Benoît Magimel

The Taste of Things aka La Passion de Dodin Bouffant

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Dodin and Eugénie at a celebration

Tran Anh Hung has only made five films in the years between his breakthrough and The Taste of Things (La Passion de Dodin Bouffant). Not much has changed since 1993’s The Scent of Green Papaya. This is also a languid and beautiful film full of longing for a bygone time when people did things properly and (say this very quietly) they also knew their place. It doesn’t need a plot. You could watch this exquisite movie for the images alone, which are spectacular and gorgeous, like paintings by Renoir or Manet come to life. But there is one, several in fact, providing just enough thread to lead us from one elegant instance of … Read more

Pacifiction

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De Roller

You’ll probably enjoy Pacifiction if you go for Graham Greene stories about shady white guys in white suits hitting the moral buffers in some sweaty colonial sump. It’s a familiar screen sub-genre. Most obviously there’s The Quiet American (either version) or 1967’s The Comedians, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But Greene’s complex-hero-abroad scenario turns up regularly in other people’s work – for example in The Tailor of Panama (writer John Le Carré obviously channelling Greene) and in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon (Denis Johnson doing the same). And so to our man in Havana. Tahiti, in fact, where the compromised hero is a gent called De Roller. Dressed in a white suit … Read more

Paris Memories aka Revoir Paris

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Mia walks the streets at night

Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films usually focus on intangible emotion rather than concrete deed. You get both in these opening moments. But once she’s made her opening statement, Winocour reverts to type. The film is about the aftermath rather than the event, with Virginie Efira playing one survivor who, amnesiac since that night, only returns to the scene of the atrocity by accident … Read more

The Piano Teacher

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Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel at the piano

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher came out in 2001, just about halfway through his remarkable 20-year run of films starting with 1992’s Benny’s Video, ending with 2012’s Amour and taking in Funny Games, Time of the Wolf, Hidden and The White Ribbon. All of them have a pitiless, lidless-eyed quality to them, and The Piano Teacher won all the major awards at Cannes when it was shown there. That will never happen again – the rules were changed so as to spread the love a bit wider in subsequent years. It’s an unusual film for Haneke because he didn’t write it and didn’t intend to direct it. He took on Elfriede Jelinek’s novel … Read more