrative tie-ins. The only thing that links the films are the Sixties themes: nuclear annihilation, the shifting role of women and the rise of consumer capitalism. The largely unsatisfying results would only recommend themselves to the dedicated arthouse fan or movie historian were it not for Pasolini's inspired contribution, La Ricotta.
Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the clockmaker’s wife, Conceptión, entertains a succession of would-be lovers in her husband’s absence. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1924), the little boy who won’t do his homework, who smashes the teapot, pulls the cat’s tail and rips the wallpaper, suddenly finds his victims coming to life and scaring him to death.
