Coup de Grace: Embellishment Can’t Save Dahan’s Fairy Tale
Try as it might, Grace of Monaco can’t seem to wring any significant interest out of the historical moment it exaggeratedly blunders through. While it seems Harvey Weinstein’s public gripe concerning the director’s cut could very well receive critical support after its Cannes premiere, it’s doubtful that any amount of king’s men could put this together into some semblance of quality. Rife with melodramatic cliché, questionable casting, and some editing choices that appear to be imbuing the film with flourishes that the onscreen subjects cannot generate, the film staggers through key events in Kelly’s life to bring us to the conclusion that she left behind acting but embraced the role of a lifetime. Dahan, despite some uneven choices, generally has a knack for catching superb lead performances from his leading women, such as...
Try as it might, Grace of Monaco can’t seem to wring any significant interest out of the historical moment it exaggeratedly blunders through. While it seems Harvey Weinstein’s public gripe concerning the director’s cut could very well receive critical support after its Cannes premiere, it’s doubtful that any amount of king’s men could put this together into some semblance of quality. Rife with melodramatic cliché, questionable casting, and some editing choices that appear to be imbuing the film with flourishes that the onscreen subjects cannot generate, the film staggers through key events in Kelly’s life to bring us to the conclusion that she left behind acting but embraced the role of a lifetime. Dahan, despite some uneven choices, generally has a knack for catching superb lead performances from his leading women, such as...
- 5/14/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Special Treatment (Sans queue ni tête – a better translation might be Cock and Bull), by Jeanne Labrune, relies to a large extent on Isabelle Huppert’s superb performance as a high-class prostitute, Alice Bergerac, who acts out fantasies with her clients but becomes disillusioned after one turns violent. In parallel, we see a psychoanalyst, Xavier Demestre (Belgian actor-director Bouli Lanners), become disillusioned with his own life and split up with his wife. The parallels are obvious: Alice effectively provides sex therapy for men who can only get it up if she pretends to be a schoolgirl or demure housewife. Interestingly, it is sometimes not clear whether she is role playing or not (to the extent that the confused Xavier later asks: “Is this you?”). She is arguably more successful than the psychoanalyst, whose perceptive clients end up analysing him and one leaves him happy in the knowledge that he may...
- 10/1/2010
- by Julia Kollewe
- t5m.com
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