Female Film Critics 24/375
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris seems like a sweet little movie about a sweet little charwoman. It is not. At least, that’s not all it is. The current film is an adaptation of earlier versions, and it presents, not just a woman dreaming of a Dior dress. It explores philosophy, as in Sartre and existentialism; it peers at feminism with references to the “invisible” woman; it juxtaposes lower middle class workers v. upper class twits.
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Mrs. Harris goes to Paris is a classic British chick flick with colorful characters, fun fashion, perfectly polite people and snappy dialogue delivered in a sometimes hard to understand Cockney accent. The film is overly sweet and wide-eyed at times as the thread seems to always end up fitting through the needle, but Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris has a charming innocence we need right now.
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Fairy tale archetypes are front and center in the surprisingly bland French film White as Snow, even with the presence of first lady of French film Isabelle Huppert and Lou de Laâge. Huppert plays the wicked queen to de Laâge’s fresh faced ingenue in a story meant to update and sex up the famed tale, presumably in the name of female empowerment. If only director and co-screenwriter Anne Fontaine didn’t vilify age and send the message that youth equals beauty and power in every scene of the film, the sexually adventurous choices her Snow White makes wouldn’t feel so shallow.
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If necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, then being short on cash must be the godfather — or, in this case, godmother — of trying your hand at a life of crime. Such is the situation in Jean-Paul Salomé’s Mama Weed, which stars Isabelle Huppert as Patience Portefeux, a police translator whose lack of funds leads her to seize a golden, albeit illegal, opportunity.
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It’s a true cinematic sin that for a career that spans five decades and with more than 120 films on her resume, French film legend Isabelle Huppert finally earned her first lead actress Oscar nomination for her darkly clever performance in Paul Verhoven’s 2016 thriller Elle. While her widow and mother of two grown daughters in her latest film Mama Weed doesn’t quite compare with her most audacious roles, at age 68, the sight of the still-glorious Huppert onscreen being as intriguing as ever will give you a contact high that lasts a good long time.
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The film “Frankie” is set in Sintra, Portugal, known for its dense landscapes. “Frankie” involves dense plotting — but not garden plots. This film is either a delicate disquisition on marriage, or else it attempts to pull the wool over arthouse audiences that think pausing between palavering is the same as significant introspection.
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This is a film guaranteed to scare claustrophobes who do not like the thought of being shut in a box, even one with Pennsylvania Dutch painting on the front. c is not a film for anyone who’s ever been tortured by a sociopath either. In fact, it’s hard to say who the audience for Greta is.
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Claire’s Camera is Cannes-centric. Filmmaker Hong Sang-soo set his quirky, genre-defying drama in the sun-drenched seaside resort as the festival takes place, but never visits the event’s star-studded glamour or industry hustle that actually surrounded the film’s Cannes premiere in 2017. And, since the story is about friendship between two women, Claire’s Camera is femme-centric, too. Continue reading…
Claire’s Camera was featured at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. French actress Isabelle Huppert meets South Korean actress Kim Min-hee,
Read moreThankfully, this year’s New York Film Festival did not disappoint in illustrating the complexities of women. We saw actresses that have become festival fixtures and a few fresh faces never seen before. Here are NYFF55’s ladies to be recognized for outstanding roles in a dynamite mix of features.
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