EDUCATING Sophie Marceau

At 15 Sophie Marceau became one of France's sweetest starlets. At 16 she asserted her independence and played a prostitute bent on revenge. Now, at 19, she has shocked her public even more with her most recent role in police, which opens here in early june. Profile by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Watching Sophie Marceau play a North African hustler in Maurice Pialat’s pessimistic film Police, it’s hard to believe she was once billed as ‘the new Gallic Shirley Temple’.
Her character, Noria, is sullen, vulgar, sensual and ultimately deceitful. In a country where anti-Arab racism runs rampant, Marceau risks losing some of the fans who adored her as the cute, sugary and white child star.

But then, at 19, with a five-year, six-film career behind her, Marceau is an exception in the usually unadventurous French film industry. At 13, she signed up with a children’s model agency without telling her parents and was called up to audition for a film. Director Claude Pinoteau picked her from 200 teenagers and her career was launched with his two innocuous comedies, La Boum and La Boum 2. School was abandoned. There was no baccalauréat for Sophie, only a French Oscar for Best Newcomer.

The films were produced by the 92-year-old plane maker Marcel Dassault, a sometime Howard Hughes with a Walt Disney sensibility. He believes in the clean, wholesome values of the French middle class, and has the money to promote them on the big screen.

La Boum, set in one of the more affluent Paris suburbs, was about teenagers going to their first surprise parties and the most daring scene showed daylight necking on a living room sofa with the curtains drawn.

Five million spectators saw it in France alone, and Marceau found herself whisked off on promotional tours of Germany, Spain and Japan (where she eclipsed John Travolta, there to sell Grease). She was a 15-year-old bankable star, and France’s best-loved young actress.

In the beginning, she behaved so true to teenage type that Dassault could never have enough of her on the cover of his other toy, the glossy magazine Jours de France, (‘We only report the good news,’ one of its editors once proclaimed) and the rest of the French press followed suit.

Her first love was her leading man in La Boum, 18-year-old Pierre Cosso. Both touchingly told reporters they wanted to ‘keep it clean’. Sophie agreed to every picture session: in front of her parents’ council house in the kind of Parisian suburb where no Dassault production would ever be shot; with her school chums, with her father, mother, dog, cat; with the ubiquitous Pierre, hand in hand at the Cannes film festival or on the Champs-Elysees.

She cut a forgettable single with the pop singer François Valéry and, such was the appeal of her image, even while she admitted to singing off-key, it sold more than 100,000 copies. She was the ultimate clean-cut teen actress.

Then the image blurred and the clichés vanished. Or perhaps Marceau was moving faster than the eyes watching her. She requested, and obtained, legal emancipation at 16 ‘to be able to sign my contracts myself’. She left her family home in Sceaux (‘No dramas, I just wanted to live at my own rhythm’), bought herself a flat in Paris and her parents a brasserie. Pierre receded gently into the background. She refused 25 screenplays that were little more than Boum series rehashes.

‘I got into the film business quite casually,’ she says, ‘and in the beginning I felt I could just give up if I stopped being successful. But now it’s got me. I’ve got to do it and do it well, and if, with my all efforts, I fail, I’ll work as an extra to keep near the cameras. I come alive on a set. Sometimes it worries me, ordinary life seems less real.’

It’s a far cry from the carefree day when, with her café waiter father, she answered Pinoteau’s casting call.
‘We never took it seriously,’ she remembers. ‘I just thought it would be fun to make a little money. Then we saw all those other kids dressed like models, with their stage-struck parents, when I was just wearing dungarees and a ponytail. Dad thought we’d better leave at once, and I begged him to wait for at least an hour. If no one had called me then, we’d go. He agreed and I was selected, so that hour really made all the difference in my life.’

Today, with years of interview experience behind her, Marceau is more reserved. Her answers remain quite direct, but she sometimes hesitates to find the best turn of phrase. Living in jeans, men’s sweaters, ‘and my latest film’s hairstyle — I don’t really care’, she refuses most picture sessions and very few outsiders are allowed in her home. She also keeps her personal life completely private. No Paris socialite, her spare time is spent working on her country house, east of Paris. At home in her city flat, the front door is firmly shut in the face of prying journalists.

Marceau’s deviation from an innocent image was born out of L’Amour Braque (Mad Love), Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s modern-day version of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Zulawski had been impressed with her performance in Fort Saganne, a big-budget epic about French colonization in Africa, in which she played the daughter of a French civil servant and shared top billing with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. A Zulawski/Marceau combination sounded improbable. But the idiosyncratic director, with a reputation for brutalizing his actresses (he gave Romy Schneider, Isabelle Adjani and Valérie Kaprisky their most taxing roles) and a fascination for the darkest human emotions, offered her the part of Marie, a teenage prostitute bent on revenge and self-destruction.

‘I was struck by Sophie’s quality of immediate truth,’ says Zulawski. ‘It could have been her youth. But when we met, it was obvious that it came from inside her.’

Marceau jumped at Zulawski’s offer and shocked her French public with violent and nude scenes in the director’s baroque, excessive style. ‘He gets things out of his actors that they never knew were there,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it hurts, yet you are changed by it.’

But Zulawski also protected, almost nurtured her. ‘He had the dresses redesigned especially for me in Paul Poiret’s Thirties style,’ she recalls. ‘He insisted on a heavy fringe to emphasise my eyes. He corrected my make-up until he found a soft enough eyeliner. He lightened the shadows on my face.’ Friendship grew from such intimacy.

L’Amour Braque was a commercial flop, which she regrets to this day, but even before its release, she’d started work on Pialat’s Police. Her days as France’s favorite sugar baby were over.

