Julia Ducournau’s new film Titane is, on many levels, an overwhelming cinematic experience. If you’re like me, it might take a second viewing to begin to fully appreciate the astounding work Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon deliver (no pun intended) to us in this film. Lindon is a seasoned actor with decades of accolades and experience in French cinema, and Rousselle is a wet-behind-the-ears newcomer making her feature film debut. But, serendipitously, as you’ll gather from this discussion, that is precisely what each of them needed in the other to energize their own performances. They talk about facing fears, letting […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Oct 5, 2021How to adapt a French epistolary novel relayed by a luscious servant from her point of view — itself a subversive proposition when it came out in 1900 — about the relationships she develops in assorted stately homes with both arrogant employers and beaten-down peers? To further complicate the project, how to insert into the mix a substantially larger contemporaneous issue: the shameful blemish on the national psyche that was the rabidly anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair? In the fourth movie version of libertarian author Octave Mirbeau’s groundbreaking Diary of a Chambermaid, director/co-screenwriter Benoît Jacquot has come up with some close-to-flawless strategies. The […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 9, 2016