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    In ‘The Lesson,’ With Richard E. Grant, It’s a Bad Writer Who Steals

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    Richard E. Grant and Daryl McCormack star as writers with similar source material in a feature tracing the limits of literary authorship.In “The Lesson,” an amusingly taut British thriller playing now in American movie theaters, two novels result from the same events at an opulent country estate.This chamber piece — a debut feature from both the director Alice Troughton, a regular of episodic television, and the comedian turned screenwriter Alex MacKeith — asks, both tacitly and explicitly: Can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?One of the film’s writers, J.M. Sinclair (a ferocious Richard E. Grant) is a consummate literary star, who hasn’t published a novel since his firstborn son’s suicide. The unscrupulous Sinclair, however, is about to write the final chapter in a new novel, “Rose Tree,” while staying true to his favorite aphorism, “Great writers steal.”J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) is a celebrated, and ruthless writer, willing to betray anyone in his life for his own success.Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetThe other scribe, Liam Somers (the Irish actor Daryl McCormack), is a young upstart with writing ambitions of his own. Hired as a live-in tutor to Sinclair’s youngest child, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), to help him gain admission to Oxford University, Somers soon begins taking copious notes on the family, and becomes entangled with their secrets.The larger narrative we witness — of a monstrous father willing to betray anyone in his life for a self-aggrandizing pursuit, and a stranger entering this isolated family unit to solve the central mystery around the elder son’s death — will eventually become Liam’s first book.“I’d never been offered a part quite like that before,” Grant said recently by phone. “Playing anybody who has that amount of entitlement and monstrous ego, you long for them to fall apart.”Given Sinclair’s twisted sense of ownership over his children, Troughton, the director, described the character as a toxic parent certain that “there’s nothing that your children can do that doesn’t belong to you, or come from you.” Francisco Goya’s graphic painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” served as the director’s key reference for understanding Sinclair’s behavior, she said in a video interview.Yet the most influential scribe may be one who never puts pen to paper, nor fingers to keyboard, but orchestrates the events that help both the movie’s literary works come to fruition: Hélène Sinclair, a curator and wife to the overbearing patriarch, played by the French actress Julie Delpy. Hélène’s objective in allowing Liam inside the home is to unveil her husband’s secrets.“She essentially functions as the detective with Liam operating as a vector for her,” MacKeith said. “When you underlay that with her motive of discovery, but also vengeance, her agency in the film and her orchestration does make her the author.”For Delpy, who described her character as a “mother fatale,” answering the question of who deserves credit when a writer creates a story from actual events is less clear-cut.Hélène Sinclair (Julie Delpy) uses Liam unveil her husband’s secrets.Gordon Timpen/Bleecker Street“When you tell stories about people around you, are you using them, or are they partly authors, since you’re telling their story?” she asked in a recent phone interview. “Is the story solely the writer’s writing, even if based on someone else? What’s the limit between inspiration and coauthorship?”Delpy, a writer-director herself, said she believed that the need for attribution depends on what’s being borrowed. She admitted to having stolen single lines, or small situations from strangers’ conversations she overhead in restaurants, which she then has transformed into stories.The kind of intellectual theft Sinclair is happy to engage in, on the other hand, is far more insidious. Even his repeated aphorism is purloined from T.S. Eliot.Inspiration for Sinclair’s ruthless appropriation of others’ writing, MacKeith said, came from the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which a writer plagiarizes Miguel de Cervantes’ masterwork word for word, and then claims it as his own.The taut thriller asks, both tacitly and explicitly, can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetOver the course of the film, it becomes hard to decipher precisely who is responsible for each story within the story. Liam’s novel is only possible as a side effect of Hélène’s machinations, and, early on, Sinclair decides to enlist Liam in his writing process for “Rose Tree.”As for whose work “The Lesson” itself is, MacKeith said that after their close five-year collaboration to bring the film to screen, he and Troughton were joint authors. The seasoned director brought touches of horror, as well as the idea of redemption, to the piece, MacKeith said, which were in turn elevated by the ensemble cast and crew in every tense scene.“As an actor, you have to create something beyond the script itself,” McCormack said. “I always hope that when I’m working alongside other people, that I can have a sense of being a co-author to the story in what I can do.”For MacKeith, this idea of collective ownership of the movie extended to the viewers, who must draw their own conclusions from “The Lesson,” especially after an unsettling plot twist.“The product itself is picture-locked,” he said, “but our discussion about it means that we as the audience can also have authorship of it in our interpretation.” More