Even today, Marceau finds it difficult to talk about Police. After Zulawski’s ultra-professional (and protective) methods, she found herself dealing with the talented Pialat’s messy, improvised direction and his habit of establishing what she calls ‘sadistic’ relations with his actors. She remembers coming to work and being ignored by him for days on end, playing a character whose delineations changed hourly. Pialat indulged in disparaging comments about her looks and weight at the end of shooting. ‘That fat cow,’ he called her, in front of a reporter. That she emerged with flying colors is a tribute to her abilities. But it left her with a bitter aftertaste.

On set, Depardieu was no help. ‘When we’d shot Fort Saganne he was so protective, like a big brother. On the Police set, he was withdrawn, self-centered. But I couldn’t criticize him; I’ve always said myself that selfishness is an actor’s best asset,’ she smiles wryly.

Since Police, she has made an LP, Certitude, a vast improvement on her first single; posed nude in Photo magazine; and is currently working on Zulawski’s next project, a biography of Joan of Arc. After that it’s a Bogart/Bacall-type thriller, La Descente aux Enfers, under the direction of Francis Girod.

Every now and then, Sophie Marceau is asked how it feels to be a star. ‘I am not,’ she says. ‘You need much more work, experience, personality to be one. People pay attention because I’m so young. Someday I’ll be 30 and perhaps, like Isabelle Huppert recently, I’ll only rate two pages in Paris-Match instead of six.’

Young Sophie Marceau, one of my childhood crushes ...

Young Sophie Marceau, one of my childhood crushes ...

Sophie Marceau at 19

EDUCATING SOPHIE

At 15 Sophie Marceau became one of France's sweetest starlets. At 16 she asserted her independence and played a prostitute bent on revenge. Now, at 19, she has shocked her public even more with her most recent role in police, which opens here in early june. Profile by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Watching Sophie Marceau play a North African hustler in Maurice Pialat’s pessimistic film Police, it’s hard to believe she was once billed as ‘the new Gallic Shirley Temple’.
Her character, Noria, is sullen, vulgar, sensual and ultimately deceitful. In a country where anti-Arab racism runs rampant, Marceau risks losing some of the fans who adored her as the cute, sugary and white child star.

But then, at 19, with a five-year, six-film career behind her, Marceau is an exception in the usually unadventurous French film industry. At 13, she signed up with a children’s model agency without telling her parents and was called up to audition for a film. Director Claude Pinoteau picked her from 200 teenagers and her career was launched with his two innocuous comedies, La Boum and La Boum 2. School was abandoned. There was no baccalauréat for Sophie, only a French Oscar for Best Newcomer.

The films were produced by the 92-year-old plane maker Marcel Dassault, a sometime Howard Hughes with a Walt Disney sensibility. He believes in the clean, wholesome values of the French middle class, and has the money to promote them on the big screen.

La Boum, set in one of the more affluent Paris suburbs, was about teenagers going to their first surprise parties and the most daring scene showed daylight necking on a living room sofa with the curtains drawn.

Five million spectators saw it in France alone, and Marceau found herself whisked off on promotional tours of Germany, Spain and Japan (where she eclipsed John Travolta, there to sell Grease). She was a 15-year-old bankable star, and France’s best-loved young actress.

In the beginning, she behaved so true to teenage type that Dassault could never have enough of her on the cover of his other toy, the glossy magazine Jours de France, (‘We only report the good news,’ one of its editors once proclaimed) and the rest of the French press followed suit.

Her first love was her leading man in La Boum, 18-year-old Pierre Cosso. Both touchingly told reporters they wanted to ‘keep it clean’. Sophie agreed to every picture session: in front of her parents’ council house in the kind of Parisian suburb where no Dassault production would ever be shot; with her school chums, with her father, mother, dog, cat; with the ubiquitous Pierre, hand in hand at the Cannes film festival or on the Champs-Elysees.

She cut a forgettable single with the pop singer François Valéry and, such was the appeal of her image, even while she admitted to singing off-key, it sold more than 100,000 copies. She was the ultimate clean-cut teen actress.

Then the image blurred and the clichés vanished. Or perhaps Marceau was moving faster than the eyes watching her. She requested, and obtained, legal emancipation at 16 ‘to be able to sign my contracts myself’. She left her family home in Sceaux (‘No dramas, I just wanted to live at my own rhythm’), bought herself a flat in Paris and her parents a brasserie. Pierre receded gently into the background. She refused 25 screenplays that were little more than Boum series rehashes.

‘I got into the film business quite casually,’ she says, ‘and in the beginning I felt I could just give up if I stopped being successful. But now it’s got me. I’ve got to do it and do it well, and if, with my all efforts, I fail, I’ll work as an extra to keep near the cameras. I come alive on a set. Sometimes it worries me, ordinary life seems less real.’

It’s a far cry from the carefree day when, with her café waiter father, she answered Pinoteau’s casting call.
‘We never took it seriously,’ she remembers. ‘I just thought it would be fun to make a little money. Then we saw all those other kids dressed like models, with their stage-struck parents, when I was just wearing dungarees and a ponytail. Dad thought we’d better leave at once, and I begged him to wait for at least an hour. If no one had called me then, we’d go. He agreed and I was selected, so that hour really made all the difference in my life.’

Today, with years of interview experience behind her, Marceau is more reserved. Her answers remain quite direct, but she sometimes hesitates to find the best turn of phrase. Living in jeans, men’s sweaters, ‘and my latest film’s hairstyle — I don’t really care’, she refuses most picture sessions and very few outsiders are allowed in her home. She also keeps her personal life completely private. No Paris socialite, her spare time is spent working on her country house, east of Paris. At home in her city flat, the front door is firmly shut in the face of prying journalists.

