Posted on: March 14, 2009
Elsa Zylberstein and Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved you for so Long
I’ve Loved you for so Long is not a movie for everyone. As has been noted perhaps a billion times, we live in a culture with mounting pressure for quick payoffs, and our attention spans have shrunk. This brilliant film takes its time. It builds up story elements slowly, develops its characters and their relationships with great care, nuance and subtlety, and never hits you over the head with messages or symbols or histrionics. It treats you like an adult. The subject matter could easily call for endless scene chewing and heightened melodrama, but the director, Phillippe Claudel (a novelist and professor of Literature at the University of Nancy), chooses a different path.
Kristin Scott Thomas plays Juliette Fontaine, a woman with a tragic, terrible secret, just released from prison.…
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Posted on: March 10, 2009
The original French edition of Muriel Barbery’s novel
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a wonderful novel. Moving, thoughtful, highly observant. I didn’t want to put it down. Unusual for a literary work, it is also a page-turner. I really wanted to keep going, to follow the story, to know how things turn out for the two main characters and at least a couple of the secondary ones. I wanted to spend more time in their company.
Barbery, a professor of philosophy in France, born in Casablanca, creates a very accessible world, with a light touch, even though some of the subject matter is heavy. She sets her novel on the Left Bank in Paris, in an upper-middle-class apartment building, filled with the well-to-do, with intellectual and political heavy weights.…
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Posted on: August 11, 2008
Mont Saint Victoire, by Paul Cezanne. 1887
One of my favorite places in France is Provence. Yes, I know. It’s not like I discovered it, of course. It’s been a very popular destination for … well, centuries. But especially in the modern era. Popularized best, perhaps, by painters such as Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, and more recently by writers such as Peter Mayle. I recently watched a movie of one of his novels, A Good Year, starring Marion Cotillard (Vie En Rose), Abbie Cornish (Somersault) and Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind). It tells the story of a London Master of the Universe who returns to his boyhood home in Provence, falls in love all over again with the land and its people, especially Marion Cotillard, and has to make some serious decisions.…
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