The Idea of You (2024)

What if I could be the sort of person who goes camping by myself? Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Forty-year old Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) is a gallery owner and divorcee who plans a solo camping trip while her ex-husband Daniel (Reid Scott) takes their daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) and her friends to Coachella. When he is called away on work assignment to Huston, she is left to accompany them. Daniel has arranged for a meet and greet with famous boy band August Moon, despite Izzy now dismissing them as so seventh grade. While waiting in the VIP area, Solène enters what she believes is a bathroom, only to discover that it is August Moon member Hayes Campbell’s (Nicholas Galitzine) trailer. The two are attracted to each other, although Solène, who is sixteen years older than Hayes, is uncomfortable. During August Moon’s performance, Hayes appears to change the show’s setlist, dedicating a song to her. Solène attends her birthday party where is fed up with prospective men her own age. Shortly after the festival, Hayes shows up unannounced at Solène’s gallery, interested in purchasing art. After he buys every piece at the gallery, Solène takes him to a friend’s warehouse studio, where they discuss life and art. After thinking that a restaurant would invite too much attention, the two go to Solène’s house to eat. They share a kiss, but Solène rebuffs him. Hayes leaves his watch behind, then, finding Solène’s phone number on the gallery invoice, texts her to join him in New York at the Essex Hotel. With Izzy away at summer camp, Solène meets him at his hotel where they have sex. Hayes persuades her to travel with him on August Moon’s European tour. Solène wishes to keep their relationship private and does not tell Izzy or anyone else. As the band takes a break at a villa in the south of France, Solène becomes uncomfortable about her age in relation to the other women travelling with them. Bandmate Olly (Raymond Cham Jr) tells her that Hayes’s dedicating a song to her is a tactic they use to impress women and that Hayes has previously pursued relationships with older women including a 35-year old Swedish film star he embarrassed. Solène feels misled and disillusioned and abruptly returns to Los Angeles … Is this your first time getting Mooned? Adapted by director Michael Showalter and co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt from actress Robinne Lee’s bestseller, this sees Hathaway getting into her groove in a seriously romantic drama. The ironic trigger for everything that now happens in her life is her ex’s need to prioritise himself and his business – just as his affair ended their marriage. When she meets a guy 16 years her junior and he reveals his own fear they find a kind of balance. He says: I think that’s my greatest fear in life – that I’m a joke. She counters with: What will people say? Galitzine at first seems like an overwhelmingly gallant white knight and Hathaway positively glows: being adored suits her. Watching her shrug off the mid-life nonsense purveyed by divorced men who insist on talking about themselves all the time is infectious – she is not in crisis. Naturally, once she goes on the road with the band Hayes’ alley cat past comes back to haunt him in a way that hers haunts her decision-making and the wheels come off when she can’t take the heat. The publicity leads her husband to gloat, I’m sure we can all agree that a relationship with a 24-year old pop star would be crazy on so many levels. Yet her daughter argues, Why would you break up with a talented kind feminist? And, for a while, it works, until the Moonfans get their way on social media. Tracy (Annie Mumolo) makes for a great BFF when she comforts Solène, People hate happy women. And that of course is the point. Women are supposed to suffer! Their cheating exes hate them except when they do what they’re told! Their kids don’t let them have a life if they’re not at the centre of everything! Other women hate them! Watching this lovely woman change her opinion of herself and her possibilities in the reflection of how a new guy sees her is wonderful. How the story beats are worked out might not be surprising but to say this is pleasurable and crowd-pleasing is an understatement: it’s a deeply sexy film. The leads are more than persuasive as the well met age-difference match, the scenario a delirium of groupiedom wish fulfilment (She’s with the boy band!!) and it’s all beautifully made with due diligence concerning the social media pile-on which is all too realistic as is the message that love at any age is a trial. A splendid soundtrack peppered with everyone from Fiona Apple to St Vincent as well as the songs from August Moon and Hayes as a singer-songwriter in his own right (with a score by Siddartha Khosla) makes this a total delight. Directed by Michael Showalter. We’re two people with trust issues who need to open up a little. What’s the worst that can happen?

April in Paris (1952) Doris Day

Doris Day recorded the Duke and Harburg song for the titular musical comedy on 5th June 1952. The film was released 24th December of that year.