Marceau’s deviation from an innocent image was born out of L’Amour Braque (Mad Love), Polish director Andrzej Zulawski’s modern-day version of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Zulawski had been impressed with her performance in Fort Saganne, a big-budget epic about French colonization in Africa, in which she played the daughter of a French civil servant and shared top billing with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. A Zulawski/Marceau combination sounded improbable. But the idiosyncratic director, with a reputation for brutalizing his actresses (he gave Romy Schneider, Isabelle Adjani and Valérie Kaprisky their most taxing roles) and a fascination for the darkest human emotions, offered her the part of Marie, a teenage prostitute bent on revenge and self-destruction.

‘I was struck by Sophie’s quality of immediate truth,’ says Zulawski. ‘It could have been her youth. But when we met, it was obvious that it came from inside her.’

Marceau jumped at Zulawski’s offer and shocked her French public with violent and nude scenes in the director’s baroque, excessive style. ‘He gets things out of his actors that they never knew were there,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it hurts, yet you are changed by it.’

But Zulawski also protected, almost nurtured her. ‘He had the dresses redesigned especially for me in Paul Poiret’s Thirties style,’ she recalls. ‘He insisted on a heavy fringe to emphasise my eyes. He corrected my make-up until he found a soft enough eyeliner. He lightened the shadows on my face.’ Friendship grew from such intimacy.

L’Amour Braque was a commercial flop, which she regrets to this day, but even before its release, she’d started work on Pialat’s Police. Her days as France’s favorite sugar baby were over.

Even today, Marceau finds it difficult to talk about Police. After Zulawski’s ultra-professional (and protective) methods, she found herself dealing with the talented Pialat’s messy, improvised direction and his habit of establishing what she calls ‘sadistic’ relations with his actors. She remembers coming to work and being ignored by him for days on end, playing a character whose delineations changed hourly. Pialat indulged in disparaging comments about her looks and weight at the end of shooting. ‘That fat cow,’ he called her, in front of a reporter. That she emerged with flying colors is a tribute to her abilities. But it left her with a bitter aftertaste.

On set, Depardieu was no help. ‘When we’d shot Fort Saganne he was so protective, like a big brother. On the Police set, he was withdrawn, self-centered. But I couldn’t criticize him; I’ve always said myself that selfishness is an actor’s best asset,’ she smiles wryly.

Since Police, she has made an LP, Certitude, a vast improvement on her first single; posed nude in Photo magazine; and is currently working on Zulawski’s next project, a biography of Joan of Arc. After that it’s a Bogart/Bacall-type thriller, La Descente aux Enfers, under the direction of Francis Girod.

Every now and then, Sophie Marceau is asked how it feels to be a star. ‘I am not,’ she says. ‘You need much more work, experience, personality to be one. People pay attention because I’m so young. Someday I’ll be 30 and perhaps, like Isabelle Huppert recently, I’ll only rate two pages in Paris-Match instead of six.’© Copyright ELLE UK & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 1986

