In the early 1950s, five-year-old Sammy Fabelman attended his first movie screening. Radical shock. Now obsessed with the 7th art, the child grew up shooting his first amateur films, while going through a second trauma in adolescence: the separation of his parents. Steven Spielberg in his latest film The Fabelmans dissects his own youth and his demons through a barely imaginary family, modeled on his own. Driven by a thousand staging ideas and an endearing cast, his intimate odyssey hits the heart. She can count on the vibrant performances of Paul Dano and Michelle Williams (nominated for the next Oscars, March 12, in the best actress category) in the respective roles of Burt and Mitzi Fabelman, characters inspired by Spielberg’s own parents – Leah Adler and Arnold Spielberg, both deceased. Special mention also to Gabriel LaBelle, interpreter of Sammy Fabelman at 16 years old and whom the filmmaker literally modeled in his image, haircut included.
The Fabelmans, in theaters February 22, 2023.
Based between Berlin and Zurich, the London trio of psychedelic krautrock created a deeply European album, steeped in Central European influences and electronic music, recorded in two weeks in a studio located in the Swiss Alps. Of a rare melancholic beauty, this second album with fine arrangements beats like a heart in slow motion, and makes us take off with its blues guitars and misty synthesizers. Special mentions for the bewitching “Moonbeam, Midnight, Howl”, which makes you want to dance in the moonlight, and the melancholic “Future Visions”.
Violet Drive (Play It Again Sam). Performing March 18 at Trabendo, Paris.
Seven decades have passed and Alain Françon is attacking, in turn, this monument of the theatre. He offers a version of it that is… masterfully simple. Beckett’s characters (camped by the imperials Gilles Privat and André Marcon) evolve in front of a large canvas where a threatening trailing sky can be guessed that one would swear was taken from a charcoal drawing by Courbet (formidable decor by Jacques Gabel). What are these two men really waiting for on this deserted country road, in the shade of a emaciated tree? The death ? Or, on the contrary, a divine boost to lift them out of their misery? The author laughed at the metaphysical readings of his text which see in Godot an allusion to God. Beckett himself confessed that he did not really know who this stranger was, whom only a child (Antoine Heuillet) seemed to have seen. By insisting on the fortuitous meeting that Vladimir and Estragon have with a disturbing passer-by named Pozzo (diabolical Guillaume Lévêque), who martyrs his poor servant, ironically baptized Lucky (Éric Berger, demented), Alain Françon opens up new avenues for reading this play. offering the spectator the pleasure of rediscovering a text he thought he knew well. But as the director says: “There can be no unambiguous discourse in literature. »
*Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Alain Françon, with Gilles Privat, André Marcon, Guillaume Lévêque, Éric Berger and Antoine Heuillet, at La Scala. Until April 8.
Inspired by the poem Whale Nation by Heathcote Williams (1988) and carried by the voice of Jean Dujardin, The Guardians of the Planet, a superb immersive documentary by Jean-Albert Lièvre (director of Ushuaïa), sets out to meet the whales present for fifty million years on our planet. Spectacular diving images, bewitching soundtrack drawn from the song of whales, commentary a bit anthropomorphic: we are quickly seduced by this superb underwater trip to Mexico and Greenland. Beyond the symbol of a (fake) sperm whale stranded on a French beach, The Guardians of the Planet is an ode to the harmony of nature and to these mammals capable of storing up to 33 tons of carbon dioxide and essential to the preservation of our environment.
Guardians of the Planet, indoors.
In the magnificent setting of the Jan-Michalski Foundation, not far from Lausanne, at the foot of the Vaudois Jura and facing the Alps – a setting that would not have displeased Colette, the nature lover and friend of Switzerland – you have to visit this enlightening exhibition: nourished by unpublished or rare documents, it makes perceptible the incredible destiny of the author of Chéri told almost by herself. Under the title “To write, to be able to write”, Frédéric Maget, who has worked for years to know the writer, explains in five chapters how Gabrielle Colette, a young girl from Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, became what the we know, the negro of her first husband, Willy for his Claudines, but what we know less, this woman of permanent combat, claiming her rights, deciding to do what she wanted and to constantly reinvent herself: the phoenix is reborn here, between manuscripts, posters, photos, rare editions. Here, a letter from Jean Genet, elsewhere, a unique edition of Les Vrilles de la vigne pour Missy, etc. His partner allowed him to realize his dream of going on stage, but their public kiss was not allowed.
The French Academy supports her, but she publishes Le Blé en herbe, where her relationship with the son of her second husband caused a scandal again. Farewell, the cupola. Hello a new volume of the Pléiade which, under the title Le Blé en herbe, publishes an anthology: a link between this remarkable Swiss career and the work to which he ardently demands to return.
Until April 2. Jan-Michalski Foundation, Montricher. Swiss.
