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    In ‘The New Look,’ It’s Chanel Versus Dior in War-Torn Paris

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    Juliette Binoche and Ben Mendelsohn play the two fashion icons during the Nazi occupation of France in a new series from Apple TV+.In “The New Look,” an Apple TV+ show premiering Feb. 14, wine glasses are never empty, cigarettes are always half-smoked and everyone is thin. The series follows two titans of French fashion, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, after all, toward the end of World War II.But this glamorous portrayal of Paris’s creative milieu is also interested in how the French elite collaborated with their Nazi occupiers during this contested period. It offers a startling throwback to a time when swastika-stamped flags hung over the streets of Paris. From 1940 to 1944, the French Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis and deported over 70,000 Jews to death camps, sent French workers to Germany and tried to crush the French resistance.The show’s main action starts in 1943. Chanel (played by Juliette Binoche), a star of French fashion, is living at the Ritz Hotel, which was then a Nazi headquarter, where she hosts her boyfriend, the German spy Hans Günther von Dincklage (Claes Bang).“Chanel was an excellent survivor,” said Binoche, sitting on a couch in the wood-paneled bar at the Hotel Regina Louvre, which stood in for the Ritz on the show. Binoche — wearing a white shirt layered with a black bustier, tie and pants — said she read several biographies of the designer to prepare for the role, and was impressed by how Chanel’s creativity and business savvy took her from childhood poverty to the top of the European elite.Binoche and Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Christian Dior, at the Hotel Regina Louvre in Paris, where several scenes from were shot.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesPlaying the character in this period of her life was challenging, the actress added, because “there’s so many layers of gray going on.” On the show, we see Chanel invoking Vichy’s Aryan laws in a failed bid to eject her Jewish business partners from the company. She travels to Madrid at the request of an S.S. general in a bizarre attempt to broker peace between Germany and Britain (Winston Churchill, whom she knew personally, declines to meet).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Taste of Things’ Review: Love, Loss and Loins of Veal

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      Juliette Binoche stars in an instant culinary classic that exquisitely captures the kitchen’s bittersweet blessing.At the center of everything good in the world is a bittersweet kernel: All things pass away. The grandest cathedral, the most vibrant painting, a beautiful harmony, a perfect aperitif — none of it will last forever. And all great love stories end, one way or another, in sadness.This will break your heart if you think about it very long, as much with grief as joy. Yet somehow it’s also what makes life worth living. This conundrum lies at the heart of “The Taste of Things,” a magnificent culinary romance from the French-Cambodian director Tran Anh Hung. The couple living the conundrum are Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a brilliant cook, and the well-known gourmand she works for, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). It is the late 19th century, and they live in an idyllic house in the French countryside, where Dodin entertains friends and visitors. The kitchen is the beating heart of the house.Nothing matters more to Eugénie and Dodin than crafting exceptional meals, from simple omelets to the kinds of feasts that linger in memory for a lifetime. Nothing except, maybe, each other. They aren’t married, despite Dodin’s pleas over the past 20 years. Eugénie smiles enigmatically and shakes her head; she doesn’t wish to change anything. But it’s inevitable, in the end, that the autumn comes.The film premiered at Cannes with the title “The Pot-au-Feu,” named after one of its central dishes, a rustic meal of boiled meat and vegetables. In French, however, the title is “La Passion de Dodin Bouffant,” which is also the title of the 1920s novel on which it is loosely based (published in English under the name “The Passionate Epicure”). That novel features one of the most indelible characters in culinary fiction, a gourmand whom the author Marcel Rouff loosely based on the French culinary writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, born in 1755. (Yes, the cheese is named for him.)Brillat-Savarin is perhaps best known for his book “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy,” which tells you a little bit about him, as well as about the protagonist of “The Taste of Things.” His book has recipes, but really it’s an often funny rhapsody of awe at the joy allowed humans in the simple act of eating. Brillat-Savarin famously quipped, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” an aphorism it’s easy to imagine Dodin trading with his friends around the dining table. In the eyes of men like these, food reveals character. For a host, a meal carefully constructed is evidence of his care for the guest as well as his self-image: Is he boasting? Pleading? Displaying his insecurities? Or inviting others to taste the divine? A guest’s willingness to dive with gusto into a meal prepared before them shows not just care for the host, but for the bounty the earth serves up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Taste of Things’ and a Lovingly Prepared Meal

