louis garrel

Couture

by
Maxine is marked up with a pen for her operation

Gentle gothic. If there is such a thing then Couture might be it. A slice down through the fashion industry, it’s also, maybe, Alice Winocour’s riposte to Robert Altman’s Pret à Porter – serious, ground-level drama not airy, star-filled satire. That said, no less than Angelina Jolie is in it. She plays a commercials director whose big break has just come – an invitation to shoot a short opening film for a French fashion house’s latest collection. As she’s arriving in Paris, Maxine is also fielding phone calls from a doctor back home – I have your results, they don’t look good, he says. Please go and see an oncologist buddy of mine … Read more

Godard Mon Amour aka Redoubtable

by
Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin

Le Redoutable aka Redoubtable aka Godard Mon Amour is another exercise in period spoofing for Michel Hazanavicius, the French film-maker who made his name with pastiches – notably winning an Oscar for The Artist, the faux silent movie having followed two 007 spoofs, the OSS 117 movies. In all three a fictional character was held up for mild ridicule while Hazanavicius and his team sweated the small stuff, getting thousands of details just so in an attempt to conjure a world back into existence. As with the OSS films the period this time is again the 1960s but this time the central figure isn’t fictional, it’s director Jean-Luc Godard, the hippest man in … Read more

Dans Paris

by
Louis Garrel and Romain Duris in Dans Paris

Since The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Romain Duris has been pretty much the hottest name in French cinema. There’s plenty of opportunity for him to do some high intensity scowling in this claustrophobic drama about a family whose secret, its driving force, is depression. His dad (the excellent Guy Marchand) is clearly wrestling with it, his brother (Louis Garrel) has flown off in the other direction and is banging anything female that moves and now Paul (Duris) is in deep trouble too. There’s a bad attack of the narrative cutes at the outset of Christophe Honoré’s latest film, when Garrel turns to the camera and addresses it directly. But give the film … Read more