Film Shapes

Jacques Audiard makes a feature film roughly every three or four years, and at the age of 72, at this rate, he may not have too many left. For me, this is one of the tragedies of modern cinema. This bloke can do almost no wrong (his first film, See How They Fall was his only misstep). So here he is with his tenth (!) feature, Emilia Pérez . It's a pretty bonkers story about a Mexican drug cartel boss who hires a young, marginalised lawyer to help him transition to a woman.  The film tackles some important themes - the transitioning element, but also racism and the disappeared population of Mexico. The twist is that it's all performed as a musical, and the balance between fantastic and ludicrous is stretched throughout. Most musicals live or die by the music and luckily, there are some great numbers in this (one of them, El Mal , just took out best song at the Golden Globbies). On the other end of the scale is a song about the details of transition surgery, where a doctor warbl...

Right, hands up, my views on the following film may be clouded by the fact that I rank Jacques Audiard as the greatest living director. Somebody (maybe Mel Brooks?) once said - and I'm paraphrasing here - they'd forgive their best friend vomiting all over the dinner table, but be appalled if their enemy had their cutlery in the wrong place. That's kind of how I feel about Audiard - I know he can tend towards melodrama, and this might irk me in anyone else's hands, but with him, I let it fly.  Paris, 13th District (or Les Olympiades ) is only his ninth feature, and for me it sits roughly mid-table of the seven I've seen. It's about the 13th arrondissement, south-east of central Paris, which is home to Europe's largest Chinatown. I say it's about the area because the people involved in the story are secondary to the place. The story itself even takes a back seat to the way the 13th is displayed, lovingly shot in black and white by cinematographer, Paul Gu...

I saw The Sisters Brothers a couple of weeks back at the Paradiso as part of the French Film Festival . This is the first English language film by Jacques Audiard and only his eighth film as director. Cards on the table time - this geezer is one of my favourite active directors (along with Denis Villeneuve). A Prophet , The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Rust and Bone are among the best films made in the past 20 years. So by these measuring sticks, The Sisters Brothers comes up short, but not by too much. The film charts a typical Western cinema journey. Character A has something or has done something and Character B has to hunt him down. The Quest type of plot as outlined by Christopher Booker and repeated ad nauseam throughout film (and story) history. Here though, it coalesces quite nicely with another of Bookers plots, the Voyage and Return. Character A, in this case, is Riz Ahmed's chemist Hermann Warm (and later, Jake Gyllenhaal's John Morris). Character B here ...