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      How a movie announces itself to you is everything, and “The Taste of Things” begins in a kitchen.Well, a kitchen garden. It’s dawn, and someone is crouching near the rows, cutting heads of lettuce, pulling up a few carrots, unearthing a white knobby thing and bringing it all indoors. The light is coolly blue-tinged. The day is just getting started.I think it’s fair to group the garden with the kitchen. A garden doesn’t spring up overnight. Seeds are planted in the spring, sometimes before, and the gardener can’t control the results. If all of the elements cooperate — sun, shade, water, soil nutrients, shifts in climate and weather — then you get a head of lettuce, some carrots, some herbs, a perfectly pink radish. The same combination of skill and luck gets a cow to produce milk, a chicken to grow fat and tender, a cheese to ripen properly. Expertise, patience, attention and care, renewed every season.Those same ingredients govern the kitchen itself, and that’s where this opening scene continues, ushering us into the world we’re about to inhabit, tummies growling. “The Taste of Things,” written and directed by Tran Anh Hung (based on a 1924 French novel but set in 1889), is one of those instant gastronomical classics designed to be savored over and over, like “Babette’s Feast,” “Big Night” or “Tampopo.” As in all great food movies — and shows, too, like “The Bear” — the food is both the point and not the point at all. A great feast says something about the world and everything in it. In the case of “The Taste of Things,” a meal is about time, and longing, and seasons.All of which is evident in this first extended scene, which runs about a half-hour. The day has barely begun, and a fish is gutted, its innards dropped into a pan to fry. The kitchen is warm and convivial. Two people weave around one another as if in a pas de deux: a man and a woman whose ease instantly indicates a long, trusting relationship. Meanwhile, eggs cook. Vegetables are chopped. A younger woman helps, following their gentle orders. She’s brought a girl with her, maybe 11 years old.Stéphanie Branchu/IFC FIlmsLater we will find out that the man is Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), a famous gourmet, and that the woman, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), is both his cook and his dearest and most intimate companion. Their kitchen help is Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who lives nearby; the girl she’s brought, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), is her niece. But for now we know very little about any of them, and the movie intends to keep it that way for a while. The focus here is not their station in this household, or even where, exactly, they are — somewhere in France, presumably. The focus is on the food and the act of cooking. A meal that’s not just nourishing, but transcendent.They all sit down to eat omelets, fortification before the grand task. “I advise you to eat it with a spoon,” Dodin tells Pauline, who is new to this kitchen. “It makes all the difference.”From that sentence we learn a lot. First, for that suggestion to work, this must be a perfect omelet: soft, tender, buttery, not an overstuffed American lump but a soft roll of egg, with no filling at all. Using a spoon preserves the texture of the finished egg, instead of harshly severing its strands. But from this exhortation we also discover that Dodin is a man who cares for the small things that make “all the difference,” as he puts it. Why simply eat some eggs for breakfast when you can savor them?Onward they press — there’s a meal to prepare, elaborate and intricate. (Heaven help the audience member who skipped lunch, gnawing on stale popcorn.) Loins of veal, roasted vegetables, stews and sauces, crackling and boiling and frying and searing. Pastry so light and flaky you can very nearly taste it. Pans go in and out of the oven; mixtures are strained and pressed from one pot into another; fat melts and browns, onions grow soft and caramelized, lettuce is blanched and squeezed and cooked in butter. Consommé, vol-au-vent, veal loin with braised lettuce, turbot, a baked Alaska: Everything is being perfectly prepared and timed for its starring role in the dining room.This all will be served, eventually, to a group of men, Dodin’s friends and associates. They will trade aphorisms and discuss wines and eventually go to the kitchen to ask Eugenie why she never joins them in the dining room. (“I converse with you in the dining room through what we eat,” she explains, smiling.) Later we will find that Dodin’s greatest passion in