mplaza

I didn't know of Segolène Point, yet a quick search over the internet revealed she's a theatre producer and actress, and it shows. In this ten-year old film, one of the handful she appears to have made, she shows remarkable acting skills, it is no mean feat she spends over an hour practically alone though in different settings, reciting her lines whilst keeping the viewer's attention. Her diction is impeccable, her presence immense. The film is exquisitely shot, very intimately framed and filmed in stunning locations in Portugal and France. The officer to whom the nun purportedly (there is some disagreement on the actual authorship of the letters) writes the correspondence is just sort of fleetingly presented, perhaps there ought to be more of him in the film; the way it is he might as well be omitted. Recommended.

There's a characteristic I find in many a film directed by women in which a very special aesthetic envolves the final product, a certain something, difficult-to-define aura that wholly eludes male-directed movies. This film is one of those. Delicately filmed, exquisitely timed and paced and with a remarkable performance from Australian actress Odessa Young, it is a very rewarding achievement. I've seen it has been considered less favourably by other people in this website, but I found it to be an out of the ordinary production. Ms Young gives out a complex, richly moulded and uninhibited characterisation of the film's protagonist that certainly deserves to be seen. The other characters are less satisfactorily rendered, yet in my opinion perhaps more the fault of the screenplay writers than of the actors or actresses involved. But this is the kind of film one returns to after some time has passed since one last saw it, for its beauty and lyricism are indeed rare nowadays.

There was a time when European networks produced excellent TV series based on historical events, literary works or on the lives of relevant historical characters. Budgetary restrictions gradually did away with that type of programming and productions nearly halted. TVE themselves produced a few remarkable ones and so did the BBC and RAI, the latter before turning into the generally appalling network it now is. With this new series centred on the life of Queen Isabella of Spain and now well into its third and final season, TVE has more or less come back to what they so successfully did until a couple of decades back. Actors are of a good enough standard and the recreation of some of the Kingdoms that comprised the Iberian peninsula at the time is in general to a good standard. There is some abuse, in my view, of computer-generated images and sequences that are distractive and in a few instances questionable in their success but the series as a whole deserves wider distribution (PBS take note?). The Alhambra sequences in Seasons 2 and 3 are a delight to watch.