Lincsobserver

Geraldine Flower was an Australian woman, born in 1947, who emigrated to England, where she worked as a secretary, then a journalist. In the course of her working life she had the opportunity to travel widely, and accumulated a number of lovers and admirers, (we're probably talking about the late 60s, early 70s, so a fairly permissive era). Her letters were found stored in a suitcase, following her death. The film illustrates her story by reading out some of these letters, and setting others in the form of songs. She clearly had an interesting life, if not a particularly extraordinary one, and the passion expressed in the prose suggests she must have been both very beautiful, and had an engaging personality. One or two of the songs capture an emotional episode very well, but a number of them seem rather bland. It's an interesting way to tell the story of someone's life, even if the film may not linger in the memory too long.

This film tells the complex story of political and corporate machinations in the French nuclear industry, along with the central character's lengthy legal battle to clear her name of charges of fabricating evidence, following a personal attack upon her. At times it feels as if the film is struggling to accommodate both stories in a single narrative - the details over the secret deal with the Chinese get a bit lost once Kearney's personal story (which has echoes of the British PO scandal) takes over. Isabelle Huppert is a fine actress, who presents Kearney as someone to admire rather than to like. I felt as if I might have got more out of the film if I had known more about either the legal case, or the French nuclear industry, but it is an interesting, compelling story about the struggles of an individual against powerful unsympathetic officialdom.

This French drama centres on whether a man's fall from an upper window of his Swiss chalet is suicide, or murder, with the other options of accident, or an attack from an unknown assailant having been ruled out. The story switches between the trial, and flashbacks to the couple's relationship, with the evidence seeming to swing one way and then the other. I felt a little uneasy that a lot of the evidence being discussed is subjective opinion - expert witnesses are subjected to ridicule, and the barristers seem able to continually interrupt each other at will. My biggest objection is that for a film that is 2.5 hours long provides us with no twist or big reveal at its conclusion. Maybe that's a sign of bravery, but it just left me feeling a sense of bathos.