life is not actually food, but the woman who cooks with him, and that their romance is the sort that unfolds over time and seasons very like the lettuce growing in the garden. We will even learn, alongside him, that the beauty of love is much like the beauty of a pristinely cooked meal: It is precious because it will, like all things, eventually be only a memory.But for now we are focused on the balancing act of the kitchen, the way ingredients come together like magic. In the hubbub, Dodin finds a lull in which to conduct a lesson. Pauline’s been watching the activity with wide, fascinated eyes. He hands her a spoonful of some liquid, a sauce, and asks her to name what’s in it.She closes her eyes and concentrates. She has no training, but her senses are keen. She starts to name elements, from bacon and red peppers to specific herbs and cognac. As she lists them, we see what’s in her mind’s eye: the elements being seared and sifted and combined, stirred together and cooked to the perfect texture.Dodin’s eyes, meanwhile, are filled with excitement at her rare talent. Across the room, Eugenie is listening, the same joy reflected in her face. What Pauline can do is what luck cannot: She can sense the elements, and also understand the balance between them, how they come together to make something quite perfect. What’s more, she feels great emotion in the task, her pleasure as palpable as theirs. Later, when she tells Eugenie that she almost wept when she tasted another dish, she cannot explain why; it just affected her in a way she can feel in her soul.I understand. It’s the same emotion I feel when I watch a movie like this one, where elements of joy and sorrow, humor and intensity, beauty and light and shadow combine in a perfectly balanced experience. It takes patience and skill, but also nerve and luck for a work of art to achieve elegance and piquancy in equal measure. You might try to reduce it to a recipe for success, but you can’t scientifically force a movie to work, any more than you can batter a meal into perfection like a blunt object. This attention, and patience, and care: It is what makes all the difference. 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      ‘The Taste of Things’ and the Transcendence of a French Meal

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      “The Taste of Things” is the latest movie to luxuriate in France’s gourmand tradition, a safe way of attracting audiences outside the country.In France, a robust appetite is a virtue if not a heroic trait.Eating gratifies all the senses: We take in the aroma of a handsome dish, delight at the sound of a sizzling steak or crave the crunch of a crusty baguette. So to fully appreciate the various sensory dimensions of a fine French meal is, essentially, to express a sophisticated artistic judgment.“The Taste of Things,” by the director Tran Anh Hung, is a 19th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. The feature opened in theaters Wednesday in France and will play on screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 10 before its Oscar-qualifying run in mid-December.The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.“The Taste of Things” is an 18th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. via Carole Bethuel/IFC FIlmsWhen I first watched “The Taste of Things” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surrounded by a delightfully vocal audience. The oohing and ahhing was ubiquitous and, apparently, a visceral response, similar to what is elicited by beholding Monet’s water lilies or being wrapped in the velvety textures of Whitney Houston’s voice. Savoring a tasty meal (or even just watching one come together on a big screen) brings a kind of joy that can’t be explained by logic or reason.Reviews of the film in France have been mixed. Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre found its blissful atmosphere and near-absence of dramatic tension perplexing and boring. Olivier Lamm of Libération wrote that there’s much more to the film than its food-porn attractions — it’s also about the assault of junk food and globalization on French standards.“Chocolat,” starring Juliette Binoche, also celebrated the French devotion to the culinary arts and made a lot of money at the U.S. box office.AlamyThe country’s rich gastronomic tradition — and its long history of federally regulating the quality and authenticity of its wines and produce — is a particular point of national pride, and French film industry leaders have embraced the gourmand label. This year, “The Taste of Things” was selected as the French submission for the Oscar’s best international film category over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”The decision was met with objections from French critics, who said Triet was punished for the political charge of her acceptance speech at Cannes. However, the selection of Hung’s film isn’t all that surprising given the selection committee’s evident partiality to films commenting on the country’s national identity — or, from a more cynical standpoint, films that offer Oscar voters a tourist-friendly idea of France.The French