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Reviews
Belle maman (1999)
Smoking Dope With Deneuve and Company is Great...
Or at least you feel pretty high after this movie. It's the kind of film that the word "rollicking" really can be applied to, though it's rollicking in that entirely casual, intelligent, and open-minded way that belongs to the French.
No, Catherine Deneuve does not spend the entire movie high (sorry to disappoint any puritans with an agenda).. but the one scene to which I refer involves all the members of a wedding party - AND it's a musical number! Anyway, everything fits pretty seamlessly together, and the unusual, bright, colorful family ( Deneuve's mother is a lesbian, Deneuve her bon vivant daughter) alternately entertain and annoy us as real families do..but since it's a movie they mostly entertain.
Don't want to say too much about the ending, but Deneuve ends up marrying a man about twenty years younger. This is entirely believable as we see the relationship develop over time, and as the two are naturally drawn closer and closer together. The ending is a happy one; and like the rest of the movie, satisfyingly quirky as well as pitch-perfect.
Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
The Seminal Film for Change
One would hope a film like this would actually cause humankind to take a step back and to foster the destruction of destruction itself. As Duras noted many years later in her semi-autobiographical "The Lover," she made the distinction early on between those who would exploit and destroy the weak and those who would protect them.
Here we have the exponential dynamic of this distinction in spades, realized in unthinkably tragic dimensions. Put in the simplest terms, "Hiroshima" is war personalized and psychologized in the language of love. It is the lovers' dialogue that begins to rouse the past; it is within the protective bond of love that atrocities can be drawn forth.
It is better to simply see the film than to depend on any synopsis. Once you do, its "medicine" will work within you --- and the medicine to which I refer is love.
Painted Lady (1997)
Washed-up Blues Singer's Courageous Turn as Undercover Art Dealer
The incomparable Helen Mirren is washed-up blues singer Maggie Sheridan, living on an estate in Ireland where she has been rescued from heroin addiction by faithful childhood friend Sebastian Stafford (a beautiful performance by Iain Glen).
When we meet her Maggie has been vegetating in semi-retirement on the estate in a guest cottage for some ten years. We see her finishing recording a demo with a (much younger) local Irish musician, and they are about to take a dip in the bath together when gunshots are heard across the grounds. It seems there has been a theft of paintings owned by the Staffords, with tragic consequences.
From there writer Cubitt has Maggie trekking across Ireland, England, and New York in search of paintings and criminals; and with the very reluctant help of her art dealer sister and brother-in-law, posing as an international art dealer.
Maggie is 50 years old without family or husband, but at turns remarkably charming, debauched, and courageous - a fascinating character. And what Cubitt has given us (and Mirren) is an unforgettable portrait of a woman who risks her life for those she considers family, and what she considers home.