Demob Happy

La Graine et le mulet - Abdel Kechiche
7.5/10
As a resident of France I was a little surprised by recent article in the Guardian by Jason Solomons about the re-birth of the French film industry in the wake of the nation’s first Palme D’Or winner (’Entre Les Murs’/’The Classroom’) in many a year. Further citing the [...]

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“Christmas time … mistletoe and [lots and lots of] wine”
7/10
I’m not going to try and summarize the tangled human relationships that characterise Arnaud Desplechin’s striking ‘Un Conte de Noel’ (A Christmas Tale), so fiddly and time-consuming that it would be. The premise is an extended and admirably dysfunctional family gathering for Christmas in a gritty [...]

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Black and white oddity from France
8/10
13 Tzameti is a surprising and memorable film that references but does not plagiarise other works while mining a distinct character of its own. Shot in stark monochrome, it opens in a bleak French coastal town where Sebastian, a young Georgian immigrant, is working as a handyman to help [...]

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The secret history
9/10
Caché - ‘Hidden’ - directed by Michael (The Piano Teacher) Haneke, is a masterclass on how to unnerve your audience, not through what you necessarily show but by what is indeed hidden from view. Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a bourgeois Parisian couple with a teenage son. Georges is presenter [...]

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