Everything Went Fine (2021)

Aka Tout s’est bien passé. This is our story. Novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim aka Manue (Sophie Marceau) receives a call from her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) informing her that their retired businessman and art collector father André (André Dussollier) has suffered a stroke. She rushes to the hospital in Paris where she sees the ill effects of this cardiac event: his face is horribly stricken, falling to one side, his speech is affected. She looks at the catscan of his brain on her computer at home. Manue is a devoted visitor despite the cruelties inflicted upon her in her childhood when he called her ugly, constantly berating her for her huge appetite (she is patently beautiful and thin). She used to fantasise about killing him. She is stunned when he asks her to help him die. It’s still illegal so Manue debates the situation with Pascale and then pays a discreet visit to a lawyer for advice and contacts a Swiss clinic run by a woman doctor (Hanna Schygulla). Their mother, his ex-wife (Charlotte Rampling) is a sculptress in the throes of arthritis, Parkinson’s and depression who doesn’t care a fig for him. She is already devastated by her own loss. She reminds her daughters that her parents didn’t attend their wedding because they warned her she was marrying a homosexual. His lover Gérard (Grégory Gadebois) creates a row in the hospital and the women have to stop him visiting. He says he’s getting the great watch he was promised by their father. As Andre gets better Manue is convinced he has forgotten about the whole idea but he tells several people including a cousin and regularly reminds her to make the arrangements. Then someone rats the women out to the police ... I want you to help me end it. Adapted from the titular autobiographical novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim by writer/director François Ozon, who regularly collaborated with the late novelist (she died in 2017), this difficult and highly emotive subject is treated in such a matter of fact realistic way and yet with a sure lightness of touch it becomes a remarkable viewing experience, decorated with stunning acting that nonetheless doesn’t feel like competitive performance. The unsentimental approach to a fraught scenario, dripfeeding backstory into the well managed narrative, subverts any potential for melodrama. Don’t tell your sister, but this story would be great for one of her novels! By turns desperate, petulant, pleading, sorrowful, distressed, enthusiastic, Dussollier is majestic as the playful monster, the gay dad whose bonkers lover has to be banned from visiting – until Manue sees them in a tender moment and eventually Gérard gets the Patek Philippe watch and it is clear the end is nigh. Manue is the daughter whom he treated disgracefully but whom he secretly adores as her sister clearly realises. Everything’s coming together. He wonders randomly when informed of the cost of the Swiss solution how poor people do it. They wait to die, shrugs Manue. This wealthy industrialist reminds her to get his Legion of Honour ribbon. We are in the world of the superannuated bourgeoisie for whom money is no issue but ill-health is the great leveller and financial comfort cannot stop the indignities of the loss of bowel control and the need for 24/7 care. As the moment nears and subterfuge is required the only person keeping a truly clear head is the man who sees only one option rather than succumb to the dreadful infirmities that will encroach upon him as further incidents will surely occur given his prognosis. He recognises his great life, his entitlement, his privilege and now his destruction. Amid all the superbly constructed tension there is great humour, telling detail, laughter, tears. A rich and timely drama, fair in every possible way. Mesmerising. You know, he’s a bad father. But I love him

The Souvenir (2019)