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      ‘The Lesson’ Review: Carefully Taut

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      A tense standoff between two writers kindles familial fireworks in this wittily self-aware melodrama.No one is quite what they seem in “The Lesson,” Alice Troughton’s winking literary mystery whose languid summer setting — a swanky estate in the English countryside — hides coldly destructive secrets.The seemingly innocent arrival of Liam (Daryl McCormack), a hunky recent graduate hired as a live-in tutor to the son of the celebrated author J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant), almost immediately causes ripples in the family’s strained dynamic.Sinclair, a pompous control freak, is struggling to finish a novel so long delayed that his fans fear he has retired. His son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), is smart and snotty, jaggedly rebuffing Liam’s patient attempts to coach him to take the entrance exams for Oxford University. (Honestly, he should fit right in.) Then there’s Sinclair’s wife, Hélène (Julie Delpy), an art curator so coolly, seductively enigmatic that at least one of Liam’s assignments is immediately predictable.Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer. Grant is magnificent as a cruel, past-his-prime genius burdened by terrible guilt over an earlier family tragedy, and Delpy — well, can any actor express so much with a single, withering look? Or persuade us that experiencing cunnilingus is no more exciting than having a pedicure?Yet in an atmosphere as chilly as the lake that lurks on the property, it is Liam — played by McCormack with open-faced guile — who intrigues. Drinking heavily and scribbling in a notebook when everyone’s asleep, spying on the family while concealing his long obsession with Sinclair, Liam gains a trust he doesn’t deserve. In this den of deceit and desperation, it’s never quite clear who is manipulating whom.The LessonRated R for Delpy en déshabillé and Grant on his knees. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Julie Delpy’s New Netflix Comedy Gives Voice to Women ‘On the Verge’

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      The talky, slice-of-life series follows four women whom the usual rom-com formula says should have figured it all out by now. Turns out, that’s not real life.Julie Delpy does not mince words when it comes to women and age.“Fifty is not the new 30,” she said during a recent video call from her hotel room in Paris. She was there to promote her television creation, the 12-part series “On the Verge,” which she wrote, oversaw and stars in.“There’s almost a cruel thing about women that if we can’t procreate anymore, what are we?” said Delpy, who also directed several episodes. “And then you become a grandmother and you exist again in your seventies. You have this dead zone.”Produced by Canal Plus and Netflix, “On the Verge,” is a sometimes absurd and yet all-too-real comedy that follows four mostly well-off friends in Los Angeles as they grapple with middle age — only to realize that after all these years, they still have no clue what they’re doing. The idea seems to have found a ready audience: After its debut last week, the series quickly cracked the Netflix Top 10 in the United States, reaching No. 7 by the weekend.So much for dead zones. And not bad for a talky, slice-of-life series that also toggles between English and French.Delpy, 51, has made a career out of creating and portraying worldly female characters in films where most of the action takes place on a walk, on a train or around the dinner table. It hasn’t always been easy getting those characters from page to screen, she said, but it has been especially tough since she started writing about women her age.Per the usual romantic comedy formula, women in their 20s and 30s are often shown screwing up and struggling to figure things out, and it’s supposed to be cute. But by a woman’s 40s or 50s — the part that comes after the happy ending — she is meant to have herself all put together, right?In “On the Verge,” that notion is, literally, a joke.“I loved how all our characters were just beginning to find their confidence when they are about to turn 50,” said Elisabeth Shue, who executive produced and stars in the show. She described filming one particular dinner party scene from Episode 2 that, for Shue, “was a perfect reflection of Julie’s artistic sensibility.”