Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  ‘There are films I want to make. There are films I have to make. This is a film I had to make.’ This is how writer-director Mia Hansen-L ø ve introduced her latest Paris-set family drama, Un Beau Matin ( One Fine Morning ), a film whose optimistic title suggests its tone if not its subject. The logline might be, ‘as she tries to arrange long-term care provision for her ailing, near-blind father, single mother Sandra commences an affair with a married man’. It is the affair, with all its difficulties, that gives cause for optimism, without detracting from the heartbreak of seeing one’s parent being transferred to an anonymising environment, one that reduces them to their most basic bodily impulses, to sleep, eat, wander, perhaps to sing, untethered from the life before. I boarded the Hansen- Løve train after watching her long-delayed, very enjoyable English language relationship drama, Bergman Island . She is an intimate director, dealing with emotional situations and milieux o...

  Potentially the most over-used title of the last two years, Victoria is not just the title of a German 140-minute single take orchestrated by Sebastian Schipper or a British BBC mini-series starring Jenna Coleman as young Queen Victoria but also a French female-driven comedy written and directed by Justine Triet. Its titular heroine is Victoria Spick (Virginie Efira), a thirty-something lawyer and single mother with an intense desire to be re-ignited. While she is a professional and assured advocate, she is uninterested in sex. Yet her personal life is a revolving door of men. Her problem is that she does not ‘see’ them.   To her they are neither interesting nor engaging nor even arousing. She is an equal opportunities neurotic, turning to both a male psychiatrist and a female (braided) card reader, open to any explanation of her condition. She is not stimulated by motherhood. Her two young daughters are shown early on sitting in tiny revolving chairs, dolorous, as if they h...

  Pictured : Mr and Mrs Screwy Whiff. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Pitt in a scene from the marital drama, ' By The Sea ', written and directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt . Still courtesy of Universal Pictures . If By The Sea were not written and directed by one half of a Hollywood power couple, Angelina Jolie Pitt and not starring herself and her husband Brad Pitt in the leading roles, it would be viewed more sympathetically than it has been by film critics and audiences. It is a film that is languorous in pace and slow to yield its real subject. But its style is very much equal to its content: it is about making the audience feel what it is like to be in the position of Vanessa (Jolie Pitt), one half of a couple on a semi-working vacation in the South of France sometime in the 1970s. It is a portrait of a marriage in which the husband, Roland Bertrand (Pitt) tries to write – notebook stuffed in the back of his trousers - but finds (eventually) gin for breakfast an easier optio...

Still courtesy of Vertical Releasing (US) When it comes to French history, I confess to regnal ignorance. Why so many Louis when two is enough? (‘Louie Louie’, sung by The Kingsmen.) I am grateful to writer-director-star Maïwenn for introducing me to Louis XV (1710-1774), as portrayed in her film Jeanne du Barry , a lavish spectacle in which the titular courtesan enchants the King in pre-revolutionary France. I also appreciated the exchange, ‘This is barbaric.’ ‘No, this is Versailles’, which counts as so bad it’s … bad. At one time, French films split the credit between scenario and dialogues. Here, among the screenwriters Maïwenn, Teddy Lussi-Modeste and Nicholas Livecchi, no one takes responsibility. But then there isn’t much dialogue, which works to the film’s advantage. Writers such as Moliere have spoilt us. We expect wit from French costume dramas. Here, we just get fashion – nouvelle Vogue rather than French New Wave. At one point, Jeanne (Maïwenn) attracts the comment, ‘she’...