|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It’s not just the Channel that separates England from France. Their cultures are so dissimilar that one is tempted to say, with apologies to Rudyard Kipling, "Oh, England is England, and France is France, and never the twain shall meet". Despite all the differences, or perhaps because of them, there have been some fruitful Anglo-French collaborations in cinema. Renowned actors of one country have occasionally worked with top directors of the other, overcoming the language barrier to a great extent. Simone Signoret was specially imported from "permissive" France to play the role of a middle-aged seductress in Jack Clayton’s path-breaking Room at the Top (1959). It was arguably the boldest British film of its time, and the love scenes between Signoret and Laurence Harvey embarrassed many prudish Britons. Signoret won the best actress Oscar for her sterling performance, leaving behind top names such as Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. French new-wave master Alain Resnais, much acclaimed for his lyrical classic Hiroshima My Love (1959), gave British thespian John Gielgud a challenging role in Providence (1977). This was Resnais’ first English-language movie, and he cast Gielgud as a dying writer who is losing his grip on reality. The dividing line between fact and fiction gets very blurred as he spends a sleepless night in recollections (or dreams) about his family. Gielgud’s performance was appreciated, but the film’s criss-cross narrative was too confusing for some viewers. Gallic film-makers’ fascination for the interplay between dream and reality is also evident in contemporary works like Swimming Pool (2003), directed by Francois Ozon, and Claude Lelouch’s And Now...Ladies & Gentlemen (2002). Ozon’s film features veteran British actress Charlotte Rampling as Sarah Morton, a prolific crime writer who is desperate to produce something "different". She puts up at her publisher’s vacant country house in France and gets down to writing a novel. However, her work is interrupted by the arrival of the publisher’s voluptuous daughter Julie (played by French sex kitten Ludivine Sagnier). The ultra-liberated girl, who frolics topless in the house, becomes a source of distraction as well as attraction for the sexually repressed Sarah. Fact becomes indistinguishable from fiction as the writer makes Julie a part of her book. In the film’s most outrageous scene, the middle-aged Sarah emulates the girl by baring her breasts before a virtual stranger (or does she just imagine it?). Though Sagnier grabs the eyeballs for obvious reasons, it is Rampling who steals every scene in this erotic thriller. The latter, who also featured in Ozon’s dream-like Under the Sand (2000), won kudos for both these films, something that has rarely happened in the case of her numerous British and American movies. And Now...Ladies & Gentlemen stars Oscar-winning Briton Jeremy Irons as an ageing jewel thief who is fast losing his memory. Fleeing a life of crime, he undertakes a round-the-world yacht trip and lands up in Morocco, where he meets a club singer who is also suffering from the same disorder. Ironically, he becomes a prime suspect in a jewel theft case despite having nothing to do with it. Irons gamely tries his hand — or rather, tongue — at French. He is quite amusing in the dream sequences, in which he sees himself "paying back" the people he robbed. Irons worked with another top French director, Louis Malle, in Damage (1992), in which he played a politician who falls for his son’s girlfriend (Juliette Binoche) and squanders his career and family life. The beautiful Binoche, unforgettable in French films like Three Colours: Blue and The Horseman on the Roof, won an Academy Award for The English Patient (1996). She was quite appealing as a French-Canadian nurse who takes care of the title character, and her nearly unaccented English was a real bonus. Her director was British playwright-turned-film-maker Anthony Minghella, who himself won an Oscar. Binoche is also playing an important role in Minghella’s new film Breaking and Entering. Regis Wargnier, whose Indochine (1992) won the best foreign language film Oscar, made Man to Man in English last year with British stars Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) and Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient). This story of a Scottish anthropologist who brings two African pygmies to his country was the inaugural film at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival. The alluring Kristin, who plays an impresario in the movie, has also distinguished herself in French-language films like Pascal Bonitzer’s Small Cuts (2002) and Robert Lepage’s The Confessional (1995). Speaking French fluently is child’s play for her as France is her adopted country and her husband is a Frenchman. Gallic superstar Gerard Depardieu delivered English dialogues with a heavy French accent but still gave a typically powerful performance in British director Roland Joffe’s Vatel (2000). The tale of a master steward (Depardieu) during the reign of Louis XIV was screened at the Cannes festival, but it got mixed reviews. Anglo-French cinematic
associations might have been sporadic, but in most cases the director
and the actor have clicked like Phileas Fogg and Passepartout in Jules
Verne’s immortal work Around the World in Eighty Days. |
||
|
|
||