October 2011 movies

Here are the movies I reviewed for the October issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last Sunday.
L’age de raison
Sophie Marceau is Margaret, a go-go executive for a French nuclear plant manufacturer who, whenever she suffers a loss of self-confidence, references strong women from history, like Joan of Arc and…Ava Gardner? Though ostensibly a comedy with lots of whimsical visual touches by director Yann Samuel, L’age de raison quickly descends into sentimental mush after a country notary who is disposing of an abandoned estate delivers to Margaret a package of letters that she wrote at the age of 7 to her future self. Confronted with her girlhood dreams she suffers a crisis of identity and starts to doubt what she’s turned into, but only for as long as it takes Marceau to exhaust her store of tantrum modes. One hopes all this self-reflection might lead Margaret to doubt her own career path–the name of her company, after all, is Pandora–but except for toughening her BF/colleague (Marton Csokas) to demand a higher safety standard from a Chinese client, there seems very little real effect on the direction of the good life she’s already got. (photo: Nord-ouest Films, France 2 Cinema, Artemis Prod., Rhone-Alpes Cinema, Mars Films)
Captain America: The First Avenger
Since it’s based on a Marvel Comic rather than a DC one, this origin story fares better than the recently released Green Lantern. What both comics share is a genesis in the 1940s. The latter was written during that fateful decade, whereas Captain America was rediscovered by Marvel in the 60s. The problem with Green Lantern (though certainly not the only one) was that it couldn’t make the leap in sensibility that rendered its premise compelling during a less jaded time. The producers of CA understand the nostalgic, almost campy appeal of its red-white-and-blue superhero and that it has to be positioned during an age when patriotism wasn’t such a cultural minefield. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is the proverbial 98-pound weakling, determined to do his duty fighting fascism during World War II despite his 4F classification. A scientist (Stanley Tucci) who overhears his desperate attempt to lie his way into the infantry recognizes the heart of a “good man” beating in Rogers’ caved-in chest and offers him a chance to join the fight if he submits to an experiment whose purpose is to create an army of “super soldiers.” Despite the scientist’s German emigre pedigree and the ubermensch cast of the project, it’s a thoroughly American endeavor since Tommy Lee Jones is in charge. Rogers thus turns into a muscle-bound hunk with remarkable restorative powers, but that’s where his super powers end. As the scientist tells him before he is unceremoniously dispatched by a German spy, Rogers is only as powerful as his decency…or something like that. In truth, director Joe Johnston and his co-scenarists use the perky platitudes of a bygone Hollywood to make Captain America almost a parody of the modern superhero blockbuster. Since Rogers is the only super soldier the army can produce, he’s delegated to war bond promotion, where he becomes the subject of the very comic book that introduced him to impressionable boys in the 40s. Such work makes him more of a laughingstock to real soldiers, and so he has to prove his worth by disobeying orders and single-handedly freeing a group of allied prisoners captured by Hydra, a Nazi cult that even scares Hitler and is headed by the maniacal Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), otherwise known as the Red Skull. Once Rogers earns his super soldier credentials, he’s given his own squadron of iconoclastic hell-raisers, a costume, and a special shield. He also wins the heart of the British intelligence officer (Hayley Atwell) who was originally charged with preparing the weaker Steve Rogers for his task. It’s a relationship that is built to last a franchise, though, unfortunately, the sequel appears to be that Avengers thing which opens in May. Another lost opportunity, if you ask me. (photo: MVLFFLLC TM & Marvel Entertainment LLC)
The Company Men
Having produced and creatively overseen two of the most influential TV series of all time–ER and The West Wing–John Wells brings his fast-moving, character-driven style to the big screen in service to the sort of big social theme his small screen work would have addressed in more detail but hardly any less subtlety. The plight of middle managers in the present economy’s downsizing frenzy may strike some as hardly worthy of the sort of drama Wells trades in, but The Company Men wields its sledgehammer with telling accuracy. Ben Affleck is perfectly cast as the whippersnapper who pulled himself out of a blue collar New England existence to become the top salesman of a once-respected shipbuilding firm. Nevertheless, he’s one of the first to go when the company’s stock price plunges in 2008. Affleck’s right for the part because Bobby Walker’s golden boy career mirrors Affleck’s own as a leading man about ten years ago, and that flamed out, too. At first, Bobby is too proud to give up the sports car and can’t abide interviews for jobs that offer 30 percent less pay. His bullheadedness contrasts nicely with the verbal Schadenfreude of his carpenter brother-in-law, Jack (Kevin Costner), who has always thought Bobby rose above his station. Jack understands the value of work, whereas Bobby doesn’t, a stance that Wells doesn’t necessarily buy but can’t quite put over, even in the guise of Bobby’s senpai Will (Chris Cooper), an executive who started on “on the floor” making ships and who now in late middle age faces his own self-worth apocalypse when he gets the axe over the objections of Gene (Tommy Lee Jones), the only director who takes issue with the board’s “rationalization” strategy being carried out by the head of human resources (Maria Bello), with whom Gene happens to be sleeping. As in ER and The West Wing these characters come across as delivery devices for the film’s various viewpoints, and without the luxury of full seasons to flesh them out beyond their symbolic importance they don’t quite succeed as integrated human beings. Bobby eventually has to swallow his pride and ask Jack for a job, and through such acts of charity we learn that the carpenter’s beliefs aren’t merely the articulation of the working man’s gripe but tied to his sense of what’s right and wrong. In that regard, Costner, the kind of intuitive actor who Affleck could have been had he not been sidetracked into romantic comedies and action flicks, delivers the movie’s over-arching sensibility with more assurance than either Jones or Cooper, who are saddled with fine, dull speeches about “what this country used to mean.” Jack may be a cliche, but he’s the kind of cliche you can’t have too much of. (photo: John Wells Productions)
Friends With Benefits