devotion to the culinary arts is a bit of an onscreen cliché, and Hollywood films like “Ratatouille” and “Chocolat” (the latter, also starring Binoche, made big money in the United States, but fared far less well in France) have relied on stereotypically French settings, like a rustic village and a Parisian bistro, to communicate lessons about food’s revolutionary and unifying powers.More rewarding — and complex — is the 1956 French classic “La Traversée de Paris,” starring the Frenchest of all Frenchmen, Jean Gabin, as an artist-turned-black market courier in Nazi-occupied Paris. This black dramedy stars Gabin and the comedian Bourvil, who play a bickering duo who must transport four suitcases of contraband pork across the city while evading the authorities and a horde of hungry hounds.Political instability not only cuts off access to revered foodstuffs, it drains the very spirit of those committed to the art of eating. In the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French chef, is forced to flee from her Parisian neighborhood when the Paris Commune, an insurrectionist government, seizes power in 1871.Seeking refuge in the Danish countryside, Babette moves into a spartan Protestant household manned by two Protestant sisters accustomed to eating the same brown fish stew, which has a mudlike consistency. Fourteen years into her employment with the sisters, Babette miraculously wins the French lottery and, rather than fund her return to France, spends all her winnings on a multicourse dinner for the townspeople.Stéphane Audran as Babette in “Babette’s Feast.”Entertainment Pictures, via AlamyThe feast — a turtle soup, stuffed quail, rum sponge cake and more — breaks the guests’ brains, while Babette, in the final scene, emerges as an emissary of the sublime. Her culinary gifts, her cooking’s ability to disrupt the very foundations of what her Danish friends perceived to be reality, make her angelic.At the same time, isn’t fine dining — like certain kinds of music, literature and art — rather bourgeois? Nothing screams upper middle class like the prim and proper dinner scene. This is delightful in films by, say, Éric Rohmer, who was fond of depicting the natural choreography of mealtime, the mess of wine glasses and plates of fruit and cheese floating between guests in the middle of a meandering conversation.In other films, dinnertime can seem ridiculous. Consider Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which three couples try over and over to enjoy a white tablecloth feast, but do not actually eat. Over the course of the film, their polite mannerisms and refined gestures become increasingly absurd.Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe” plays like a glutton’s version of “Salo,” linking the pleasure of eating to consumerist society and the gross hedonism of the leisure class. In the film, four friends literally feed themselves to death, feasting on an endless parade of shrimp, turkey, pot roast and sausage while reading excerpts from canonical works of literature and, notably, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomical bible, “The Physiology of Taste.”Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi and Andréa Ferréol in “La Grande Bouffe,” which links the pleasure of eating to consumerist society.Alamy“La Grande Bouffe” is a nauseating showcase and a welcome retort to the glorification of tunnel-vision foodies like Brillat-Savarin. Ferreri was also a gourmand, and he reportedly had difficulties keeping himself from binge eating. His film points a finger at himself as well as society at large.“The Taste of Things” is an adaptation of the 1961 novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, which was itself inspired by none other than Brillat-Savarin. “The Physiology of Taste” is supposed to be about the science of eating, but it often veers off into discussions about sex, love and sensuality.Brillat-Savarin’s passion for food is not unlike the passion he might develop for another person, a dynamic that Hung’s film depicts with a hypnotic warmth. When I see Binoche’s Eugénie, laboring away on a buttery risotto or a vegetable omelet, I’m overcome by the sense memory of something deliciously intimate, like being held tight or a loved one’s scent. In that moment, nothing else seems to matter. More

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      ‘Between Two Worlds’ Review: Juliette Binoche Goes Undercover

