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Emily

2023-05-03 by Steve

“How did you write it? How did you write Wuthering Heights?” Charlotte Brontë asks her sister Emily as Emily lies on her deathbed. Emily is the answer, a feverish blend of fact and fancy, part biography, part romantic extravaganza. It’s tasteful but not twee, gothic but not ridiculously so. Pulling off the impressive feat of being about the life and the work, and taking inspiration from 1940s Hollywood, Frances O’Connor’s debut movie as a writer and director tells the (not very true at all) story of the adult life and death aged 30 of author Emily Brontë. O’Connor also borrows from Jane Austen for her story of a picky young woman who meets … Read more

Eiffel

2023-04-162022-08-13 by Steve

“Librement inspiré de faits réels,” it says at the beginning of Eiffel. Not a mere “inspired by real events”, often used as an apology for serving up historical fact laced with made-up stuff, but “freely inspired”. Turn to Wikipedia if what you want is the actual factual, in other words. That’s what I did, and can tell you that the background to this story is pretty much all true, depending on what you call the background, which Eiffel isn’t entirely sure about either. In opening scenes Gustave Eiffel, engineer extraordinaire, stares out at Paris from the tower he gave his name to – handy if you’ve no idea who he was – before Eiffel cycles … Read more