The third, or maybe even the fourth, Hollywood romantic comedy to take on the issue of “sex friends,” that Internet-fueled, supposedly widespread phenomenon of young (and maybe not so young) people who hook up with friends of the opposite gender merely for sex. It’s not as if the movies haven’t addressed the subject of loveless bonking before, though the theme here goes beyond the old canard of one-night-stands. Since romantic comedies are premised on the idea that the two leads will end up married, the whole subgenre of sex friends is fraught with anti-climax. We know how it’s going to end so what’s the point? Will Gluck’s contribution tries to get by with more blue language rather than a more candid take on sex itself (which is better provided by Love and Other Drugs, which opens here next month). Moreover, the two main characters, internet startup wiz Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and rabid headhunter Jamie (Mila Kunis), are constantly commenting on the truisms that are integral to romantic comedy. That Friends With Benefits sticks resolutely to these truisms means that it’s either too ironic for its own good, or clueless to the point of catatonia. The biggest turnoff in this regard is having the two young hotties so financially successful that they seem to exist on a different plane. Dylan is lured from Los Angeles to New York by Jamie to take the creative director job for GQ (didn’t anybody tell Gluck that print is on the way out?), which gives him what looks like the largest, most mod-con stuffed apartment in Manhattan. Since both are coming off short-term relationships that ended badly they decide to satisfy their libidos in each other’s beds, a device that allows the writers to get humorously candid (Dylan discusses in detail the difficulty of having to pee with a hardon), though they draw the line at actually showing sex. The movie doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of discreet, revealing tableaux whose purport is meant to goose the pair into a realization that you can’t have sex without love. It’s a tortuous process that takes into consideration the two principles’ parental issues: Jamie is the daughter of a 70s sexual predator (Patricia Clarkson) who doesn’t even know who Jamie’s father is, and Dylan’s dad (Richard Jenkins) is a heartbroken divorcee slowly vanishing into the fog of Alzheimer’s, certainly the most overused plot ingredient of the new millenium. Add to that Woody Harrelson as a gay sportswriter who acts as the film’s romantic wise man and you have a product that hardly needs to be about anything, it’s so beholden to formula. The only thing you can say about it is that it’s bold enough to make fun of George Clooney and T-Mobile in equal measure.
Gomorra
In order to appreciate Matteo Garrone’s neorealist take on Roberto Saviano’s bestselling non-fiction novel, one has to discard the Mafia-related pop culture detritus absorbed over the years. Saviano’s chronicle of crime in
Naples has nothing to do with the so-called Cosa Nostra, which is centered in Sicily. This is an organization called the Camorra, which is even bigger. More significantly, it is not a study of the people who run the show. It’s a look at how the factotums operate and their often deadly interface with the people they serve and exploit. Garrone dispenses with conventional narrative, dropping in and out of storylines that don’t go anywhere until someone dies very violently. The opening scene sets the tone and the methodology. Several men are enjoying themselve at a spa, when suddenly their companions pull out guns and kill them. There is no explanation of why these men were killed or even who they are. Human life is extremely cheap in this milieu: People die not so much for a romantic notion of honor or betrayal, but because it’s convenient to get rid of them. The two dimwitted teenagers who wander fitfully around the decrepit public housing complex that serves as the film’s setting, spouting lines from Scarface, a movie that stimulates their desire for filthy lucre and all it can obtain (The Godfather would bore the shit out of them), dream of becoming criminals because it’s the only role model they have. Unable to distinguish between the fantasy of the thug life and the reality of the brutal Comorra operating principle, they steal guns that aren’t theirs and rob African drug dealers who happen to be clients or larger forces. They’re not dangerous, just annoying. The 13-year-old who offers his services to one lowly gang of enforcers quickly learns that he can be made an accessory to a murder that is more or less carried out by whim. Garrone doesn’t dwell on these horrors; and isn’t interested in whether or not anyone agonizes over them. The only expression of conscience is demonstrated by the new assistant to a powerful businessman (Toni Servillo) who arranges to have toxic chemicals dumped on public lands. When his boss tells him to throw out a box of peaches grown on such land and given to him as a present by an unknowing grandmother, the younger man walks. And just because he isn’t killed then and there doesn’t mean he won’t be later, but Garrone is already on to the next story: an accountant (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes payments to impoverished mob families and gets sucked into an internecine gang war; and an underpaid tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) working for a mob-owned sweatshop who moonlights for a Chinese knockoff operation. No one is safe.
The Last Exorcism
Though it starts out as the latest horror mocumentary in the style of Blair Witch, this creepy Southern Gothic makes only a weak attempt at authenticity. The protagonist is a Louisiana preacher (Patrick Fabian), born and bred to the calling, who expresses doubt to a documentary film crew about his faith and decides to out the exorcism business as a scam. He brings the crew on one last job deep in the countryside, where the daughter of a widowwe has been acting funny ever since her mother died of cancer. The filmmakers’ idea is a good one: The preacher will reveal the “tricks of his trade” to the camera while also patronizing the backward beliefs of these yokels, but as the exorcism develops the girl’s affliction becomes truly alarming and the preacher’s comeuppance is initiated from more than one quarter. If the scares are relatively negligible, the movie does keep the mystery compelling until the very end with a very Blair Witch-like climax, all shakey camerawork and indistinguishable figures–and a more ridiculous explanation than it deserves. (photo: Studiocanal & Strike Entertainment)
The Light Thief
In Aktan Arym Kubat’s fourth feature, the director stars as the title character, an electrician in a Kyrgyzstan backwater. He steals juice from the grid for his fellow residents who, either through poverty or neglect, can’t get it otherwise, at least not consistently. In the meantime, he’s developing his own wind power generator with whatever resources are at hand. Since he’s one of the most important members of this community, a political mover-shaker with clearly dodgy intentions enlists his help in modernizing the town, and eventually the electrician’s impish sense of right-and-wrong clashes with the politician’s more commercial self-interest. Maybe because Kubat himself embodies the film’s moral essence, it doesn’t have much room for anything else, including character development; and while certain scenes are touching or hilarious or both, the narrative thrust becomes predictable early on. What Kubat has to say about the post-Soviet style of governance in his country (or any former Soviet state) is important, but the methodology and storytelling is too quaint to make the intended impression.
Limitless
Given its thematic pretenses, this Faustian-bargain thriller should be more fun, but that’s the trouble with Faustian-bargain thrillers: Payback is the point, and Leslie Dixon’s cynical screenplay offers little that’s compelling. Then you have Bradley Cooper, whose patented shit-eating performance style starts at cynicism. Cooper plays a lazy, disaffected writer who chances on a black market drug that unleashes the 80 percent of our brains that lie unused. He bangs out his best-seller, learns two foreign languages, and corners the stock market before you can say “lucky asshole,” since that, basically, is what Eddie is. And despite the tribulations he has to face–the drug’s wicked side effects, its unavailability, other “addicts” who will kill for his secret stash, and the kind of “responsibility” that comes with enhanced intelligence–Eddie never evinces a shred of sympathy. “You have not earned that power,” an energy magnate (Robert De Niro) screams at him, stating the obvious. But Limitless isn’t interested in the obvious. It’s interested in the grotesque possibilities such a drug offers and assumes the audience is, too. (photo: Relativity Media)
The Next Three Days
