Grasse

I saw this at the Leicester Odeon, London, last June. The montage pieces are striking - starting with the titles, then on with the dolly bit in the private garden, then the unexpected season-lapse tracking shot down Portobello, ending with the dolly on the now seemingly diegetically absent couple sitting on the bench. The use of found music in such passages seems pertinent because the effect is unashamedly slick and derivative. It is the world of the unattainable - the life of a screen star. And it doesn't purport to be anything 'up to date' - as it would happen with an Antonia Bird montage, for instance - because the world we are dealing in is exactly old hat (and that is the reason for the montages being there in the first place). It was courageous, in my opinion, to have such long takes. As far as Panavision comedies with Julia Roberts go, this doesn't have the same flow and exquisite close up composition of "My best friend's wedding", but its charm lies in the longueurs, in the intensity that the protracted shots and repeated situations eventually manage to convey.

I first saw this as a kid, in 1970, on tv, and thought the nightmare sequence at Diane Cilento's home to be one of the scariest scenes I'd ever seen on film. After 29 years the impact is somewhat diluted, but overall the film holds together pretty well. Take a look at the extraordinary Douglas Slocombe panavision cinematography, the driven performances of Franklin and Boyd - an underrated actor if there ever was one - the striking set pieces on the Thames riverbank. It should be restored and re-issued on a VERY big screen. Scorsese, where art thou?

It is Bresson's most accessible, classically structured film. Taken from Diderot, it is a story of love, betrayal and revenge. Why a masterpiece? Because it is one of the few films which manage to give the viewer a true sense of what love is and/or should be, of what it may achieve, avoiding the corny lexicon of romance, turning the potentially stale conventions of melodrama into an altogether plausible concoction of events, gestures, actions directly speaking to our experience. In its perfectly self-contained way it keeps showing us again and again that people may actually love each other, in spite of all.