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      In this social-justice drama, the French actress plays an investigative journalist who poses as a cleaner to expose worker exploitation.In “Between Two Worlds,” Juliette Binoche plays Marianne Winckler, a woman struggling to make ends meet in the Normandy region of France. When she arrives at an unemployment center at the start of the film, she’s sheepish and bewildered, selling herself as a “team player” to secure a minimum wage gig.In a voice-over, the details of her quest for steady work are articulated in a matter-of-fact tone. Subtly, the director Emmanuel Carrère reveals this social-justice drama’s real stakes: Marianne, an investigative journalist, has gone undercover. Her mission? To reveal the ways in which low-income workers are exploited — specifically women working graveyard shifts while under contract to private sanitation companies.The film is a loose adaptation of “The Night Cleaner” (2010), the nonfiction best seller by Florence Aubenas, a French journalist who went underground and lived a double life as a cleaner for an English Channel ferry.“Between Two Worlds,” written by Carrère and Hélène Devynck, departs from its source material with a fictional arc: Marianne, a savior figure driven to expose the system’s injustices, is also guilt-ridden about keeping her true identity a secret from her co-workers like Christèle (Hélène Lambert), an edgy single mother. This rift is echoed in the casting, with the usually glamorous Binoche acting alongside nonprofessional actors.Carrère — known primarily in Europe as a writer of nonfiction books with a literary twist — applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries. At her worst job, for instance, she’s forced to prepare over 100 beds in less than two hours. Less compelling is the sentimental crisis that plays out because of Marianne’s deception. It does little else beyond remind us that advocacy work is too often in a tango with a bad case of main-character syndrome.Between Two WorldsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Winter Boy’ Review: Lost and Found

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      In this French drama about a teenager grappling with grief, a winning cast rises above a heavy-handed script.In “Winter Boy,” a new drama by the French director Christophe Honoré, a father’s sudden death leaves his teenage son adrift in time. Adolescence pulls Lucas (Paul Kircher), a 17-year-old high schooler in a provincial French village, toward the future; grief holds him in the grip of the past. Lucas fumbles through a coming-of-age both rushed and stunted: He tries, like a grown-up, to stoically support his mother (Juliette Binoche) through her bereavement, but when he follows his older brother (Vincent Lacoste) to Paris for a week, he stumbles into juvenile misadventures.Lucas is gay, and one of the strengths of Honoré’s film is how unassumingly the character’s queerness is depicted. Lucas is open about his orientation from the start and supported by his family; his desires and sexual escapades — one of which involves his brother’s roommate, Lilio (Erwan Kepoa Falé), who moonlights as a prostitute — are tortured by confusion and loss but not by shame. It’s a gentle touch in a movie that otherwise can be quite heavy-handed: a cloying piano score underlines every emotion with a saccharine flourish, and, throughout the film, Lucas appears as a talking head, narrating his feelings to the camera.Much like its young protagonist, the movie feels clumsy when trying too hard to provoke: one such sequence alternates rather arbitrarily between Lucas’s conversation with a priest and an anonymous hookup he has in Paris. But “Winter Boy” shines when it allows its actors to quietly play out family dynamics, with Lacoste, Binoche and especially Kircher wearing the many shades of grief with effortless, endearing naturalism.Winter BoyNot Rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Paradise Highway’ Review: A Test of Loyalty

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      A truck driver’s brother asks her to deliver a girl to sex traffickers in order to save his life in prison.Growing up in a violent home, Sally (Juliette Binoche) only had one person to rely on: her brother, Dennis (Frank Grillo).Years later, Dennis is in prison, and now depends on Sally, who is a truck driver. When Dennis tells Sally that she must carry illicit cargo or he’ll be harmed, she is determined to come through, even after she finds out that the “package” she’s meant to deliver is a girl named Leila (Hala Finley).“Paradise Highway,” written and directed by Anna Gutto (“A Light Above”), follows Sally and Leila as they run from both the benevolent F.B.I. agents, played by Morgan Freeman and Cameron Monaghan, and the sex traffickers looking to recover Leila. They are kept company only by a shotgun and the radio that connects Sally to a network of other women truck drivers. Their camaraderie and Finley’s performance as the troubled Leila are highlights in a film that otherwise does not quite hit its stride.Perhaps unsurprisingly, Binoche is not believable as a working-class American truck driver, and her lingering French accent seems out of place in that world. In addition, the vague danger to her brother is difficult to accept as enough motivation for her to participate in such a heinous crime.Though it is refreshing to see members of law enforcement focused on recovering and supporting a victim rather than pursuing her abusers, it does not allow for much narrative tension. If only the film had taken a broader view, filling in more details about the lives and motivations of the truck drivers as well as the sex traffickers.Paradise HighwayRated R for language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ Review: Who Do You Love?