Director Paul Haggis, famous for creating the Oscar-winner Crash and writing the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, tones down the hot-blooded social commentary for a fairly straightforward suspense flick, albeit one that is based on a French action movie, which sounds desperate on the surface. Russell Crowe plays John Brennan, a college English instructor whose wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), is sentenced to life for the murder of her boss, a crime that is never clearly explained (motive is inter-office politics?) because the audience isrequired to wonder throughout the running time whether or not she really did it. It’s a fatuous plot device meant to increase Brennan’s air of fidelity bordering on insanity. He never doubts Lara’s innocence, and after three years of exhausting every legal recourse and Lara’s suicide attempt in stir, he decides on the only logical solution: He will break her out. Such preposterousness is hardly an obstacle for a well-orchestrated action movie, and I imagine the French original, Pour Elle, which I didn’t see, didn’t bother with making it all seem credible, but Haggis is too self-consciously a “quality” director, and his attempt to bolster the story’s relatability with excruciating details of how a milquetoast like Brennan learns to be a cold-blooded criminal provides its own measure of discomfort above and beyond what you might feel for his protagonist. Brennan interviews an ex-con (Liam Neeson) who wrote a book about his own escape, and then surfs the net for any intelligence about prison procedure and criminal technique, such as breaking into automobiles and producing “bump keys.” In the meantime, he has to raise a son who is persecuted at school for having a murderer mom and deal with parents who suspect something is afoot but can’t bring themselves to articulate it. Then there’s Lara, who has to be kept in the dark about the breakout until it’s actually happening. All of these elements are suspenseful in and of themselves, and Haggis wisely avoids his usual sermonizing tone, focusing intently on Brennan’s increasingly obsessed personality, which Crowe embodies handily; so handily, in fact, that he can deliver Haggis’s late-inning surprises without raising so much as a cackle of derision. Crowe may be too successful, in fact, since his character’s lack of cool makes it difficult to believe he would rob a drug den full of armed thugs for the money he needs for his enterprise. This is a guy, after all, who in a previous scene was easily screwed over by a fake passport dealer. The learning curve is long for English teachers who endeavor to break the law, Haggis seems to say, but some things just automatically bugger the imagination.(photo: Lions Gate Films Inc.)
No Impact Man
Environmental writer Colin Beavan and his wife, Business Week editor Michelle Colin, pledged to live a more ecologically responsible life for the entire calendar year of 2007. This meant consuming only locally produced food, doing without electricity (for six months, at least), buying nothing new or anything packaged, and foregoing motorized travel. This mission is made either a little more difficult or a little more tolerable by the fact that the couple live in a really nice apartment in Manhattan. Though Beavan, who also produced, admits it’s all a publicity stunt and accepts every interview he’s offered, he manages to make his point in a clear and understandable fashion. Michelle has trouble getting with the program at first, but eventually warms to it. And who wouldn’t? The couple and their toddler daughter hardly suffer, and as Beavan’s gardening mentor, an aging 60s diehard, points out, the real culprit is the corporate culture Michelle promotes in her magazine work. But the movie is most entertaining as a snapshot of a marriage strained to a certain point by idealism. (photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories)
Puzzle
The opening scene of Natalia Smirnoff’s movie makes its point humorously and effectively. Buenos Aires housewife Maria (Maria Onetto) bustles around her small house serving dozens of guests who ignore her labors, a grievous failure of etiquette given that the get-together is to celebrate Maria’s 50th birthday. Though hardly put-upon by her loving-if-complacent husband and distracted sons, Maria deals with her own quiet mid-life crisis by taking up jigsaw puzzles, a pastime that, with her intuitive ability to see “the big picture,” she excels at. When she applies to be the partner of another jigsaw aficionado for a nationwide contest, she’s forced to take on competitive airs that contradict her gentle nature, and her new partner, an older, wealthy gentleman, is smitten. Dramatically subtle but emotionally rigorous, Puzzle sneaks up on you with its unassuming storyline. Though Smirnoff addresses class distinctions and gender politics with care and intelligence, it’s Maria herself who makes the film special, a caring woman who is offered a new lease on life and genuinely agonizes over what to do with it.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The original Planet of the Apes was released back in 1967, and four sequels were followed in 2001 by Tim Burton’s wrong-headed remake. Still, this origin story here feels newer than it has any right to feel, maybe because director Rupert Wyatt has recreated the offhanded lack of seriousness that made the first movie so timeless. Wyatt incorporates a number of subtle jokes hearkening back to the first movie while setting up a premise that backs up the original Pierre Boulle story. It’s San Francisco in the not-too-distant future and biochemist Will Rodman (James Franco) is feverishly developing an Alzheimer’s treatment while his once-genius father (John Lithgow) slowly succumbs to the disease. Rodman lords over a lab full of chimps that are given an experimental drug that enhances brain function, and when one escapes to wreak havoc, the pharmaceutical company shuts the project down and orders all the lab animals destroyed. Rodman smuggles the baby of one of the doomed chimps out of the lab and raises him at home, where he discovers the primate has a high IQ, obviously passed on by his drug treated mother in vitro. Named Caesar by Rodman’s father, the chimp becomes a surrogate son to the researcher. They have conversations in sign language, and after an injury Rodman starts romancing the pretty vet (Frieda Pinto) who treats Caesar. The ape goes through the normal stages of human childhood and adolescence, turning into the chimp equivalent of a moody teenager. Played by Andy Serkis using the same motion-capture technology that allowed him to bring Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings, Caesar is the most interesting character in the movie, mainly by contrast. Franco, an actor whose intelligence often gets the better of him, understands the puerility of the lines he has to speak and stays well out of the way of the dodgy plot–his romance with Pinto comes off as even less than gratuitous. Wyatt proves his mettle with several violent action scenes, but it’s clear he’s never worked with special effects on this scale before. Still, for all its predictable summer blockbuster conventions, Rise provides a good 45 minutes of some of the best cinema Hollywood has to offer this year, and the bulk of it is silent. After Caesar goes on a neighborhood rampage he’s imprisoned in a primate research facility where he’s tortured by a psychotic attendant (Tom Felton) and in the process politicized. Using his vast intelligence he gains control over the other apes and initiates what can only be termed a revolution. He’s a hairy Spartacus, and Serkin invests him with all the pain and anger such a firebrand requires to lead the downtrodden to freedom. It’s a thrilling passage, even if the mayhem that ensues doesn’t quite stack up. But any ape should be proud. (photo: Twentieth Century Fox)

