Un Prophète
For some reason, I can happily sit through six hours of a Wagner opera, but in the cinema, anything over 90 minutes tends to become unbearable. It takes something special to make me want to go to a film that … Read More
Edited
The Secret Life of France
Lucy Wadham appropriately chooses to begin her engaging and engrossing book, The Secret Life of France, with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I: “Remember where we are,/In France, among a fickle wavering nation.” Her book is one in … Read More
Les Beaux Gosses
Opening shot: a tight close-up of two mouths engaged in a long and rather complicated looking French kiss. In any other movie the image would be charged with romanticism, even eroticism, but in Riad Sattouf’s new film Les Beaux Gosses, … Read More
Murder in the Latin Quarter
Cara Black is an incorrigible recidivist, coming out with a new crime novel set in Paris every year. Now she is back again with the ninth in the series, “Murder in the Latin Quarter.” The latest “Aimée Leduc Investigation” … Read More
Je l’Aimais
On almost every conceivable level, Je l’Aimais (I loved her/him) seemed designed to set my teeth on edge. Following the well-worn theme of so many French movies, this film appeared at first to center on an adulterous love affair told … Read More
City-Lit Paris
Did you know that Hans Christian Andersen spent time in Paris and wrote about his experiences in his diary? I didn’t until I read City-Lit Paris, an anthology of literary excerpts about the city edited by Heather Reyes. And I … Read More
Coco avant Chanel
The name Chanel may conjure up images of the icons of the legendary fashion house – the quilted leather purse with chain shoulder straps, the braid-edged tweed jackets and suits, or even the simplicity of the Chanel Number 5 bottle … Read More
The Kindly Ones
Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, just published in English as The Kindly Ones, is rubbish. What could have been an enthralling 394-page novel on the daily grind of history’s largest war is instead a lame 1,394-page (992 in the English version) … Read More
La Journée de la Jupe
Director Jean-Paul Lilienfeld must have been annoyed that a hit film set in an inner-city school, Entre les Murs (The Class), should come out just five months before his movie, La Journée de la Jupe (literally, The Day of the … Read More
Donne-moi la Main
Donne-moi la Main, the first feature-length movie by Pascal-Alex Vincent, stars a pair of identical twin brothers, Alexandre and Victor Carril, who live in Paris’s Marais. On the evening I saw it, at the MK2 Beaubourg cinema, just on the … Read More