French Beauty

Over at FACEForums, one of our members recently started a thread for the irresitably cute Audrey Tautou. This got me a thinking, so in the finest traditions of both FACE and ReeksofWin here is a quick canter through some of the delights that the French nation has given unto the world.

 

1  Audrey Tautou

Best known for: Amelie (2001), The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Pout rating: 4/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: Where better th start than the inspiration for this? Audrey is the ultimate fringey, foppish ingénue, her sparkling eyes and shy smile an irresistible draw to all bookish/film nerd/hipster/indie kids everywhere.
Parlez-vous français? “I believe in God, but I am not sure to trust Him so much.”

 

2  Brigitte Bardot

Best known for: And God Created Woman (1956), Contempt (1963)
Pout rating: 3/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: A full-force blonde bombshell, and perhaps the screen’s greatest ever out-and-out sex symbol.
Bardot played smiling, wide-eyed blondes to knee-weakening effect, but also had a knowing glint of smartness and sharpness behind her heavy-lashed eyes.
Parlez-vous français? “I have always adored beautiful young men. Just because I grow older, my taste doesn’t change. So if I can still have them, why not?”

 

3  Juliette Binoche

Best known for: Damage (1992), The English Patient (1996)

Pout rating: 4/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: Smart, private, effortlessly intriguing if not straightforwardly beautiful, Binoche is a continental fantasy - the dark-haired and introspective girl you fall madly, elusively in love with but can never fully understand. Sigh…
Parlez-vous français? “I have been proposed to four times. Twice at the beginning of a relationship and twice at the end of a relationship. I’ve never said no. I just didn’t give an answer!”

 

4  Emmanuelle Béart

Best known for: Mission Impossible (1996), 8 Women (2002)
Pout rating: 5/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: With her round, heavy-lidded eyes and full, pillowy lips, Béart has a doeish vulnerability which, when combined with long-legged hotness, is all kinds of irresistible.
Parlez-vous français?: “I give everything I have to give on the screen. I feel I don’t owe the public anything else.”

 

5  Julie Delpy

Best known for: Before Sunrise (1995), Broken Flowers (2005)
Pout rating: 3/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: As she showed in Richard Linklater’s heartbreaking brace of dallying romances Before Sunrise and After Sunset, Delpy is piercingly pretty and bright, but also elusive in that way which makes men abandon all reason.
Parlez-vous français?: “I’ve never made the first move in my whole life. I’m too scared. I don’t think I’ve ever been with someone I really loved, because the people I really cared for - I didn’t have the nerve to go after.”

 

6  Eva Green

Best known for: Casino Royale (2006), The Dreamers (2003)

Pout rating: 4/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: She’s beautiful, obviously, but not fluffy-pretty. That thick dark hair gives her an air of troubled gothic romance.
She’s radiant when she breaks into a full smile, but usually offers a mysterious, concerned half-smile instead. Maddening and mesmeric.
Parlez-vous français?: “It’s a way to exteriorise all my shit. To scream and cry and laugh on-screen, it’s almost like black magic. You can do anything. I’m a dreamer, so that’s a good job for me.”

 

7 Sophie Marceau

Best known for: Braveheart (1996), The World Is Not Enough (1996)

Pout rating: 4/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: Marceau’s long legs and statuesque frame made her sizzlingly sultry as a villainess opposite Pierce Brosnan’s Bond, but she’s at her best when tousled, natural and breathless.
Parlez-vous français?: “I hate those kisses - you know, American kisses, with the tongues out. They’re disgusting. I can’t look, it’s like porno!”

 

8  Marion Cotillard

Best known for: Taxi (1998), La Vie En Rose (2007)

Pout rating: 3/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: Effortlessly talented (not just an actress but an accomplished singer and musician) and wonderfully alive - that impish grin and sharp, sparkling eyes are so playful it’s easy to forget what a knockout she is.
Parlez-vous français?: “I have a tendency to often share the point of view of the conspiracy theory. I think that we are told lies about lots of things.”

 

9  Beatrice Dalle

Best known for: Betty Blue (1986), Night On Earth (2001)

Pout rating: 5/5

Je Ne Sais Quoi factor: More firebrand than French fancy. She’d eat you all up but it’d be a hell of a way to go.
Student Betty Blue poster-girl in the ’80s, Dalle’s high-maintenance rep has sadly held her back from a major breakthrough. (She was due to play alongside Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense but was denied a US work permit because of drug-use allegations).
Parlez-vous français?: “I don’t act in the way other actresses act, in terms of building or creating a character. I don’t transform myself into the role, I invest myself in it.”