You are lost and you will always be lost. London, 1980. Shy Knightsbridge-dwelling film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) gets involved with a mysterious older man Anthony (Tom Burke) who claims to work for the Foreign Office. While she starts working on a project and he disappears from time to time, she doesn’t suspect what is revealed at a dinner party by a guest – that he’s a junkie. When he steals all her belongings to score she appears to be reeled in to a deeper relationship with him. She doesn’t socialise as much with her old friends but they visit each other’s parents. Then following a trip to Venice when he realises she is aware of his habit she starts bringing him to housing estates to buy drugs and finally sees what is going on in his life until finally she sees him out of control … Don’t be worthy, be arrogant. It’s much more sexy.  Writer/director Joanna Hogg’s quasi-autobiographical tale turns on the passivity rather typical of her characters, upper middle class types stuck in situations they can’t quite recognise and then have trouble leaving.  Here it’s a story of her own youth when she fell in with a much older man who concealed his serious heroin problem from her and given the prevalence of that drug among the arty set in the era (read Will Self on the subject) her naivete is somewhat hard to credit. Realism is introduced by a very welcome soundtrack of songs by bands like The Pretenders and The Fall with those awkward dinner conversations punctuated by political talk – the IRA, the Middle Easterners holed up at the Libyan Embassy:  we even get to re-live the bomb that ended that particular siege.  There are urgent exchanges about movies. Then there are the barely comprehensible phone calls. The letters we can’t read.  It is amusing to see Swinton Sr. turning up in twinset and pearls – definitely not how she spent the Eighties, after all, with her forays in Derek Jarmanland. But it takes 83 minutes for Julie to do something active to end the relationship and it’s only when she sees Anthony’s drug paraphernalia at the flat and then he appears, strung out.  That’s a long time after he robbed all her possessions for a fix. She may be rather innocent in that sense but she has big ambitions and continues with her film: her obvious class status arises only when her Head of Production comments rhetorically, I don’t suppose you really have to think about budget in Knightsbridge, do you. Richard Ayoade gets a great scene when he obnoxiously ponders how a heroin addict and a Rotarian got together and Julie is utterly baffled:  she doesn’t know what track marks are.  The photo of Anthony in full beard in Afghanistan circa 1973 didn’t arouse any suspicions. For such a sophisticate you have to wonder, don’t you. The formation of an artist is tough to put together in the frustrating first hour but somehow in the second, it works, when you finally get intimations of an emotional undertow about to burst in a film that is chiefly of memory rather than strict narrative or depth psychology. I do what I do so you can have the life you’re having

Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019)

Aka Portrait de la jenue fille en feu. Will you be able to paint her? Painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is instructing a class of art students in Paris. They ask her about the origins of a painting and she reminisces: France, 1770. Marianne is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) a young woman who has just left the convent and is at home on a remote island off the coast of Brittany. She is a reluctant bride to be and her mother the countess (Valeria Golino) wants Marianne to paint her portrait in secret for an arranged marriage to a nobleman suitor in Milan whose visual approval is required. The last male artist failed in his mission and Marianne must study Héloïse without her knowing. Marianne accompanies her on her daily walk under the pretence of being her companion but observes her carefully and paints her secretly. Is that how you see me? When she reveals her identity and Héloïse dislikes the portrait Marianne destroys it, to the rage of the countess who goes away for a while as long as Marianne agrees to do another portrait, this time with her subject’s full co-operation. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s. The women fall in love and Héloïse reads Orpheus and Eurydice by firelight to Marianne and Héloïse’s servant, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) whose pregnancy the women help to end. As Marianne finishes the portrait and the countess is returning they must accept what happens next … Your presence is made up of fleeting moments that may lack truth. French writer/director Céline Sciamma’s historical romance is stately, elegant and well framed:  this is a picture of female solidarity and love, grounded in the most obvious of ideas – the female gaze in a patriarchal world – in a film about looking and perception. We are going to paint. This is about turning around and acknowledging and engaging with what you see – and making a choice. The performers look and watch and are passive aggressive as society dictates they must be with their taboo affair, illuminating each other’s lives in secret. How people see each other has rarely been so truthfully portrayed. A profound, at times magical, meditation on what it means to be a woman, this is beautifully and carefully staged, with nothing excessive or ornamental and driven by stunning performances. The digital cinematography by Claire Mathon is so exquisite there are candlelit scenes you will want to reach out and touch and hang on your wall. This show and tell is far from still life. If you look at me, who do I look at?

Smashing Time (1967)

