Cinema and Culture

On the screens is the French “culinary symphony” by Vietnamese—born Chan Anh Hung, which won the Cannes branch for best director.

Previously, the author was awarded the “Golden Camera” for the debut “Fragrance of Green Papaya” in 1992 and, three years later, the Venetian “Golden Lion” for “Rickshaw”. The original title of the new film — “The Passion of Dodin Buffan” — refers to Marcel Ruff’s novel “The Life and passion of gourmet Dodin Buffan”, praising the sweet France of the pre-war Belle Époque. At the international box office, the title of the film “Pot-au-feu” is also intentionally French — it’s a poor dish, stewed meat with vegetables.

Medieval chowder is simpler than a steamed turnip: haute cuisine implies complex work with elementary ingredients; gastronomy is a matter of measure and taste. However, where can I find her? The hero studies the book of author’s recipes of the famous cook of the gallant century… However, both the folio and the text in which it appears are taken by the director as a sub-drawing. The hero and the author do not delve into the twists and turns of the book — they are only interested in their own cuisine: the invisible connections of design and embodiment, hassle and gourmet, the hustle and bustle of everyday life and the meaning of being. On this path, an annoying boundary arises — satiety. However, the skill of the gastronome consists in extracting the most charming notes from under a bushel of consonances of changing dishes… This is half-art, half—sport – the highlight of haute cuisine; the French are partly gluttonous, but above all skeptics, mathematicians and researchers who gamely indulge in what little they can believe in.

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In cinemas there is a melodrama, a love dramedy by Alexandra Frank “HE + SHE” on the theme “what are we like” and why dislike happens to us
“The inspiration for the creation of the picture was my author’s project, which was originally conceived as a base for presentation video interviews of artists,” the director notes. — As a result, about 287 actors of different ages and experience were filmed, and with each of them, in conversation, we somehow touched on the topic of love, family, the relationship between a man and a woman. I’ve heard a lot of touching, sad, funny, and sometimes just comical love stories. All these stories were the impetus for the creation of the film, which includes five short stories about family misunderstandings, giving food for sad reflections.”

The point here is in the peculiarities of the author’s optics — the director lived abroad for a long time and, upon returning home, “considered” the confessions of the interviewees from scratch as a fresh slice of collective psycho. The insufficient sterility of this laboratory work, presenting social ulcers in one package with professional transformations of actor egos, affected the quality of the result.

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The best spring gift and one of the signature masterpieces of Studio Ghibli is the immortal story of growing up, awakening love and finding God’s gift.
In the mid-nineties, the legendary Hayao Miyazaki decided to leave his studio, take up hand-drawn projects and entrust the brainchild entering the digital age to the care of a worthy heir. He became the main animator of “Princess Mononoke” Yoshifumi Kondo, who did not miss the chance to debut the film adaptation of Miyazaki’s original script “Whisper of the Heart”.

It was a non—trivial task due to the weakness of the source material – a novel of growing up based on a sentimental manga. However, the co-authors read something significant in the girly comic and suggested that an outstanding painter of utopian impressionist landscapes develop a visual series. Based on the typical landscapes of the western district of Tokyo, Naohisa Inoue created an illustrated encyclopedia of the city where dreams come to life. And literally — in a kaleidoscope of visual plot, in contrast to the graphic rendering of the landscape, coming to life in a symphony of diverse rhythms and glare of sunlight, clouds, foliage, rainy twilight and night lights.

The 14-year-old heroine looks like a blind spot in this whirlwind, but with each turn, the adventures of the Tokyo schoolgirl take on an increasingly bizarre context. Knowing nothing but a family nest in an ordinary slum, the little girl turns into a songbird, a migratory bird, a bird in love and, finally, an angelic “bird of God”. The essence of the metamorphosis is a barely noticeable shift in visual intonation: opening the door, the schoolgirl always finds herself in a slightly different world.

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The documentary mural “Shadows of Goya” was released. An excursion into the imaginative world of the great painter became the last film trip of 89-year-old Jean—Claude Carriere, co-author and friend of Luis Bunuel.
The classic of European film drama has composed one and a half hundred scripts for films by Godard and Brooke, Mal and Etex, Forman and Schlendorf, Vida, Oshima, Babenko, Dere, Schnabel… However, the truly great paintings were created by Carriere in collaboration with an Aragonese native, a countryman of Francisco Goya and Carlos Saura. The latter sets the tuning fork of the study: “Goya has two aspects that are also present in Bunuel,” Saura notes in the prologue of the tape: on the one hand, the bestial cruelty of unrestrained violence, on the other, an amazing sensitivity.”

However, the duality of the classics did not immediately manifest itself. The future creator of the infernal “Capriccios” made his debut with frescoes of the church of del Pilar, striking with the play of powerful volumes and primitive freedom of communication with Renaissance models, which Goya met in the early mysterious Roman period of his life.

Then the artist became a court painter; after ceremonial portraits, Don Francisco took his soul away in mischievous folk subjects, panels and tapestries. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he rejected academicism, from the very first steps he sought to penetrate into the essence of things on the edge of the visible world, manifested in shifts of angles and optics. The characters of Goya’s genre paintings and ceremonial portraits are slightly ugly, somewhat scattered, definitely defenseless and charmingly spontaneous in a purely individual, delicately revealing naturalness of inner life.

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Jessica Hausner’s social dramedy “Club Zero” is in cinemas, nominated for the Cannes Golden Bough and missed the award because of black—black sarcasm.
The author admitted that the idea of the painting was inspired by the legend of the Pied piper of Hamelin and Russian folk tales. Obviously, first of all, there is a “Kolobok”, and there are seven “koloboks” here. The role of grandparents is played by the parents of students who invited a fashionable coach to an elite boarding school in order to improve the eating behavior of their children as part of her elective.

To begin with, Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska) suggests that teenagers formulate the goals and objectives of the training. One kid wants to please parents who are hooked on a paleo diet, another chooses “healthy eating as one of the main components of a proper lifestyle,” the third wants to score points for active behavior and get a scholarship. Beautiful girls care about the environment — they hope that “conscious nutrition will help in the fight against global warming”, they dream of reducing stress … “Great! — the mentor sums up, — our classes will allow you to contribute to saving the planet, improve your physical fitness and self-control, as well as increase your scores.”

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