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Monica Bellucci's Paris apartment burgled as she appears on television at Cannes

 

Monica Bellucci (right) wilth co-star Sophie Marceau at the premiere of Ne Te Retourne Pas in Cannes last week. The Italian actress's apartment was robbed while she was at the festival

Thieves used the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival to break into the Paris apartment of Matrix Reloaded beauty Monica Bellucci, it emerged today.
As the Italian sex symbol and her actor husband Vincent Cassel appeared on TV from the south of France, the burglars got away with more than £80,000 in cash.
Jewellery and computer and video equipment worth at least double that amount were also taken, as well as Miss Bellucci’s passport – something she needed this week to travel to Hollywood.
‘It was clearly a meticulously planned burglary,’ said one of the officers investigating the burglary in Boulevard de Ménilmontant, in the French capital’s 20th arrondissement.
‘The thieves are believed to have struck just as the stars were appearing on television in Cannes on Sunday evening.
‘They entered the fourth floor apartment via a balcony, smashing a window in the process. Then they pretty much cleared the flat out of anything which was valuable and could be removed easily.
‘There have been plenty of cases of the homes of professional footballers being targeted while they are playing in high-profile matches, but this appears to be the first time that the same kind of thing has happened to actors.’
The 45-year-old former model has appeared in numerous films, including Irreversible and The Passion Of The Christ, in which she played Mary Magdalene.
She was in Cannes – where the 62nd festival ended on Sunday - promoting Marina de Van's Don't Turn Around, in which she stars alongside the French former James Bond girl Sophie Marceau.
Vincent Cassel, 42, was in Ocean’s Twelve but is best known in his native France, where he recently starred in a two-film biopic about the Paris gangster Jacques Mesrine.
The Paris crime is being investigated by the 2nd Division of the Judicial Police.

 

 

The Tourist: A very Jolie adventure for Johnny

Have you ever watched an old Hitchcock caper starring Cary Grant and murmured ‘they don’t make them like that any more’? If so, The Tourist is the picture for you.
It’s a glossy, sophisticated, gloriously improbable romp — escapist fun for these austere times.
A shy, unassuming American tourist on a train to Venice (Johnny Depp in the Cary Grant role) is lured by an absurdly glamorous Englishwoman (Angelina Jolie, never more sensually enigmatic) into a devilish web of dangerous intrigue.

Dangerous intrigue: A shy American tourist (Johnny Depp) is lured into a devlish web by glamorous Englishwoman Angelina Jolie in The Tourist

First, the British police (under a grumpy Timothy Dalton and a fanatical Paul Bettany) and then Russian gangsters (led by a Bond-villainish Steven Berkoff) wrongly identify him as an elusive master-criminal.
He’s also being followed by a dark, handsome, mystery man (Rufus Sewell at his most laconic). Who on earth could that be?
The Tourist has been promoted as an Oscar contender, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is a luxurious trifle with nothing serious to say — a vastly superior version of the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz misfire, Knight And Day.
The good news is that there are twists and chases a-plenty, and it juggles its hoary old clichés with supreme confidence.
A remake of an abstruse 2005 French thriller called Anthony Zimmer (which starred Yvan Attal and Sophie Marceau), it’s written with tongues firmly in cheek by the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who gave us the much more critically respectable The Lives Of Others, that consummate professional Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) and Christopher McQuarrie, whose best work this is since The Usual Suspects.

At least three other scribes were involved — Jeffrey Nachmanoff, William Wheeler and Jerome Salle, but their names appear to have dropped off the credits, along with any mention of Anthony Zimmer.
The film’s had more than its share of production difficulties, with a couple of directors (Lasse Hallstrom and Bharat Nalluri), two male stars (Tom Cruise and Sam Worthington) and one leading lady (Charlize Theron) all falling by the wayside.
Fortunately, those problems aren’t visible onscreen. It may be significant that none of those who have dropped out has ever been noted for his or her sense of humour.
The end product is extremely silly, bordering on high camp — so much so that it might easily have been directed by Baz Luhrmann.
I guessed what it was up to from reel one, but that didn’t stop me from being thoroughly entertained all the way to its joyously barmy conclusion.
Not to be taken even half-way seriously, this is — if you’re on the right, ironic wavelength — the most nostalgic of escapist pleasures.