I do love your accent. It’s so tuned in. Selfish Yvonne (Lynn Redgrave) and her best friend frumpy Brenda (Rita Tushingham) leave the drab North of England and head for London with dreams of hitting the big time, their ideas of the place dominated by what they read in trendy magazines. But when they arrive and quickly lose their savings to a robber, they find that city life is tougher than expected and success may be more elusive than they planned. Yvonne hits Carnaby Street where she encounters trendy photographer Tom Wabe (Michael York) and then lucks her way into TV and achieves celebrity when she unexpectedly turns a bad song into a hit single.  She begins to wonder about the cost of fame, and the whereabouts of her old friend who has become Tom’s modelling muse and is now the face of a cosmetics campaign including the perfume Direct Action which uses footage from protests in its TV advertising … Ain’t she smashing when she gets the needle! Screenwriter George Melly (yes, the same jazz hero) has a ball making fun of the Swinging London scene with ‘Brenda’ and ‘Yvonne’ which were the nicknames given to the Queen and Princess Margaret by Private Eye magazine. Director Desmond Davis had previously directed Tushingham and Redgrave in The Girl With Green Eyes and they clearly have a rapport – their burning charisma has a lot to contend with in a narrative that is essentially ten slapstick scene-sequences (including a pie fight) so there’s a lot of wide-eyed mugging as well as some nifty lingo. Effectively our lovely ladies are turned into a distaff Laurel and Hardy. Tushingham’s A Taste of Honey co-star Murray Melvin makes an appearance, Ian Carmichael does a kind of class throwback as a nightclub lech who gets his back at his, Anna Quayle scores as posh shop-owner Charlotte who doesn’t want to sell anything, Arthur Mullard and Sam Kydd have a knockabout in a greasy spoon and Irene Handl seems to appear with one of her own chihuahuas in the vintage clothes shop. The last scene is literally set to overload and the pair see the ludicrousness of the cool gang for themselves even if they’ve briefly been their icons. The garish glare of the ‘happening’ places is physically some distance from the rest of London, which is shot in several tracking shots, revealing its true grimy drabness. The songs are a lot of fun in a pastiche score by John Addison. A time capsule that might even have been too late by the time it was released but a must for fans of the appealing stars whose sheer exuberance lights up the screen.  Watch out for the psychedelic group Tomorrow. Thanks to Talking Pictures for putting this on their schedule.  I may be green but I’m not cabbage-coloured

L.A. Story (1991)

Why is it that we don’t always recognize the moment when love begins but we always know when it ends? Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) has the easiest job in the world: he’s a TV weatherman in Los Angeles, where the weather is so predictable he tapes his ‘wacky’ forecasts days in advance. Bored with his job, his life and his relationship with longtime girlfriend Trudi (Marilu Henner), foundering while she carries on an affair with a colleague Frank Swan (Kevin Pollak), Harris begins to receive secret messages from an electronic freeway sign near his home, which lead him to pursue romance with a married British journalist Sara (Victoria Tennant) doing a story on LA lifestyles and a vapid young model SanDeE* (Sarah Jessica Parker). Sara doesn’t want to let down her ex-husband Roland Mackey (Richard E. Grant) but Harris believes she could be his source of happiness … Let us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time. Written by Martin and directed by Mick Jackson, this pleasantly zany romcom perfectly encapsulates what many believe to be true of a certain kind of social scene in Los Angeles, an updated take on Cyra McFadden’s earlier self-help satire Serial, perhaps, with fads and fashions plucked from the air like oranges from trees or aphorisms from freeway signs. If it never hits the comic heights you would expect from Martin, this is a Valentine to the city, an observational fantasy that sees contentment as a home run while a certain kind of busy wit unspools through these characters’ lives...it’s not what I expected. It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I’ve seen a lot of L.A. and I think it’s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is all right. Not quite the Odyssey Harris’ name suggests but an intriguing and insightful journey nonetheless, with an outstanding soundtrack which will practically bring tears to the eyes of Nineties kids. Ordinarily, I don’t like to be around interesting people because it means I have to be interesting too

Peter Beard 22nd January 1938 – Unknown date March/April 2020

The legendary photographer Peter Beard has been found dead close to his home on Long Island, New York following his disappearance 31st March. His iconic images and glamorous lifestyle attracted the kind of attention more usually visited upon some of his subjects (for whom he was also a muse) but at the heart of his work – art, collage, diaries and books – is a real love for life of all kinds: animal, human, and above all, the wildlife of Africa, his home for so many years. Rest in peace.

