Film Shapes

Justine Triet's Palme d'Or winning drama about the unravelling of a relationship is a coldly intriguing piece of work. The film starts at an Alpine cottage where Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is being interviewed about her writing. Her husband, Samuel (Samuel Maleski) is upstairs playing loud music, her son readying the dog for a walk in the snow. The music brings a premature end to the interview as the son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) heads out. On his return, his father lies dead at the front of the house. No spoilers here, this all happens in the first 10 minutes of the film. The rest of the runtime picks apart the events leading up to the fall. But did he fall, did he jump or was he pushed? The intrigue doesn't play out like a detective story, where the fun lies in the minutiae of putting the 'how' together. Rather, it focusses on the 'why', or how things got to this point. Sandra enlists the help of an old lawyer friend, Vincent (Swann Arlaud) when it appears...

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...