“It was just a lovely mixture of insanity and humor born out of insecurity and chaos,” she added.From left, Alexia Landeau, Elisabeth Shue, Sarah Jones and Delpy in a scene from “On the Verge.” NetflixIn the series, Delpy plays Justine, a successful chef with a bustling restaurant. She is writing a cookbook while working long hours at the restaurant, raising a young son and enduring a barrage of passive aggressive insults from her sulking, out of work husband. Shue plays her friend Anne, a clothing designer with a trust fund, a vaping habit and a husband who is struggling to accept their gender-fluid son.The Tony winner Sarah Jones plays Yasmin, a mother and wife who gave up her career and is desperate now to reclaim something for herself. Alexia Landeau (who co-wrote several episodes and executive produced) plays Ell, a jobless single mother of three children by three different dads.Despite the characters’ struggles, “On the Verge” is very much a comedy, and Delpy isn’t afraid to crack jokes about serious topics like the stresses endured by working mothers, toxic masculinity or ageism. In one early scene, Yasmin is interviewed by a woman half her age and is told that she is, basically, too old. When Yasmin starts to panic and clutches her chest, the young interviewer asks if she is having a heart attack.The scene details an experience that will resonate with many women; Delpy gives the audience permission to laugh, even as they’re cringing.“I’m 46, not 96!” Yasmin shoots back.It’s a comic, cerebral sensibility has been honed throughout Delpy’s career. Her parents, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, were both actors (they played her onscreen parents in Delpy’s 2007 feature, “Two Days in Paris”), and she grew up in France surrounded by artists, theater actors and writers. Her first big onscreen role came when Jean Luc Godard cast her in his 1985 film “Detective,” when she was 14. She went on to work with Agnieszka Holland on the Golden Globe-winning film “Europa Europa” and with Krzysztof Kieslowski on his “Three Colors” trilogy.She spent much of her childhood backstage at her parents’ experimental theater shows or dancing, making music and writing on her own; later, she studied filmmaking at N.Y.U. It’s that mix of experimentation and structure (Delpy is quick to point out that the show is meticulously scripted) that she brings to “On the Verge.”“It’s sophistication obliterated by absurdity,” said Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Justine’s endearing yet infuriating boss, speaking about Delpy’s sensibility. “Julie has made a mark with her own style. She’s a craftsman. She’s got personality. Like they had in the 1970s.”When Delpy played Céline opposite Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” (1995), her character resonated with a generation of 20-something women in the 1990s — women who were thrilled to see a romantic female lead who could be both philosophical and funny. “Before Sunrise,” shot on a modest budget, proved to audiences and critics alike that a simple tale about two people meeting on a train and talking all night long could go on to become one of the most enduring romantic films of the ’90s.Delpy went on to co-write the sequels, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” with Linklater and Hawke, earning Oscar nominations for best adapted screenplay for both films.She has directed seven films, including the drama “My Zoe,” released earlier this year. With “Verge,” she got to tackle subjects close to her heart, show off her comedy chops and explore the lives of women who, even in their 40s and 50s, deserve more than a few throwaway lines.“It’s fun to be able to talk about real things,” Delpy said. “Although it was a bit of a struggle to get there.”Delpy started thinking in 2013 about the four main characters in “On the Verge,” and a script soon followed. A few people were interested in the project over the years as she shopped it around, but financiers and studios were reluctant to back “a show about women in that age range,” she said.“Fifty is not the new 30,” Delpy said, adding: “The show is talking about not having to lie about your age.”Elliott Verdier for The New York Times“I think it eventually happened, in part, because people are ready,” Delpy said. “It was the right timing, finally.”Olivier Gauriat, an executive producer of the series, signed on in 2019 because he was a fan of Delpy’s work onscreen and off. But he was also drawn to what she was trying to do in “Verge” with regard to female representation and age.“There are not many shows out there revolving around women at this age,” said Gauriat. “Canal Plus and Netflix were very supportive, and I think that’s what was interesting to them. They gave her carte blanche.”Preproduction on “Verge” began prepandemic, before being shutdown with the rest of Hollywood. Delpy went back to the scripts. She adjusted certain story lines to reflect what was actually happening. By the time shooting finally began, she had revised the timeline to take place in January and February of 2020, eight weeks during which a crisis was building but few understood what truly lay ahead. Viewed over a year and a half later, “Verge” feels like a time capsule of those early days just before everyone started stockpiling toilet paper and hunting for N95 masks.Delpy said she had decided to incorporate real world events because the characters were, as it says in the title, on the verge of something new and unknown, and so was the world around them.“Everything is changing for these characters, but everything is changing for the world as well,” she said.Things may be changing, but Delpy harbors no illusions that women over 40 are suddenly the new “it girls.” There’s a moment in “Verge” when Jerry tells Justine, “You’re in a cultural blind spot” — no one cares about women her age.It’s funny because it’s so absurdly insulting. It’s also funny because it rings true.“The show is talking about not having to lie about your age,” she added. “Or pretend you’re something else.” More

