Despite the closure of theaters, Francis Cabrel takes the stage of the Maison de la Radio in Paris to offer us an unprecedented France Bleu Live. A salutary moment, in music and poetry, to experience on France Bleu.
Malgré la fermeture des salles de spectacle, Francis Cabrel monte sur la scène de la Maison de la Radio à Paris pour nous offrir un France Bleu Live inédit. Un moment salutaire, en musique et en poésie, à vivre sur France Bleu.
Antoinette, a school teacher, is looking forward to her long planned summer holidays with her secret lover Vladimir, one of her pupils’ father. When she learns that Vladimir cannot come because his wife organized a surprise trekking in the Cévennes National Park with their daughter and a donkey to carry their load, Antoinette decides to follow their track, by herself, with her own stubborn donkey.
A very beautiful film, both funny and touching, which makes you want to return to France and go hiking in the Cévennes and carrying in its suitcase “Travel with a donkey in the Cévennes” by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Le Petit Journal
Antoinette, a Parisian schoolteacher, has an extra-marital relationship with Vladimir, the father of one of her students. The latter abandons him for the summer holidays to go hiking in the Cévennes with his wife and daughter. Neither one nor two, Antoinette also decides to make “the way of Stevenson” accompanied by Patrick, a recalcitrant donkey. If the beginnings are more than laborious, a beautiful relationship is established between the two protagonists and Patrick even comes to guide Antoinette in her love choices. Laure Calamy, always just as fair, finds the perfect tone and does not give in to cliché or caricature
She was a salacious icon of 20th century Paris — the brothel-keeper to the stars — and Netflix hopes the basis for another hit in the recent run of French successes.
In the 1960s and 1970s, “Madame Claude”, real name Fernande Grudet, had a client book that read like the guest list to a royal wedding: captains of industry, President John F Kennedy, Marlon Brando, the Shah of Iran…
There were enough secrets being divulged on her pillows to ensure protection from the authorities, as well as considerable interest from the secret services.
But in the latest telling, released on Netflix on April 2, the glamour in which her story was often shrouded is stripped away to show a darker reality.
“There is the image of Madame Claude: of Paris, beautiful dresses and big hotels, power… What interested me was what was happening behind the scenes,” director Sylvie Verheyde, 54, told AFP.
Behind the scenes were ties to organised crime, a life of emotional misery and a near-pathological lack of scruples: Madame Claude, it emphasises, always made sure to get her 30 percent, even when the girls returned bruised and bloodied from an encounter gone wrong.
“Madame Claude built her mythology. She was a great liar, a fraud who said she wanted to ‘beautify vice’, which meant brushing all the ugliness under the carpet,” said Verheyde.
– ‘This isn’t love’ –
The director knows this world well: a grandmother and cousin both worked as prostitutes, and she tackled the subject already in her 2016 film “Sex Doll”.
Continue reading “‘Madame Claude’: gritty Netflix take on Paris sex icon”
A seductive blend of 1930s blues, cinematic vision and French lyrics.
Ouest France
Acclaimed film-maker won a string of awards for a wide variety of films, including crime and film noir, as well as his celebrated film about a jazz musician
Bertrand Tavernier, the veteran French director of a host of acclaimed films including A Sunday in the Country, Round Midnight and These Foolish Things, has died aged 79. The news was announced by the Institut Lumière, the film organisation of which he was president. No cause of death was given.
Tavernier’s output was prolific: he made his directorial debut in 1974 with The Clockmaker of St Paul and worked continuously until 2013, when he released his final feature film, The French Minister. He also took in a wide variety of material, from crime and noir, to comedy, jazz and historical drama.
Born in Lyon in 1941, Tavernier was the son of magazine publisher René Tavernier, whose anti-Nazi principles would greatly influence Bertrand. Like the generation of French New Wave directors that slightly preceded him, Tavernier grew up as a film obsessive; having moved to Paris after the war, he founded his own magazine and managed to get a job as an assistant director to Jean-Pierre Melville on the 1961 film Léon Morin, Prêtre. By his own admission, he was so bad as an AD that Melville instead made him the publicist for its follow-up, Le Doulos. It was in this role that Tavernier made his first mark in the film industry, working as a publicist on a series of New Wave classics, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Agnés Varda’s Cleo de 5 à 7. “We were the first film publicists who were film buffs – we only accepted the films we liked,” he told the Guardian in 2008.
Continue reading “Bertrand Tavernier, veteran French director of Round Midnight, dies aged 79”
In a country where the circles of power are overwhelmingly White and male, the fact that many important decisions are made by exclusively White groups would be a good reason to spark outrage.
Centering spaces around the voices of those who experience oppression is the only way for them to identify strategies to deconstruct structural inequalities.
The outrage quickly spread across the political landscape. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer called the meetings “racist,” “deeply outrageous” and potentially “leading to things that look like fascism.” He added he was exploring the legal grounds to prevent the meetings.
In the Senate, the right-wing party the Republicans drafted a letter to the justice minister, claiming the meetings did not comply with “French values,” as if there were no racial issues in France. Legislator Julien Aubert alerted the Paris prosecutor and said in a statement that the interior minister should consider the dissolution of the UNEF, backing the viral hashtag #dissolutionunef. [ . . . ]
Continue at WASHINGTON POST: Opinion | What France does not understand about racism and safe spaces – The Washington Post
Pas De Merde 