Frantz

seen on 8 May 2017

François Ozon directs Pierre Niney as Adrien and Paula Berry as Anna in a film loosely based by him on Ernst Lubitsch's 1931 film Broken Lullaby. 

The film begins in the Saxon town of Quedlinburg in 1919, where Anna is living with the parents of her fiancé Frantz who was killed in France during the War. Adrien, a tormented and fragile Frenchman, arrives and puts flowers on Frantz's grave, and makes himself known to the family. Where Lubitsch, adapting a play by Maurice Rostand, told the story from the Frenchman's point of view, Ozon is more interested in exploring Anna's experience, and he has re-arranged the revelations in the film accordingly, and pursued the story further.

A Quiet Passion

seen on 4 May 2017

Terence Davies directs Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson, Jennifer Ehle as her sister Vinny, Keith Carradine as her father Edward, Joanna Bacon as her mother (also Emily) and Duncan Duff as her brother Austin in an extraordinarily intense film about the poet's life; Davies also wrote the screenplay. 

Emily Dickinson was famously reclusive and unconventional in the eyes of 19th century Boston society - her steeliness is shown in the first scene when she does not move to the right of her headmistress amongst those who have accepted Jesus, nor to the left with those who hope to; she is then castigated as a 'no-hoper' and her father and siblings soon arrive to bring her home. After that, the film barely moves from the house where she spent the rest of her life writing and, increasingly, refusing to meet visitors.