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      Julie Delpy, Science-Fiction Filmmaker? It’s True

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJulie Delpy, Science-Fiction Filmmaker? It’s TrueBest known for romantic comedies, the creator of the cloning drama “My Zoe” refuses to be pigeonholed: “I love to mess up and not go in the direction that is expected.”Julie Delpy in Los Angeles. She wrote, directed and stars in the new film. Credit…Jake Michaels for The New York TimesFeb. 26, 2021, 11:49 a.m. ET“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” said a flustered Julie Delpy, who was a few minutes late for a video interview. “My son is doing online school, and there is always something complicated to sort out.” She paused and took a breath. “But it’s nice too, having this time together.”Motherhood, its deep pulls of love and its concomitant potential for terror, is the central subject of Delpy’s new film, “My Zoe.” It’s a tough depiction of an antagonistic divorcing couple who are struck by tragedy, but then (spoiler alert!) moves into futuristic terrain as Delpy’s character, Isabelle, a geneticist, searches for a radical solution: cloning the child she has lost with the help of a controversial fertility doctor, played by Daniel Brühl.Brühl, who has worked with Delpy previously and was also one of the film’s producers, said in a telephone interview that the questions the film raised about ethics and morality, “about what might be possible, or what is perhaps already possible,” were deeply interesting to him. His character was “driven by his scientific ambitions to hold these questionable moral positions, but also driven by a growing empathy for the despair of this one mother,” Brühl said.“My Zoe,” Glenn Kenny wrote in The New York Times, “is an unusually compelling domestic drama with sharp ears, a sharp eye, and up to a point, sharp teeth.”It’s probably not the kind of film that mainstream audiences associate with Delpy, 51, who may be best known for the Richard Linklater romantic-comedy trio “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.” In those movies, spaced nine years apart, she played Celine, a strong, flawed heroine at the center of a compelling and equally flawed romance with Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke. (She also co-wrote the films, earning two Oscar adapted-screenplay nominations alongside Linklater and Hawke.)The French-born Delpy has been acting since the age of 14, when Jean-Luc Godard cast her in “Detective,” and she has worked in European art house cinema as well as mainstream Hollywood movies. But Delpy, whose parents were actors, has always wanted to write and direct, and she has done so since the mid-1990s: “My Zoe” is her seventh film and she has a number of writing and directing projects in the works, including a television series, “On the Verge,” in production for Canal Plus and Netflix.In an hourlong interview from her Los Angeles home last week, she talked about the genesis of “My Zoe,” the ethical questions around cloning, and whether conditions for female movie directors have improved. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Delpy with Sophia Ally as Zoe in a scene from the film.Credit…Blue Fox EntertainmentWhat made you take on a subject and a genre so different from your previous films?When I worked with Godard, he published a book of letters he had written to actors and never sent. To me, he wrote, be careful in your life because people will put you in a box. He knew I wanted to direct, not just be a pretty actress. For me it’s essential not to stay in one place, it’s just not interesting. I love to mess up and not go in the direction that is expected.The story of “My Zoe” comes from a few different places. I was witness to a terrible accident with a child who died at my school and to the grief of the parents. And then being a parent yourself, you always think about this and fear it. But I think I had the idea even before that. I remember talking to [Krzysztof] Kieslowski when we were making “Three Colors: White” and discussing the idea of fate, and whether you could change things.I have seen so many movies in which people deal with death, and the main idea is acceptance. When you think about it, loss is an ancestral burden, particularly for women, who for centuries routinely lost babies at birth or young children. Isabelle refuses that condition of loss; she rebels and tries to recreate a child who is only hers. That’s the No. 1 fear of men, and I think that’s partly why this idea upsets many people.You divide the film into three parts, and the first shows the grim, petty