| | | France review – Léa Seydoux's celebrity journalist becomes the story | | by Wendy Ide Jan 1, 2023 | | A hardened news reporter is forced to reassess her life in Bruno Dumont’s watchable if laboured media satire This blunt media satire from Bruno Dumont stars Léa Seydoux as a French celebrity TV journalist whose life becomes part of the news cycle she reports on. Seydoux is terrific as tough cookie current affairs anchor France de Meurs, a bullet-hard professional with a Chanel wardrobe who unscrupulously deploys tears in exchange for ratings. But what happens when the tears are genuine and the pain that De Meurs weeps for is her own? A freak traffic accident involving a delivery rider causes her to re-evaluate her life, but the lure of the job, and the attention that comes with it, is more potent than pretty much anything else in her life. France is watchable, if not subtle, but the picture labours its message with an overstretched running time and an oddly anticlimactic structure. Continue reading... | | | | | The Pale Blue Eye review – starry gothic mystery loses its way | | by Wendy Ide Jan 1, 2023 | | Despite the best efforts of Christian Bale, Gillian Anderson and co, this wintry crime yarn featuring a young Edgar Allan Poe descends into farce A gothic crime thriller set in the snowbound Hudson valley in 1830, and featuring macabre, ritually violated corpses and a supporting role for the young Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling): on paper, The Pale Blue Eye has much to recommend it. And for the first hour or so it’s a deliciously morbid mystery, meticulously unpicked by Christian Bale’s jaded detective and let down only by some slightly ropey American accents from the predominantly British supporting cast. Melling brings an intense oddball energy to his portrayal of Poe, and Gillian Anderson makes the most of a minor supporting role with a collection of genuinely bizarre line readings that, if they don’t quite add up to a fully fleshed character, certainly make an impact. But while the picture looks wonderfully atmospheric throughout, with its frostbitten monochromes and consumptive colour palette, the story disintegrates into a lurid and rather silly final act. Not content with this, the writer and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) tacks on a superfluous and cumbersome coda in which characters leave lengthy, tortured gaps in their dialogue, the better to hear the despairing howl of the wind. On Netflix from Friday 6 January Continue reading... | | | | | The week in theatre: One Woman Show; Hakawatis; Bugsy Malone | | by Susannah Clapp Jan 1, 2023 | | Ambassadors; Sam Wanamaker Playhouse; Alexandra Palace, London
Liz Kingsman’s zinging take on Fleabag goes beyond parody. Elsewhere, a gutsy, all-female Arabian Nights, and splurge guns at dawn Here’s a good start to the new year. A show that dismantles old assumptions but fizzes with its own life. One Woman Show has sparkled into the West End via the Vaults, Soho and Edinburgh. At first it seems that Liz Kingsman is simply going to use Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag as a satirical trampoline. There is an elliptical allusion to a collision with “a bridge” as a foundational experience, and she describes waking up in a disorientatingly strange bed, which turns out to be her own. At work at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (yes, there is eventually a gag about being foul and wild) she unleashes a wanky speech about masturbation, which her Australian boss thinks could do with being reined in a bit. There is a lot of booze, a tricky ex-boyfriend, a burgeoning new romance, an all-purpose best friend. Much to recognise; but the evening, which is framed as if it is being ineptly filmed, flies beyond parody. Kingsman dances her way out of box after box. And points out what she is up to, just before her audience notice. Every bit of predictable plotting or fatty phrasing is picked to pieces as she sends up the loquacious, intimate, supposedly unflinching but actually indulgent monologue in a loquacious, intimate etc etc: “I am so relatable.” Continue reading... | | | | | | | Nonfiction to look out for in 2023 | | by Rachel Cooke Jan 1, 2023 | | From insights into siblings, rock music and anorexia, via the stories of trailblazing women and Boris Johnson’s time at No 10, here are the titles that will define the year The first major book event of 2023 was supposed to be the publication of Prince Harry’s long-awaited (OK, opinions may vary) memoir, Spare (Penguin, January). But that was before a certain six-hour Netflix show, as a result of which it seems highly unlikely his literary effort will contain anything we haven’t heard already. So let us, having spared only the briefest of thoughts for his livid publisher, turn our attention instead to some other forthcoming memoirs, in what looks set to be a bumper year for autobiography. At the top of my list are Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Cape, February), a brilliant account of one man’s tilted world following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia (4th Estate, April) by Hadley Freeman, which does what it says on the tin with all of its author’s usual wit and insight. I’m eager to read Blake Morrison’s Two Sisters (Borough Press, February), an account of sibling relationships that will be published 30 years after his classic And When Did You Last See Your Father?, while fans of another poet, Don Paterson, should look out for his memoir, Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Faber, January). Several excellent music books are headed our way in 2023. I’m enjoying an early proof of Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (Faber, March), an account by Leah Broad of the trailblazing lives and careers of the musicians and composers Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen; and of course I can’t wait for Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile (Faber, June) by our own Fiona Maddocks. In a long career, Tony King has been fixer, confidante and muse to, among others, the Beatles, Elton John and Tom Jones, and he has now written a book about the glory of it all: The Tastemaker: My Life With the Legends and Geniuses of Rock (Faber, February). Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key (Cape, April) isn’t strictly a music book, but its author, a poet, uses Joni Mitchell’s album Blue as her guide in a memoir about love, loneliness and the unexpected life. It will also be fun to read Masquerade, a new life of Noel Coward by Oliver Soden (W&N, March), as famous for his songs as his plays. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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