Film Shapes

This surreal film about the Surrealist painter Salvador Dali is another oddity from the abstruse Quentin Dupieux. He's never short of a batty idea but the strange thing about this film is that it might be his most straightforward work, at least in the subject matter. A print journalist, Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) is chasing an interview with the legendary artist but has trouble tying him down, particularly if she can't provide a film crew. Dali needs to be seen, not just written about. The story flirts with mortality and fame and is multi-layered in its structure. Dali is played, at different times, by Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï and Didier Flammand, and if there is any method to the madness of who plays him when, it was lost on me. It reminded me of the Dylan film by Todd Haynes, I'm Not There , in this respect, though that was more measured and didn't jump back and forth, if memory serves. There's also the little matter of the unrelia...

I'll begin this write-up with a little peek behind my waffle curtain. Sometimes I find it tricky to unearth the theme or underlying meaning of certain films, which often leads to a straight-up documentation of the movie and my feelings on it. Occasionally, it might lead to unfocussed word vomit, where I'm madly clutching at straws (or apples - I remember that blind alley). Sometimes it's just pointless to search. Then there are films like Thomas Cailley's The Animal Kingdom , where there are clearly perceptible nuggets in the loam. So as not to be confused with David Michod's seminal Animal Kingdom , maybe we need to go with the French title, Le Règne Animal . Whatever the language, this is a wonderful little film. The topics touched on here include otherisation, palliative care, and kicking against the political system. There's so much going on here but it's mostly about the pain of letting someone go. At least, that's what I got from it. That's not...

I caught this second episode a couple of days after the first one, while the world of Dumas' Musketeers was still fresh in my mind. It picks up very close to the cliffhanger ending of the first, with D'Artagnan (François Civil) in a spot of bother after watching his fancy, Constance (Lyna Khoudri) possibly being abducted, and then taking a club to the head. As with the first episode, this is a fairly dense film, full of 'script' events and a near exhaustive roll call of characters to facilitate. Martin Bourboulon and his writers, Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandre de le Patellière pay their due respects to Dumas by trying to squeeze as much in as possible in a relatively short runtime. And mostly, it works. It's as entertaining as the previous film, albeit with a markedly different tone. The story continues as King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) has finally declared war on the Protestant terrorists, camped in La Rochelle on the west coast of France. The Musketeers make thei...

Here's another version of the Alexandre Dumas classic, the latest in a long line of adaptations, possibly starting in 1903, but probably most famously directed by Richard Lester in the 70s (or the Douglas Fairbanks film in the 20s, if you want to go back that far). This one, directed by Martin Bourboulon, is given all bells and whistles - it was filmed together with its second part, The Three Musketeers: Milady  and they had a pretty sizeable budget, apparently. I'm guessing a lot of those Euros went on the stellar cast - Vincent Cassel as Athos, Romain Duris as Aramis, Eva Green as Milady, and Vicki Krieps and Loius Garrel as the Queen and King. All on sterling form, though it's François Civil as the lead, D'Artagnan and Lyna Khoudri as Constance who must take the plaudits. The innocence of their burgeoning romance is the heart within the film that all the religious and political arteries feed into.  The story is slightly convoluted but it all spins around the affairs ...