Sophie Marceau is celebrating her 45th birthday this week

Sophie Marceau is celebrating her 45^th birthday this week. Joyeux anniversaire!

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In case you don’t know her, she is a French actress, director, screenwriter, and author. Her original name is Sophie Danièle Sylvie Maupu, but in the beginning of her career she was suggested to change her name to a better sounding Marceau. Her first movie – in which she played main character Vic Beretton – La Boum (English title: The Party) in 1980, was a big hit all over Europe, just like La Boum 2 in 1982. She even received a César Award for Most Promising Actress. I watched the first movie again yesterday and today I know what I didn’t when I was watching it in the 90s: Vic is going to the best high school in France (Lycée Henry IV). She and her junior high friends are exploring love, kissing, cigarettes and drinking. There is a story line for the parents as well, so don’t worry: it’s not boring even if you are not a teenager anymore. Oh and the music! Classic.

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After The Party movies she became a movie star in Europe with a string of successful films, including L'étudiante, Pacific Palisades, and Fanfan. Soon she became internationally popular with her roles in Braveheart (1995) with Mel Gibson, Firelight (1997), and the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough (1999) with Pierce Brosnan.

L'étudiante - Source

Fanfan - Source

Braveheart - Source

Firelight - Source 

James Bond: The world is not enough - Source

In 1995, Marceau wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Menteuse (in English: Telling Lies published in 2001). In 2002, she made her directorial debut in Parlez-moi d'amour (Speak to Me of Love) for which she was chosen Best Director at the Montreal World Film Festival. This movie is said to mirror Marceau’s life as it about a 15-year relationship which ends in separation. Just like hers with Polish director Andrzej Żuławski, who she has a son with. Since 2007 she is in a relationship with Christopher Lambert who she met on the shooting of La disparue de Deauville.

Sophie Marceau to star in Wang Xiaoshuai's new film

French actress Sophie Marceau answers questions of journalists during a promotion activity of her film "Ne Te Retourne Pas (Don't Look Back)" at the Ever Shining Circuit Cinema in Shanghai, east China, March 12, 2010

Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai confirmed Monday that renowned French actress Sophie Marceau will act in his new film.

Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai confirmed Monday that renowned French actress Sophie Marceau will act in his new film, M1905.com reports.

Wang said a cooperation contract between Chinese and French investors has been signed. But the director didn't mention the movie's name, only saying it will be a story he has reserved for nearly two decades.

Wang says he will discuss the movie with Sophie Marceau during the upcoming Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France.

When Marceau attended the China premiere of her film "Female Agents" in April 2009, she told Chinese media that she was looking forward to working with Wang Xiaoshuai and called him her favorite Chinese director.

Wang's film "Chongqing Blues" is in competition for the top Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival, which will open this Wednesday.

Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai confirmed Monday that renowned French actress Sophie Marceau will act in his new film.

Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai confirmed Monday that renowned French actress Sophie Marceau will act in his new film, M1905.com reports.

Wang said a cooperation contract between Chinese and French investors has been signed. But the director didn't mention the movie's name, only saying it will be a story he has reserved for nearly two decades.

Wang says he will discuss the movie with Marceau during the upcoming Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France.

When Marceau attended the China premiere of her film "Female Agents" in April 2009, she told Chinese media that she was looking forward to working with Wang Xiaoshuai and called him her favorite Chinese director.

Wang's film "Chongqing Blues" is in competition for the top Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival, which will open this Wednesday.

17 May 2000 Jennifer Aniston vs Sophie Marceau

 

Posted  by Simguy on Wednesday, 17-May-2000 19:34:44

Before: Aniston bringing Marceau’s career to a skidding halt, spoiling the latter’s US debut and discrediting Sophie to boxing insiders who dismiss her as another soft Euro-import. Jennifer’s in good shape looking tanned and tough, and talking about treating Sophie shabby in her own backyard. Black pushup, tiger-print bikini bottoms, ponytail for Aniston, light blue push up, white hipster bikini bottoms for pony tailed Marceau.

R1: Both girls execute well--Aniston coming forward, hooking off the jab and throwing a good straight right. Shifty southpaw Marceau resists the temptation to slug, right hand low, left cupping her cheek, giving Aniston the lead shoulder to punch at and slipping effortlessly most of the American’s offerings. Down the stretch, Marceau with some nice cuffing right hooks, pivots as Aniston staggers forward with punches--Jennifer outslicked by Sophie in the first.

R2: Sophie Marceau timing Aniston  perfectly slips under Jen’s pushing jab and slings a straight left counter onto the American’s mouth, putting her on her heels in hurt. Marceau patient, hunting the French star down with a exaggerated creeping motion, fading back as Jennifer’s punches and leaning into left hand counters with nail Aniston flush on the mouth with impunity. Aniston unraveling, starting to push her punches, and Marceau cruelly setting down on those Michael Nunn-like right hooks and slinging  lefts from the hip to drive Jen to the ropes. Aniston in trouble, tries to bib her way out of trouble but takes a perfect short right uppercut on the chin that drops her to one knee. It’s over: Jen can’t get off her knee as she gives up the 10 count with glassy eyes--KO2 Sophie.

After: Revenge doesn’t get any sweeter than  that--a second round KO that looked as easy as it was. Demonstrative erasing of speed bump goes a long way to rebuilding Marceau’s confidence, not to mention rep. Long plane ride home for Aniston, who leaves St. Tropez much more quietly than she arrived.

Chic encore!

Since Carla Bruni-Sarkozy swept on to the world stage in Dior, France has been reinstated as global leader of all things cool. From fashion to film, the French are once more the flavour du jour. Lucie Greene takes a look at the crème de la crème

Oh la Carla!

