Anaïs Demoustier

Along Came Love aka Le temps d’aimer

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François, Madeleine and Jimmy lying on the grass

Katell Quillévéré’s follow-up to Heal the Living takes the bare bones of her own grandmother’s story – a Frenchwoman who had a relationship with a German soldier during wartime, wound up a single mother in the post-war years, then met the man who’d become her husband on a beach in Normandy – embroiders on it heavily and repurposes it as a decade-straddling tale of cockeyed love and melodramatic dark secrets. Along Came Love (Le temps d’aimer) whisks us briskly from the aftermath of the end of the war – archive of GIs being feted as they march into France, cutting to “collaborating” French women having their heads shaved in orgies of public shaming … Read more

The Count of Monte-Cristo

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Edmond in close-up

So here’s The Count of Monte-Cristo 2024 style, not to be confused with the TV show of the same name from the same year covering the same story. Or the more than 20 film adaptations down the years, the numerous TV and radio versions (including one by Orson Welles). Plays. Musicals. Games. You get the idea. The story has legs. Injustice, the upper orders out of control, a triumph against adversity, Alexandre Dumas’s original story has timeless drivers, plus a dramatic knot at its centre – whether to let revenge boil on or yield to something more gracious. As one tragic character on her death bed says to this story’s hero: “Between vengeance … Read more

Daaaaaalí!

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Edouard Baer as Dali

Surrealist film-maker makes film about surrealist artist shock. Daaaaaalí! is the result, and you wonder why Quentin Dupieux, who’s only a semi-serious surrealist really, didn’t do it before. Dupieux starts off with a bit of comedy. Judith, a nervous young reporter played by Anaïs Demoustier, stands in a corridor with the great painter’s assistant, awaiting his arrival. Here he comes, says the right-hand woman, and indeed it is the legend himself, barrelling towards them down the corridor, his signature moustache pointing skyward, his mouth working at a mile a minute as this ball of self-regard and practised eccentricity approaches them. Except he never seems quite to arrive. In a scene familiar from an … Read more

The Girl without Hands aka La Jeune Fille sans Mains

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The girl examines her stumps

A miller down on his luck meets a man in the woods. The man is the Devil, though the miller doesn’t know it, and after a bit of smalltalk he’s soon offered the miller a deal. Give me what you have behind your mill and I’ll make you rich, offers the Devil. Behind the mill, thinks the man, that’s an apple tree. An apple tree for a crock of gold sounds fair enough to me, he reasons. Obviously never having read any fairy tales, he agrees to the bargain. It turns out that the miller’s daughter was also behind the mill and the miller has now signed her over to the Devil himself. … Read more

The Beast in the Jungle

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John and May

Henry James on the dancefloor! La Bête dans la Jungle (aka The Beast in the Jungle) sees the old Edwardian master throwing some pretty fly shapes in this fabulous and slightly mad adaptation of a James novella from 1903. The action may have shifted from London to France but the characters and plot are largely intact. It’s 1979 when May first meets John in a Paris discotheque. In what looks like May making a clumsy move on him, she claims she and John have met before. He isn’t sure they have. She insists. He reluctantly goes along with her insistence, though quite why this nice-looking but not exceptionally attractive guy isn’t reacting more … Read more

Smoking Causes Coughing

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The Tobacco Force

Smoking Causes Coughing. Of course it does. It might be the only bit of sense there is in Quentin Dupieux’s latest film, a drama-free but quirk-heavy work of surreal flippancy centring on a gang of superheroes who call themselves the Tobacco Force. In their tight suits and helmets, this gang look like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers but as we meet them they appear to be fighting a character who’s escaped from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a gigantic upright Tortoise called Tortusse (the film is in French, which explains the tortoise’s name, and the film’s original one, Fumer Fait Tousser). Struggling, even five to one, the Tobacco Force decide to combine their … Read more

Anaïs in Love

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Daniel and Anaïs

Anaïs is hot. A pretty young French woman who wears a succession of dresses that show off her long legs, her bare arms, her lovely skin. With her hair cascading down her back, she’s a gorgeous, flighty, scatty, slip of a thing who, silly her, gets herself into the most terrible situations and then, skipping elegantly with an impish grin, escapes out of them back into her consequence-free existence. Anaïs has a boyfriend, Raoul, but she doesn’t seem particularly interested in him. She has commitments to a university thesis but seems to be treating that in the same take-it-or-leave-it way. Early on she discovers she’s pregnant and so, alors, pops off to the … Read more