realities of divorce; why was it important to you to set up the story in that way?I was writing the film in the middle of a separation, and sorting out custody of our kid, and it was important to me to have the first act be all about that horrible stuff, because I wanted to show how people forget the big thing: the well-being of the child. Sometimes in films, you get the bigger picture of separation; they don’t do the minutiae of breaking up with a child [involved]. I wanted to build a story from something rooted in reality, so that when you move into the next act, it doesn’t feel like science fiction.The second part, after Zoe’s accident, is luckily less familiar to most of us but still grounded in reality, and then we move into the third part, to events that are a possibility in the near future if not now. I didn’t want to be judgmental about Isabelle’s actions, just show her point of view. I am not saying that cloning is a good thing, but I’m saying, let’s not blind ourselves: When I.V.F. was first done, people called it evil and now they don’t think twice. For me, it’s an allegory of what people are capable of doing.Daniel Brühl said that you can be “very nerdy, very precise, a real perfectionist” as a director. How did you manage that role alongside this emotionally draining part in “My Zoe”?Often I would really rather have another actress play my role, but I always do these low-budget films and it helps to have a bit of a name. It irritates people that I do everything, they think it’s megalomania. But it really isn’t, just necessity!Yes, I am a perfectionist, and this film was really hard. The actors and I talked a lot before takes, but it’s very hard to judge the quality of a scene if you are also acting in it. The main tool is the playback; you need time to look at your own performance and make sure you are giving very different colors to scenes. In this case, I was very conscious of not turning it into a melodrama. We had a low budget and limited time — not a good combination. But I am not scared of difficulty, struggling, even chaos. Perhaps that’s the one thing I have in common with Isabelle.You’ve been outspoken about the difficulties facing female filmmakers — do you think things have improved in the last few years?I am happy to say things have improved. Now I feel I’m at the same level as male directors, and probably have almost the same opportunities. I see this particularly clearly in France; America isn’t quite there yet for all the talk about feminism and racism and equality. But there has been change. When I made “Two Days in Paris,” at 36, I had to battle for a half a million dollar budget; talking to younger female filmmakers now, that’s not the case.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘My Zoe’ Review: Julie Delpy’s Provocative Family Drama

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘My Zoe’ Review: Julie Delpy’s Provocative Family DramaThe characters can be confoundingly self-involved, but Delpy finds unusual threads to pull you closer to them and their crises.From left, Richard Armitage, Sophia Ally and Julie Delpy in “My Zoe.”Credit…Blue Fox EntertainmentFeb. 24, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMy ZoeDirected by Julie DelpyDramaR1h 40mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The French filmmaker Julie Delpy is still best known as an actor, but she’s been building a varied and impressive filmography as a feature writer and a director since the early part of the century. Her new picture, “My Zoe,” in which she also stars, is an unusually compelling domestic drama with sharp ears, a sharp eye, and up to a point, sharp teeth.Delpy plays Isabelle, a geneticist living in Berlin with her young and adorable daughter Zoe. Her ex-husband, James (Richard Armitage), seems a perpetual and arbitrary thorn in her side, constantly needling her about visitation days and the competence of babysitters. The bickering doesn’t stop when disaster strikes. While their daughter has surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain caused by an aneurysm, Isabelle and James argue about their married sex life.[embedded content]Sounds like something to be appalled by. But Delpy writes these characters with such depth, and stages their interactions with such sensitivity, that you understand them without necessarily approving of them.The movie takes a likely unexpected turn from the conventional bad marriage story. Isabelle travels to Russia, appealing to a controversial medical researcher, Thomas Fischer (the frequent Delpy collaborator Daniel Bruhl), for a radical solution to a family tragedy.For nonspoiler purposes, let’s call that solution “the shiny object” — a project of dubious ethics, and little probability of succeeding, that nevertheless proves irresistible to all who contemplate it. As it happens, it proves irresistible to filmmaker Delpy as well. It’s in her embrace of it that the movie, so tart and assured up to a certain point, goes wrong. But Delpy is a sufficiently assertive cinematic voice that she’s well worth arguing — and maybe ultimately disagreeing — with.My ZoeRated R for language and themes. Running time: Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More