Along Came Polly (2004)

I’ve found the perfect woman. Risk-averse insurance company risk assessor Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller) takes a chance on marrying his ideal woman, realtor Lisa Kramer (Debra Messing) but she has an affair with nudist scuba instructor Claude (Hank Azaria) on the first day of their St Bart’s honeymoon. His best friend actor Sandy Lyle (Philip Seymour Hoffman) known from his bagpipe-playing role in an 80s teen movie advises him to play the field and at a gallery opening they encounter their junior school classmate Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston) now working as a waitress. He asks her out and finds his life taking a different turn when they date because she’s a kook who tries everything (including Latin dancing and Middle Eastern food) but commits to nothing while his buttoned-up persona descends into a kind of undone madness by association. Meanwhile he has to assess daredevil accident-prone businessman Leland Van Lew (Bryan Brown) who is forever leaving a trail of destruction behind him but represents a great deal of money to the firm run by Stan Indursky (Alec Baldwin). Chaos ensues when Lisa returns to reconcile with Reuben and he has to make decisions that don’t depend on his Risk Master technology … I can’t have thrown up 19 times in 48 days if I wasn’t in love with you. Writer-director John Hamburg was listening in screenwriting class because he pushes every single character to do the opposite of what their nature impels them to – with delightfully nutty comic results in this modern take on screwball, the ill-advised toilet humour notwithstanding (an issue arising from Reuben’s unfortunate Irritable Bowel Syndrome condition). Sure, there are cheap laughs, including Polly’s flatmate – her blind ferret Rodolpho – but all of the character flaws are cleverly turned into neat plot pivots: when Reuben’s silent dad Irving (Bob Dishy) finally speaks he talks only common sense and spins the plot into its final happy resolution, with Sandy letting go of his past and getting his greatest role, posing as Reuben so that Reuben can stop Polly from leaving the country, with Polly committing at last and Reuben ultimately taking a risk. It’s crazy but works because at its beating heart it’s dramatically logical. Great silly fun with Stiller and Aniston making for a tremendously charismatic couple in a story that makes neat references to The Breakfast Club and Friends. What kind of guy are you?

Dorian Gray (1970)

Aka The Secret of Dorian Gray/Il dio chiamato Dorian/Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray. One day when even you’ve become an old and hideous puppet this will still be young. London student Dorian Gray (Helmut Berger) is the subject of a portrait by society painter Basil Hallward (Richard Todd) whose clients hedonistic aristos Lord Henry Wotton (Herbert Lom) and his wife Gwendolyn (Margaret Lee) take a fancy to him. Meanwhile he has fallen in love with aspiring actress Sybil Vane (Marie Liljedahl) as she rehearses Romeo and Juliet. She makes him think about someone other than himself for a change. As Basil completes his portrait Dorian finds himself obsessed with his painted image and swears that he will trade his soul to remain young. His relationship with Sybil grows complicated and argumentative and she is killed when she is knocked down by a car. Dorian is heavily influenced by Henry who has him sleep with Gwendolyn and Dorian then becomes immersed in society as a kind of gigolo who makes other people famous, be they men or women. However as the portrait begins to reveal his age and escalating depravity he hides it away from sight where it changes appearance and becomes ugly and Dorian ends up killing Basil when he says he’s not responsible for the alterations.  Dorian is conscious of the peril of his situation, particularly when Henry introduces him to Sybil’s double, a woman married to a scientist embarking on research into rejuvenation … Everything is yours. Take it. Enjoy it. The most beautiful man of this or any time stars in a European co-production of the greatest work of literature by the greatest Irish author and it’s updated to the flashy, groovesome Seventies. What bliss is this?! With equal parts tragic romance and fetishistic kink it easily falls into the category of trash yet the moral at the centre – the idea that youth is beautiful in itself, not just for what it can obtain – gives it a lingering value. The god-like Berger is perfectly cast as the impossibly erotic creature who transitions from youthful selfishness to graceless decadence, and his sleazy polymorphous journey through the fashionable world of swinging London is both quaintly dated and oddly touching, principally because of the relationship with Liljedahl (best known for her soft-core films in her home country of Sweden) and Berger’s consistent performance, beset by narcissistic fascination, bewildered by loss. It is precisely because this plugs into the truly pornographic ideas behind the 1890s textual aesthetics that it seems oddly perfect as an adaptation despite the occasional surprise – a bit of S&M in a stables, plus it’s not every day you see Lom approach a beautiful young man to have his wicked way with him. The screenplay is credited to giallo director Massimo Dallamano, Renato Romano, Marcello Coscia and Günter Ebert, from  Oscar Wilde’s indelible novel. The contemporary score is composed by Peppino De Luca and Carlo Pes. Produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff and Harry Alan Towers for American International Pictures. You only have a few years to live really fully