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      In the latest film from Claire Denis, Juliette Binoche plays a Parisian radio journalist in a romantic quandary.When we first meet Sara and Jean, they are enjoying a vacation. To be precise, they‘re making out in the waters of a sun-dappled lagoon, the very picture of midlife romantic fulfillment. The fact that Sara and Jean are played by Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon, two of most charismatic actors of a certain age in modern cinema, makes their apparent bliss look all the more enviable.But the pictures only tell part of the story. The couple’s smiles and caresses are accompanied by brooding, cello-heavy music — the kind that lets even the most inattentive or tone-deaf viewer know that something bad is going to happen. Even when the sound brightens and Jean and Sara return to their tidy Paris apartment, you can’t quite shake the feeling of dread.“Both Sides of the Blade” is a Claire Denis movie, which is to say that it can be expected to confound expectations, including those it seems to set up for itself. Sex, politics, vampires, science fiction, Herman Melville — nothing is alien to this restless and resourceful filmmaker.Here, the plot occasionally gravitates toward romantic comedy, as Sara finds herself torn between Jean and François (Grégoire Colin), a former lover who is also an old friend and potential business partner of Jean’s. But the mood hovers in the neighborhood of melodrama, thriller, even horror. Sara’s passion for François seems almost like a form of possession, and allusions to Jean’s status as an ex-convict contribute to a free-floating sense of danger.The dissonance between the film’s structure and its tone is potentially interesting, and the off-balance intensity of the performances means that “Both Sides of the Blade” is never dull. As they did in “Let the Sunshine In,” Binoche and Denis trace the disruptive effects of desire on a woman who is neither heroine nor victim. The impulses that lead Sara to destabilize her own domestic life are mysterious even to her, and the audience may wonder why she appears to prefer François, who is pouty and petulant (even in bed), to the stoical, sad-eyed Jean.Bad choices often make good stories, but there is something thin and tentative about this one, which Denis wrote with Christine Angot. Sara is the host of a public-affairs radio broadcast, a job that allows the film to glance occasionally at the wider world. Guests talk about the crisis in Lebanon and the pervasiveness of racism in Western society, and their presence in the movie is a puzzle. Maybe we are supposed to see that Sara cares about such matters, or that Denis does, or to be reminded that we should. Or maybe Denis is pointing out the gulf between public concerns and private experience.The larger problem is that the main characters and their situation seem weightless, their nonromantic lives sketched in hastily and without much conviction. Jean sometimes travels to the suburbs to visit his mother, Nelly (Bulle Ogier), who is caring for his teenage son, Marcus (Issa Perica). The young man, whose mother is out of the picture, is biracial, and becomes a too-convenient symbol for social problems the film otherwise ignores. He steals Nelly’s credit card and does badly in school, and because we know almost nothing else about him as a character, he seems like a stereotype.Marcus’s behavior provokes a rant from his father against “the prevailing discourse” that emphasizes identity over individuality. Like the segments from Sara’s radio program, this diatribe against le wokisme waves in the direction of contemporary reality without engaging it.Meanwhile, the Sara-Jean-François love triangle, as it grows louder and more tearful, loses momentum as a source of drama. Its resolution is — and I mean this as a literal description — a bad joke. How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.Both Sides of the BladeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

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      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More