Opiniones de usuarios

A film that despite its complete unabashed intellectual minimalism has some surprisingly humorous and emotionally affecting moments. The film seems at first to be a Bresson inspired Antoine Doinele-esquire sojourn... but at a certain point of the film the real leading star of the picture emerges... in a recital for a new Baroque record... the film showcases an unbelievable transcendent and mournful version of Monteverdi's "Lamento Della Ninfa"... sung by one of the characters... the song is so arresting that it causes everyone who hears it to weep tears of malaise... and to your surprise as you sit in the half empty art house theater eyes half lids you start to feel your chest clench up... your eyes tear and before you know it the combination of the incredible recording by a group called "Le Poeme Harmonique" I believe... and the acute, mournful acting by Natacha Regnier punctuates an otherwise sparse film on an obscure subject with a great burst of emotion...

Having said this... I have been desperately trying to find the recording of "Lament of the Nymph" used in this film, but so far to no luck... it seems that "Le Poeme Harmonique" either has not recorded it for release... or else I'm looking in all the wrong places... I found a version by Cantus Colln but it pales in comparison to the version in the film...

Can anyone help me out? I'm am desperate to find this recording, and you will be too if you see the film...

Former New Yorker, Eugene Green's austerity conveys the intensity that motivates the revisionist/exploratory movement of early music which is accurately referred to as Baroqueux. It certainly helped explain to my puzzled wife why we seem to cry so much! This story, so emblematic, suggests how profoundly personal, resistant and even revolutionary this impulse is, and what historical/institutional factors it has encountered in our generation. Green is a vital theorist of baroque performance as well as a cinematographer. His loose caricature of the anglophones' most popular baroque luminary is truly hilariously. And, of course Vincent Dumestre's ensemble and Claire Lefilliâtre are always important!

Eugene Green has come up with a quirky unclassifiable entry here with elements of satire, black comedy and tragedy rubbing shoulders that fit where they touch. Denis Podalydes and Olivier Gourmet act everyone off the screen but they do have strong assistance from the script in which the latter is more Eyde Gorme than Olivier Gourmet and the former appears to be sending up Gilbert Adair. The limerick about the young man from Racine who invented a strange new machine (concave or convex, it would fit either sex/with attachments for those in between)was seldom more apropos than in Gourmet's take on Phaedra which has to be seen to be believed whilst Podalydes succeeds in creating an entirely new kind of faggot, light years away from Michel Serrault's Screaming Queen in La Cage aux folles. This is one of those plots in which tenuous links between disparate characters never quite mesh. Camille Carroz (Christine) is much too intense for boyfriend Adrien Micheaux and finally finds a soulmate in an equally intense (but thankfully unseen) student who is passionate about 12th century dietary conditions in Normandy. In the wake of their break-up Micheaux falls in love with the voice of Sarah (Natacha Regnier)a soloist on an album Christine had given him as a Christmas present. We, of course, have been following the traumas of Christine, who despite being in a solid-seeming relationship with Manuel (Alexis Loret)is vaguely unhappy and not just because of the cruel criticism of her singing at the hands of Podalydes. Although continuous the film is also episodic and punctuated by picture postcard views of Paris and Classical French film buffs will be delighted to catch a glimpse of the Hotel du Nord, albeit as it is today but still in the same location on the Canal St Martin. Quirky, uneven, but one that can definitely stand a second viewing in, say, six months or so. 7/10