I think you can tell a lot about a person from the last film they went to see. Right now I’m wishing the last film I went to see was The King’s Speech.
Gosh, wasn’t it just fantastic? I felt a warm glow when it won Best Picture, and rightly so – they just don’t make films like that any more. And Colin Firth… what can I say. Making an uptight, repressed inarticulate royal seem realistic, vulnerable and sympathetic deserves an Oscar – and he could give Prince Charles a few tips.
Helena Bonham Carter seemed to have the quirky dialed right down, going back to her Merchant Ivory roots but letting just enough feist peek through to make her Elizabeth delicious.
But Geoffrey Rush – oh Geoffrey Rush was ROBBED of Best Supporting Actor (and I do not use capital letters lightly). What a beautifully judged performance as the goad against Bertie’s stuffiness and repression. Funny, touching – when the movie was over I wanted to stand up and cheer.
The next movie I saw provoked no such reaction… when No Strings Attached finished, all I wanted to do was slink out of the cinema and soap my brain. NSA, released here under the unprepossessing title ‘Sex Friends’, wanted to be a sexy, raunchy romp, but really it was just a glossy idealistic romantic comedy with period jokes. Shudder.
But at least NSA was aspirational – young romance sponsored by Apple and Audi. In Requiem Pour Une Tueuse, no-one can afford an iPhone (except for one ill-fated character) or a classic car. Instead it’s all clunky, functional dumb-phones and driving Renault hatchbacks.
[Warning, mild spoilers – but really, you won’t care]
Requiem Pour Une Tueuse is like someone decided to remake La Femme Nikita (why bother?) but this time with opera (again, why bother?) and forgot to call Luc Besson. So at the last minute they dragged in a poor young film director who has only ever done relationship dramas. And instead of a thrilling action movie in a beautiful setting, we get moody introspection (signaled by meaningful looks) and inner turmoil (signaled by pouting), and existential dilemmas (signaled by meaningful looks and pouting), plus a barely-articulated love triangle and a most unsatisfactory ending.
I expected better from Melanie Laurent, who has done better things with less (Le Concert) and also done fantastic feisty, complex women (Inglorious Basterds, Paris). But I should have seen trouble on the horizon when Clovis Cornillac turned up as the best soldier the French equivalent of the SAS has ever seen. Oh jeez. Clovis Cornillac is the guy you call when you need puppy-dog eyes, not when you need a hired killer. So he mopes around the screen watching Melanie Laurent fail to kill anyone, while he himself fails to kill anyone, except accidentally.
I need to go and watch La Femme Nikita again – and the director of this rubbish should be strapped in a chair and forced to watch Luc Besson’s entire oeuvre over and over again until he gets it.
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