THE ODYSSEY

THE ODYSSEY is a beautifully constructed melancholy tale about a man who sacrifices his family for fame, and then tries to redeem himself late in life. That man is the French naval officer turned submariner and film-maker Jacques Cousteau - a figure handed down to us almost as parody as STEVE ZISSOU. One forgets - and it's delicious to be reminded - that he was once a truly respected and international star. That his oceanographic films earned the Palme D'or and huge global TV audiences.  That he was something of a rock star. And yet for all this fame, he was never financially secure.  His wife sold her jewels and fur to finance the refurbishment of his first ship and was steadfast on board despite his philandering.  His banks could barely keep up with the ever more outlandish plans for films.  And he would foolishly mis-sell movies to TV studios at a fraction of their cost. And yet, somehow he prevailed, bringing images of exotic animals and Antartica to his fans. 

The emotional arc of this film creates a two act drama. In the first act we have the relentlessly driven Cousteau neglecting one of his sons in favour of the one who is also a diver. And you have Cousteau having affairs and abandoning his wife.  In a more subversive narrative, we also have Cousteau financing his film with petrodollars, effectively researching the best place to dig for oil in the Arabian Sea. In the second act of the film, inspired by his beloved ecologist son, Cousteau becomes an evangelist for the environmental cause and founds the Cousteau Society. It brings precious little reconciliation with the neglected son and wife, and he becomes even more famous, even though that fame is now tinged with deep personal loss. 

Jerome Salle's film is not afraid to show both sides of Cousteau - his charisma and energy as well as his callous disregard for people and financial facts. He manages to capture the wonder of underwater ocean-cinematography and the majesty of Antartica in a way that - as Cousteau did - inspires us with the romance of ocean exploration.  But he always manages to undercut this with the darkness of family life chez Cousteau.  In particular, I liked the lead performance from Lambert Wilson - capturing all of Cousteau's ambiguity - and some of the touching set pieces - particularly that between Vincent Heneine's Bebert and Audrey Tautou's Simone. 

THE ODYSSEY has a running time of 122 minutes. It opened last year in France, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Russia and Switzerland. It opened earlier this year in Netherlands, Romania, Canada, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Norway. It opens today in the UK.

COCO AVANT CHANEL / COCO BEFORE CHANEL - yawn

I am the target demographic for this film. A woman of a certain age with a penchant for period romance and a handbag collection worth the output of a small African country. Coco Chanel defines a large part of my wardrobe, shoes, handbags and cosmetics. More profoundly, I am a career woman, and Coco Chanel was not just a radical fashion designer but also a formidable businesswoman who founded a global brand.

Why, then, did I find this movie so dull? The problem is that COCO AVANT CHANEL wants to tell us how Coco got to Paris, rather than how, once in Paris, she built her global business. The film argues that to know Coco as a young woman is to know all - a highly reductive stance. So we see very little of Coco designing anything, or of her famous business sense. Rather, the film focuses on her struggle to break out of the role pre-WW1 France had ascribed to her: resigned to being a working class shop-girl, a bauble for rich men to be traded like property, trussed up in corsets and unable to breathe.

It's a shame that a woman as radical and, yes, politicised, as Coco didn't get a movie as brave as she was. Rather we get a rather schmaltzy period romance in which our poor young heroine foists herself upon a rich Milord, only to fall for a young English businessman who will marry for money. The whole thing is filmed beautifully, in sumptuous period settings, with a lush score from Alexandre Desplat. But Coco's spikiness is near-smothered by the sepia-tint. It's also deeply hypocritical for the movie to praise Coco's iconoclastic stance and her fierce independence, while, at the same time, reducing her life to one thwarted love affair.

Shame.

COCO AVANT CHANEL was released earlier this year in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Israel, Australia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal and Poland. It is currently on release in the UK. It is released in August in New Zealand, Germany, Argentina, Singapore, South Korea and Norway. It is released in September in Japan, Sweden and the USA. It is released in October in Russia and Brazil; in November in Greece, Finland and Bulgaria and in December in Denmark.

PRICELESS / HORS DE PRIX - does anyone else think this is actually quite depressing?

PRICELESS is a very loose, contemporary French re-imagining of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. An attractive young woman called Irene is gold-digging on the French riviera. An innocent hotel waiter called Jean falls for her, and turns into a gigolo so as to keep up with her lavish lifestyle, and persuade her that what she really wants is a life of poverty with him. That the movie slips down so easily is entirely due to the fact that the leads, Gad Elmaleh and Audrey Tautou, are photogenic. Elmaleh also displays a deep talent for physical comedy - just watch how he uses his mournful eyes!

The problem I had with PRICELESS was the nagging feeling that this was all actually rather disingenuous. It's the same problem I have with the film adaptation of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. It's all too light and breezy. I mean, how can we stay all frothy and romantic when what our two protagonists are really doing is turning tricks?

HORS DE PRIX opened in Belgium and France in 2006. It opened in 2007 in Poland, Latvia, Iceland, Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, Malysia, Estonia, Spain, Greece, Italy, Finland, Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Sweden, Hungary and Romania. It opened earlier in 2008 in the US, Japan, Mexico and South Korea and opened this weekend in the UK.

