A few days ago I watched the movie "Tour", which received at Cannes in 2010, the award for best director and the critics' award for best picture. The director, Mathieu Amalric, also wrote the screenplay and has one of the main roles in the film. The movie is amazing and delicious from start to finish, and is able to portray the daily life of a company without falling into burlesque shows appealing.

A French TV producer back to their country as a manager of a group of American burlesque, for a series of presentations in the port cities of France. The tour will culminate in Paris, but a contretemps with local businessmen hinders the plans of the troupe.

Amalric chose to tell the story in a straightforward manner, with a script without leftovers or inconsistencies, which makes so generous and honest, the focus on the performers. The universe of voluptuous bodies, lush makeup, false eyelashes, wigs, feathers and champagne is shown in a haphazard manner. The director did not mitifica, moralize or purchase their cause. Take the performers for what they are artists of the theater hump, and portray their daily rehearsals, concerts, nights out, pause between shows and travel.

In parallel, the group's manager undertakes an inglorious attempt to score a theater for the presentation of Paris. So there is a glimpse of the reasons that have led to the United States, his relationship with former co-workers, family and children.

The camera is intimate, the presentations are always assisted the aisle, with the proximity of one member of the group. In moments of intimacy of the characters, the viewer is also taken into the rooms, trains and hotel lobbies, as if side by side with the protagonist. All the actresses are really burlesque artists and embody characters with their own names, so maybe they are all so tangible and real, with a story that one can assume beyond what the film shows.

A highlight of the film, incidentally, is the actress Miranda Colclasure, or Mimi Le Meaux (pictured above), in his stage name, an intense and moving performance as a star of the troupe.

Despite having an axis fictional narrative, "Tour" also has a documentary character, in that all presentations were actually staged by the artists to audiences of the cities shown in the film: Le Havre, La Rochelle, Nantes, Toulon and Sète.

The woman above is Delphine Seyrig (1932-1990), a French actress symbol of femininity and elegance, the scene of "Last Year at Marienbad" ("L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad", 1961), one of the most confusing movies in the history of cinema, who turns 50 in 2011.

"Marienbad" is not a consensus. Since its launch, its script and its enigmatic images share the opinion of moviegoers. There are those who adore and consider one of the greatest works of European cinema of the post-War, and today, there are those who hate his experimentalism and find pretentious, boring and meaningless.

In an atmosphere of dream and with a fragmented narrative, the film takes place in a luxury resort, where a man meets a woman who is supposed to have known and by who fell in love in the previous year, possibly in the same place. She denies being the same person, but his actions and words are ambiguous. Another man comes. It would be her husband? Scenes are repeated with slight changes. More memories, images, phrases repeated, recurring situations. A crime may have happened ...

The narrative grinds fragments of memory, as if to seek the version of "truth" of the past, and the camera floats between characters sometimes enter a state of "suspension". The way the plot goes back and forth, in circles and twisting lines, echoes the architectural ornaments from the ceiling and walls of the palace in which the action takes place, and on which the camera often lingers. All this in a black and white in the whites have a quality pearl, a diffuse light that enhances the texture of a dream.

The formal rigor of the movie finds support in the costumes, Coco Chanel, one of his last and most remarkable work for the cinema. His creations are a modern elegance to a time and timeless, which serves to show how idealized the memory crystallizes.

In the '30s, Chanel had worked in Hollywood as a fashion consultant of Samuel Goldwyn studios, and made the costumes for such films as "modern amenities" ("The Greeks Had a Word for Them"), "A Man of Another World" ("Palmy Days") and the comedy "Tonight or Never" ("Tonight or Never") with superstar Gloria Swanson, who, they say, hated the clothes.

Perfectionist standards for other movies, sometimes the designer wanted to produce versions of the same dress, cut to different situations in which the actress was standing, sitting or moving. So, she said, the way the clothes would always be perfect. But the studio and actresses did not recognize the genius of Chanel and considered her penchant for excessive detail.

How well summarizes the historian Elizabeth Leese in his book "Costume Design in the Movies" (Dover Edition, 1991): one for her famous quotes and sayings (she has many) "Chanel Hollywood simply not needed." So, after a few run-ins with stars and the studio, she ended her film career in the U.S. Experiences with movie costumes only be repeated years later in Europe, in films like "The Lovers" ("Les Amants"), Louis Malle, "Sentimental Education" ("L'éducation Sentimental"), Alexandre Astruc, and "Last Year at Marienbad."

In 2010, we launched "The Making of Last Year At Marienbad," a documentary directed by Volker Schlondorff, assistant director inResnais' Last Year ... "with new footage, which was believed lost, and that record production the film.

Just saw “The Arbor"(2010, 90 min). It portraits a few episodes in the life of the English writer Andrea Dunbar (1961-1990), killed by an aneurysm, and its relationship with his eldest daughter, Lorraine, addicted to heroin. The film is constructed from recorded interviews with real characters and then voiced by actors. The mediation of actors creates a disturbing gap, given the drama of the events described. For this his first film, director Clio Barnard was chosen the best young filmmaker's Tribeca Film Festival in 2010.

The film alternates stretches of highly biographical parts of Dunbar with episodes of real life, and promotes family gatherings intriguing hardly have happened without the help of the issue. In all sections, the dubbing of the actors is really impressive, as are shocking episodes of the lives of the characters and the writer of "real life" of their community in the suburbs of a town in England, lives captured by a wicked environment and by social immobility.

The long title was borrowed from the first play written by Dunbar, age 15. The work, staged at the Royal Court Theater in London, with the help of teachers, won him a prize for young talent and some fame. His next play, "Rita, Sue and Bob Too," won a film adaptation of Alan Clarke. The text also inspired by the author and biographical data in the neighborhood where she lived, tells the story of two girls who have an affair with a married man himself. Dunbar said in an interview at the time, the BBC, which, because of the movie, even received threats from residents of their region.

In his film debut, Barnard is a hopeless sort of requiem for Andrea Dunbar who, having failed to overcome the dramas he wrote about, has died at 29 years, without friends, after collapsing in the bathroom of a bar that used to attend daily. "She died at home," he concludes wryly desolate his youngest daughter.

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