Robert Tanitch reviews the latest DVDs
SUITE FRANCAISE (Entertainment One). Irene Nemirovsky’s best-selling novel about sleeping with the enemy during World War 2 was discovered and published in 2004, sixty year after she died in Auschwitz. Saul Dibb’s film opens with the invasion of France and the fleeing refugees. It then moves to occupied Bussy (a fictional village). A young wife (Michelle Williams) falls in love with a decent, cultured, music-loving German officer (Matthias Schoenaerts) who is billeted in the house in which she and her mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas at her most glacial) live. The husband is away fighting. The film also concentrates on the brutal realities of the Occupation and the French settling old scores by betraying their neighbours to the Nazis. Only the final tacked-on sequence rings totally false.
LISTEN UP PHILIP (Eureka). Insatiable egos are a pain in the (you know where) and enough to drive you up the wall. A selfish, arrogant, cruel, unsentimental, miserable young writer (Jason Schwatrzman), whom nobody likes, is invited by an older and more famous writer-in-exile (Jonathan Pryce) , equally obnoxious, to ditch his girl friend (Elizabeth Moss) and come and stay in his country retreat and teach creative writing at the local university. Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry with a deliberately pretentious and verbose voice-over commentary, the satire, very literary, quickly becomes tiresome. The best gags are the books’ dust-jackets. The hand-held cinematography often irritates.
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Eureka) is also irritating. A middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche) is asked to appear in a revival of a play in which she appeared when she was a very young actress. The role she is offered is now the older woman. She is accompanied by her personal assistant (Kristen Stewart) who rehearses her lines with her on long hikes in the mountains of Switzerland. Writer-director Olivier Assayas’s film is over-long, heavy-going and not always easy to follow. He deliberately blurs the line between fiction and reality so as to make it difficult to know whether the two women are rehearsing the play or just being themselves and having an argument? The potential eroticism between them is never really developed.
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