Maybe

 

 

 

 

“Maybe… you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.”

— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Cine Me

 

 

Woman in Gold

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404425/

 

 

http://womaningoldmovie.com/

 

 

The amazing true story of Maria Altmann.

 

 "Plenty of stars glitter in Woman In Gold. But the film's impact comes from the fact that it is real: It's the compelling true story of a woman who sought justice in the face of seemingly insurmountable international obstacles."

 

For the second time in a year, the recovery of art treasures stolen by the Nazis gets the big Hollywood star treatment. But where George Clooney's The Monuments Men was a high-stakes wartime drama with a crack military team hunting down caves filled with purloined masterpieces, Woman in Gold is much more intimate in scale. This also makes it more affecting.

 

Maria Altmann was just a child when her Jewish family escaped Vienna. They left behind their extensive art collection, including a 1907 portrait of Maria's aunt by the celebrated Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt.
In the postwar years, the work became the centerpiece of the city's art museum. To the millions who loved it, the painting was known only as "Woman in Gold," effectively erasing the name of its Jewish subject, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

 

It’s a touching film that entertains with warmth and humor while teaching us something about history, law and justice with enormous heart, subtlety and compassion, brilliantly acted and skillfully written. Is there anything Helen Mirren cannot do?

 

 

I will simply say that in addition to a fine film, if you want to see the actual Woman in Gold, it’s on view in the elegant Neue Galerie in New York City from April 2 to September 7.

Cine Me

 

 

 

A Little Chaos

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2639254/

 

 

 

http://www.focusfeatures.com/a_little_chaos

 

 

 

A romantic drama following Sabine (Academy Award winner Kate Winslet), a strong-willed and talented landscape designer, who is chosen to build one of the main gardens at King Louis XIV’s new palace at Versailles. In her new position of power, she challenges gender and class barriers while also becoming professionally and romantically entangled with the court’s renowned landscape artist André Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts).

 

Kate Winslet blooms in a film full of heaving bosoms, flouncing dandies and landscape gardening.

 

Alan Rickman directed this – it’s his second behind-the-camera effort, after the Emma Thompson-Phyllida Law Scottish coastal drama The Winter Guest, way back in 1997. It’s an indulgently actorly piece, but in a thoroughly pleasant way.

Rickman also co-stars as a very droll Louis XIV, who likes to take a turn through the palace grounds and throw off his wig after a long morning’s kinging. So it is that Sabine mistakes him for a horticulturalist she’s due to meet, and they spend an afternoon together talking about roses and forbidden love and whatnot. It’s a jolly sequence, well-played by both stars, but the first half of it does wholly consist of Rickman repeating Winslet’s lines back to her with a puzzled question-mark attached. “My book on pears?”

 

 

Matthias Schoenaerts neuters his sex-god reputation, Kate Winslet gets maverick with potted plants, and Alan Rickman almost hijacks his own movie in a weedy horticultural romp through the court of the Sun King.

 

 

 

BB & Lucille

 

 

BB, anyone could play a thousand notes and never say what you said in one.

Wake up

 

 

«Ho there! Wake up! The river in your dream may seem pleasant, but below it is a lake with rapids and crocodiles, the river is evil desire, the lake is the sensual life, its waves are anger, its rapids are lust, and the crocodiles are the women-folk.»

 

Jack  Kerouac Wake up

Outside it's cold, misty and it's raining

 

 

If you want my body and you think I'm sexy
Come on, sugar, let me know
If you really need me just reach out and touch me
Come on, honey, tell me so.

Cine Me

 

 

 

Suite française

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0900387/

 

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfilms/film/suite_francaise

 

 

Handsome adaptation of Irène Némirovsky’s epic novel vividly depicts French rural life under the Nazis.

 

The now-celebrated origins of Suite Française, which became a publishing sensation in 2004, are as startling and extraordinary as anything on screen – arguably more so. Having fled Paris as the Nazis approached in 1940, the Ukrainian-Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky relocated to Issy-l’Evêque in Burgundy, where she began work on a planned five-part tale of war and peace. But after being transported to Auschwitz, Némirovsky died (aged just 39) in 1942, her notebooks entrusted to her daughters Denise and Elisabeth, who believed them to be diaries. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Denise discovered what turned out to be the first two instalments of Némirovsky’s extraordinary unfinished work. Published under the umbrella title Suite Française, these two self-contained novellas were reportedly optioned by Hollywood’s Universal Pictures. But by 2007 the title had returned to the French ownership of TF1, with whom British co-writer/director Saul Dibb has brought this French/UK/Belgian co-production to the screen.

 

Taking the novel’s lead, Saul Dibb’s nuanced, compelling film offers an intriguing close-up portrait of Bussy, a northern French village forced to host a garrison of Nazi soldiers. At the film’s heart is a sort-of romance between timid Lucile (Michelle Williams), and a cultured, piano-playing Nazi officer, Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts). But more lasting than the film’s romantic angle is the snapshot that Dibb (‘Bullet Boy’, ‘The Duchess’) offers of a class-ridden society under the spotlight of occupation.
The themes of collaboration, compassion and betrayal run through the film, and characters who initially seem to be one thing, like Lucile’s hard-hearted mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas), emerge as more complex. Even the film’s portrayal of the Nazi soldiers is satisfyingly complicated. Also refreshing is a sense that we’re thrown into the middle of the uncertainty of war; ‘Suite Française’ works hard to free itself from the benefit of hindsight.

The film is not without its problems – Michelle Williams is an elusive lead, and a wide array of characters come at the expense of depth – but it’s a knotty, thoughtful piece of work nonetheless.