Once upon a time France was simply synonymous with style – the language, the ladies, the fashion labels. From Christian Dior to Christian Louboutin, the French have historically done chic brilliantly – if a culture can ooze charm, theirs did.
But in recent years the je ne sais quoi faded and the nation simply lost its va-va-voom. Maybe it was the competition from our 1990s Brit-cool or the ascendancy of all things brash, bling and very un-Français – who knows?
And, quite frankly, in 2009 who cares, because France is back! In the past 12 months it has been reinstated as global leader of all things hot, and the fashion pack can’t get enough of it.
Following behind the kitten heels of First Lady Carla Bruni Sarkozy, a legion of pretty French actresses and models are now the ones to watch. Forget Nicole Kidman (and that expressionless forehead). Thanks to the wonderfully zeitgeisty film Coco Before Chanel (which will be out here later this month), Audrey Tautou bagged the latest Chanel No 5 ad campaign, while It-actress Clémence Poésy landed the Chloé fragrance contract and Charlotte Gainsbourg scooped best actress for the film Antichrist on home turf at Cannes.
Meanwhile, Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard and her handsome boyfriend Guillaume Canet have established themselves as worthy rivals to Brad and Angelina for the title of Hollywood’s most gorgeous couple.
What’s more, the French fashion houses were once again behind the most fêted collections on the 2009 catwalk. Lacroix, Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga all enjoyed critical adulation, while hot label Balmain with its iconic pointy-shoulder jackets is being paraded by every celebrity from Victoria Beckham to Kate Moss.
On the British high street, French boutique labels Charles Anastase, Maje, Isabel Marant and Zadig & Voltaire are lining the rails at department stores, and French chains such as Comptoir des Cotonniers are expanding rapidly.
The London and New York party scenes are throbbing with hip Parisians. No guest list is complete without the likes of Julia and Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld (children of Carine Roitfeld, editor of French Vogue, who is rumoured to be next in line for Anna Wintour’s job in New York) and Lou Doillon (daughter of style icon Jane Birkin).
Perhaps the reason we are so drawn to French talent just now is that it is more interesting, more mysterious and more of the moment than identikit Hollywood. The mood du jour favours dignity, class and character. And no one does that better than the French.

The film-star femmes

From left: Audrey Tautou, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sophie Marceau

From left: Marion Cotillard, Cécile Cassel

From left: Clémence Poésy, Mélanie Laurent

The fashion filles

From left: Lou Doillon, Carine Roitfeld and daughter Julia

Mode in heaven

From left: Christian Lacroix, Louis Vuitton, Balmain

 

Female Agents: Girl power, World War II-style

The title may not be hugely inspired, but you must give Female Agents credit for doing precisely what it says on the tin  -  the tin being designed in the middle of the 20th century and containing Gauloises cigarettes.
In 1944, five French women are recruited by the SOE, an intelligence service overseen by Winston Churchill, to rescue a British agent.
These are, in ascending order of grit and resourcefulness, Gaelle (Deborah Francois), Suze (Marie Gillain), Maria (Maya Sansa), Jeanne (Julie Depardieu) and Louise (Sophie Marceau).

Gritty and intelligent: a French Charlie's Angels

What follows is a sort of taut, intellectual version of Charlie's Angels with added torture, as each woman shows amazing courage in thwarting the efforts of Colonel Heindrich, the head of Nazi counter-intelligence, to find out crucial information regarding the upcoming landings on the Normandy beaches.

 

 

It's based on a true story and, while you can't help feeling that the original characters would not have been quite as unusually attractive as the women playing them, you can't help admire the authenticity of the period detail and the urgent, slush-free narrative which captures the live-for-the-moment aspect of the character's lives.
The sole sour note comes from the English officers, who seem to hail from an entirely fictional British Isles, only ever seen on screens and not since at least 1975.

Verdict: An urgent, gratifying unsentimental portrait of life during wartime

Single-mother minister Rachida Dati voted greatest French woman while Italian Carla Bruni comes in eighth

 The French have voted justice minister Rachida Dati as the best  representative of Gallic womanhood in the world today, a fascinating new poll reveals.
The 43-year-old single mother, who rose from a troubled immigrant background to  high office, follows in a long list of internationally famous female icons including Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve.
Just as intriguingly, French First Lady Carla Bruni only makes eighth place on the list.

Rachida Dati (left) was voted greatest living French woman while Carla Bruni made eighth place - despite being Italian

Most are only too well aware that Miss Bruni was born in Italy, and only  received a French passport last year following a whirlwind marriage to  President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Miss Dati, by contrast, is praised in the survey for traditional French female attributes including style, beauty and sexiness - but also for independence,  dynamism and ‘inner steel’ in her professional life.
She received 26 per cent of votes in the poll of more than 3,500 French people. Miss Bruni received 16 per cent. 
Born in Saint-Rémy, near Lyon, in the Bourgogne region of northern France, Miss Dati is viewed as an inspiring example to thousands of modern women from ethnic  minorities.

Actress Sophie Marceau (left) and politician Rama Yade also made the list

Miss Dati’s parents were an illiterate Moroccan bricklayer and Algerian cleaner, and she left school at 16.
Yet through sheer perseverance she finally earned a place in the French government, before being forced out last month.
Miss Dati, who had just given birth to her first child, broke down and cried  when told the news, but has pledged to fight on in her career - endearing her  to many of her fellow countrymen.  She will now stand for the European Parliament in June.
In a further reflection of the changing nature of modern France, most of the  women in the top ten of ‘Most Representative Modern Women’ are single mothers or divorcees with hugely complicated private lives.

Ingrid Betancourt, left, came in at fifth position while politician Segolene Royal came in at seventh

There is only one woman in the top ten under 40 - human rights minister Rama Yade, 31.
Miss Bruni, who received 16 per cent of votes, spent much of her adult life  bringing up a son alone while juggling a long list of famous lovers including  Mick Jagger, before she became President Sarkozy’s third wife a year ago. 
Commenting on Miss Dati’s place in the new poll, French feminist historian Florence Montreynaud said: ‘Rachida Dati is certainly independent, dynamic,  determined, and careerist.’
The new poll, published in the Reader’s Digest Selection magazine followed a survey of 3, 755 people between January 14 and 16 carried out by Global Net.
THE TOP TEN
1.Rachida Dati, 43, Justice Minister 
2.Sophie Marceau 42,  actress 
3. Claire Chazal , 52, TV journalist 
4. Simone Veil, 81, veteran politician 
5. Ingrid Betancourt, 47, anti-corruption campaigner and former hostage
6. Rama Yade, 31, Human Rights Minister 
7. Segolene Royal, 56, former presidential candidate 
8. Carla Bruni , 41, French First Lady and pop singer 
9. Laurence Ferrari , 43, TV presenter
10.Valérie Lemercier, 44- actress