Film
SHORT FILM ANTHOLOGY PARIS, JE T’AIME (15) 120min 00
For this portmanteau work, 21 directors from around the world have contributed five-minute shorts. which are set in 18 of Paris' administrative districts. The project was intended as a cinematic valentine to the French capital. with the theme of love linking the various segments. There's an array of styles and moods on display. and a
TALKING movies
I - .
.4... t )2 fig I n
In Talking Movies (Wallflower 0.00 ) Jason Wood interviews more than 30 contemporary filmmakers including Carlos Reygadas, Richard Linklater, Atom Egoyan, Lucrecia Martel, Elia Suleiman and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Wood’s project is wonderfully international in scope, and there are numerous good observations from his interviewees. Professional biographer Charlotte Chandler has not one but two biographies out. Bette Davis - The Girl Who Walked Home Alone (Pocket Books 000 ) and
’50 Oil! was thMnf Hum: Atom
.t k ,
CHARIOUG (II-MAID!“
the other on Bergman, Ingrid - A Personal Biography (Simon and Schuster 00. ) are hardly great works of biographical research, but they are very engaging examples of celebrity self-examination. Chandler’s books
cosmopolitan line—up of acting talent. including Juliette Binoche. Steve Buscemi. Ben Gazzara. Maggie Gyllnehaaal, Emily Mortimer. Nick
Nolte. Natalie Portman. Gena Rowlands and Ludivine Sagnier. Yet. as so often with omnibus films. the results are very hit-and-miss. and along with the seemingly arbitrary running order. the brevity of each film makes it harder to savour the more compelling sections. On a positive note Brazilian
filmmakers Walter Salles and Daniela
FILM BOOKS ROUND-UP
are basically based
, on interviews with
5 Davis and Bergman, and as she allows
her subjects to open
up, whether it is Davis talking lucidly about the ageing
. process, or Bergman about the ‘. importance of love,
these are works that definitely allow us to feel close to two of
cinema’s most
important stars.
. William J Mann’s
1 Hepburn bio, Kate -
The Woman Who Was Katherine
: Hepburn (Faber
000 ) is an
impressively
: tieiiiiiowg HA INE HEPBUR ,
5 researched tome,
1 and while this is one i of those biographies where we learn
much about
Hepburn’s love
3 affairs and personal quirks, the book is
' ultimately more
scurrilous than
: revealing. Brian J ; Robb’s decidedly
(and deliberately) superficial run- through of Silent
40 THE LIST 21 Jun— 5 Jul 2007
Cinema (Kamera Books 000 ), offers us chapters
: with titles including
‘The Silent Clowns’, ‘The Dramatic Stars’ and ‘Silent Scandals’, which gives some sense of the book’s expected
_ l'SiléntCineiit-gg,
readership. Sure, there are mentions of Eisenstein and Lang, Keaton and Chaplin, but the book keeps to the surface and rarely offers analytic probes. James Morrison’s The Cinema of Todd
: Haynes - All That
Heaven Allows (Wallflower GOO ) is an academic work
full of references to
desire, ‘ambisexuality’ and Deleuze - the philosopher looking
. as if he’s
suspiciously been drafted into Anglo-
American film
studies to replace Derrida as an intellectual
touchstone.
(Tony McKibbin)
Thomas contribute a poignant account of an immigrant mother in a poor suburb who leaves her own baby each day to work as a nanny in a more affluent district.
South African writer director Oliver Schmitz shows. With a deft use of flashbacks. the fate of a Nigerian musician after he is stabbed. Cassavetes fans WI” relish Rowlands and Gazzara paired as a c0uple discussmg their divorce in a film directed by the former. The Coen brothers deliver a blackly entertaining tale of a tOurist iBuscemii. who makes eye contact with the wrong people on the Metro.
Disappointments include a tedious riff on vampires (Vincenzo Natali), a cloying yarn about mime-artists (Sylvain Chometi. and Nobuhiro Suwa's overblown foray into the imagination of grieving mother. Still. there is the pleasure of Alexander Payne's final contribution. which compasSionately
BIOPIC LA VIE EN ROSE (12A) 140min 000
details the epiphany of a middle-aged US postal worker on a visit to Paris. (Tom Dawsoni
I GFI? G/asgow 8 Fi/rnhouse. Edinburgh from Fri 29 Jun.
French singer Edith Piaf’s real life was the stuff of turbulent melodrama: she was abandoned by her mother and spent some of her impoverished childhood in a brothel, and she was discovered singing on the streets by an impresario, whom she was later accused of murdering. And despite winning the affection of millions through her heartfelt songs, the diminutive Piaf endured a series of failed love affairs and became addicted to painkillers following a car crash. By the age of just 47, suffering from crippling arthritis,
she died of cancer.
Director Olivier Dahan heeds Jean-Luc Godard’s advice that ‘a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order’, by scrambling the film’s chronology. His highly stylised film ricochets between different time periods, jumping from late 19505 New York, to post- WWI Paris, from mid-19505 to the early 605 south of France. The scenes are brief, and often overwrought and without prior knowledge of Piaf, it’s sometimes hard to grasp the significance of what you’re seeing. Supporting actors such as Pascal Greggory as her long-suffering manager Louis Barrier, Gerard Depardieu as her first patron Louis Leplee, and Jean-Pierre Martins as the boxer Marcel Cerdan - supposedly the love of her life — make little impression. Puzzlingly, despite a near two-and-a-half hour running time, there’s no mention of Piaf’s activities during the Occupation, where she played for German officers and apparently assisted the Resistance.
The film is worth seeing however for Cotillard’s magnificent central performance. It’s not just her impressive physical transformation into her character, it’s the way she conveys Piaf’s all-or-nothing personality: this is a woman of strength and fragility, capable of treating her confidants with cruelty. And the chansons themselves, convincingly lip-synched by Cotillard, continue to electrify, with Dahan wisely leaving the very best - ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ (‘No Regrets’) til last. (Tom Dawson)
I Gf-T Glasgow 8 Fi/nihouse. Edinburgh from Fri 22 Jun.