THE DA VINCI CODE - a game of two halves

I was all ready to love this film. Skulduggery, treasure hunts, pretty pictures of London....I had anticipated writing a spirited defence of the film as "glorious trash". It all started very well. Beautifully photographed, menacingly lit shots of the Louvre. The Curator, who also happens to be the Grand Master of a secret society, running for his life, observed by the mournful eyes of renaissance figures. The movie looked expensive, by which I mean well-made and lush. The old-fashioned orchestral score added to the tension, even though I had read the book and knew the plot. I loved the fact that periodically the current action would dissolve into a lavish recreation of ancient Rome or medieval London. As the film unravelled it got better and better. We had our dashing Symbologist (Tom Hanks) and the pretty French cryptologist (Audrey Tautou) in car chases through the French countryside, following a series of clues leading to the Holy Grail. Admittedly they were being chased by an Albino monk - a murdering member of a secretive Catholic prelature - but Paul Bettany somehow managed to portray this character as conflicted and threatening rather than ridiculous and camp. The high point was the introduction of the hero and heroine's helper, Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Grail legend living in a conveniently close chateau. Teabing, as played by the ever-brilliant Sir Ian McKellan, is the life of the party. Despite this character having to impart a considerable amount of pseudo-religio-history to the Audrey Tautou character, Teabing hooks the audience with his child-like excitement at having a real keeper of the Grail in his midst. His enthusiasm for continuing to uncover the clues is contagious.

Now as far as I am concerned the movie, which is faithful in most respects to the novel, took a decided turn for the worse just over half way through, when a number of key characters were faded out. Tom Hanks was left to carry the film and, frankly, his bland looks and bland emotional response to what should have been Church-shattering events killed any enjoyment I might have experienced as the final meaning and location of the Grail was uncovered. Indeed, in the penultimate scene, when Hanks intones the true secret to Tautou, the audience at the screening I attended started to giggle. Which must rank as a bit of a failure on the part of the film-makers. The problem is that, in a world where everyone has either read the book or scene a TV documentary debunking its claims, The Big Bad Secret seems a bit of an anti-climax. In addition, there is zero sexual tension between Hanks and Tautou. Overall, I suppose I would sum up my reaction to THE DA VINCI CODE as "ho and indeed hum". It starts off like a rattling summer blockbuster and ends up as a damp squib.

P.S. For those concerned that the film may offend their Catholic sensibilities, I would argue that it is harmless hokum that would shake only the flimsiest of belief. Moreover, the script is at utter pains to distance itself from the radicalism of the novel. The murdering monk and nasty Bishop are described continuously as fringe elements acting without the authority of the Church. The Tom Hanks character is far more sceptical about the existence of the secret society and Grail, and then about its ability to destroy the Church, than in the book. Indeed, the whole film merely hints at prior crimes of the Church at large rather than damning the whole outfit as a misgynistic con. And the final conclusion is far less, well, destructive, in it airy-fairy conclusions. I feel that the director Ron Howard may have scored a bit of an own goal with this decision to shy away from the the radical anti-Catholic content. He still won't have appeased the kind of religious who hate any kind of criticism of their faith, whether real or imagined. And as for the die-hard fans who seriously believe all this hog-wash, the film may well feel like a soft-soaped compromise....

THE DA VINCI CODE is on global release.

RUSSIAN DOLLS/LES POUPEES RUSSES - The Return of Eurofromage

RUSSIAN DOLLS is an amiable film. A lot of the scenes are played well, especially in the first half, and given that the movie is shot on Digital Video, Paris looks suitably dreamy. We should all live in such apartments! But, having said all this, ultimately, RUSSIAN DOLLS is a film that frustrates with its incoherent narrative structure.

RUSSIAN DOLLS is actually a sequel featuring a bunch of thirty-something Europeans, all of whom lived together in their student days. I have to confess to not seeing the original movie, and the sequel does not make me want to rush back to it. As in the original, RUSSIAN DOLLS focuses on Xavier, a Parisian writer played by Romain Duris, and his complicated love life. Xavier claims that he is in love with is best friend, Martine, played by Audrey Tautou (soon to be seen in the Da Vinci Code flick.) She is a single-mother environmental campaigner. Yet while Xavier looks after her kid and claims love, he also shows her precious little empathy when she is going through emotional difficulties – unceremoniously kicking her out of bed to make way for his latest squeeze, Kassia. Meanwhile, Xavier is crashing with his friend, Isabelle (played by the marvellous Cecile de France) a gay financial news reporter. Desperate to cheer up his frail grandfather by introducing him to a non-existent fiancée, Xavier persuades Isabelle to put on – the horror! – a dress and pretend for an evening.

In all these intertwining relationships that make up the first hour of the movie, I felt engaged with the characters and emotionally invested in how things would turn out. There is a lot of oh-so-clever use of editing and fantasy sequences (Audrey Tautou dressed as a princess, explaining to her son about the seven Princes Charming she has dated etc) which I found got in the way of the drama rather than enhancing my enjoyment of the film. But a lot of people were laughing so what do I know?

However, in the second hour the movie takes a sharp right-turn into an entirely different story. The three key female protagonists are dropped and we enter a new world! Xavier is now torn between a screenwriter who loves him, played by the unimpressive Kelly Reilly, and a supermodel whose memoirs he is ghost-writing. This whole segment seemed to me unrealistic, inauthentic and just plain bizarre. Moreover, I found the writer-director’s treatment of the Xavier character a little irritating. Here was a man who had been a bit of a shit to all the women in his life, but you know, he is charming and handsome and he can change, so that’s okay? In the final scene, we see a brief flash to the Audrey Tautou character, in a belated recognition that one of the key characters had been dropped. Frankly, the whole thing seemed stretched rather thin.

RUSSIAN DOLLS was released in France, Australia, Germany and Austria in 2005. It is currently on extremely limited release in the UK and US.