Pierre Lottin

The Marching Band

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Jimmy and Thibaut together with Jimmy's band

Feelgood movies often lunge for the heartstrings. The Marching Band (originally En fanfare) does so too, but there is finesse here as well, and lovely performances, plus a plot that doesn’t always go where expected. And when it does go where expected it does it so unapologetically and majestically that you might feel like applauding, or even shed a little tear. It’s soppy. It’s lovely. And it tells an interesting and faceted story. First of all about Thibaut, an orchestral conductor who collapses on the podium one day, goes to the doctor and discovers he has leukaemia. He needs a bone marrow transplant but his sister cannot oblige because, he learns, she is … Read more

The Stranger aka L’Étranger

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Benjamin Voisin as Meursault

Albert Camus always rejected the queer reading of his novel L’Étranger, but director François Ozon insists on it in his adaptation. One of the urtexts of existentialism known for its blank refusal of emotion, the book famously opens with its antihero coolly announcing the death of his mother. Ozon’s Meursault (no cosy first name), for his part, tells us similarly blankly that “I killed an Arab”, again shifting the story slightly. The dead man was a “stranger” – one translation of “L’étranger”. Another is “outsider”, and refers to Meursault himself, a white Frenchman in brown Algeria, a coloniser in someone else’s country. Ozon gets all this done just like that and then proceeds … Read more