Cast: Emily Watson, Dan Stevens, Ian McKellen, Kevin Kline, Ewan McGregor, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci, Emma Thompson
Director: Bill Condon
Duration: 129 mins
A wonderful music score, dazzling magical effects, delightful humour and a great cast make this classic fairy tale a winner. In 1991 we had the animated version, with a music score also by Alan Menken, but what this new, big budget extravaganza offers is a darker reality, complete with moody, gothic production design and Emma Watson perfectly cast as the romantic, well-read Belle, who believes that books transform small corners of the world into huge vistas. A beastly hero, a magic spell, a spirited heroine and a castle filled with quirky characters in the guise of inanimate objects all set the scene for an uplifting magic carpet ride into fantasy, propelled by hummable songs and a promise of happy ever after.
After a spectacular opening ballroom scene in which an evil magic spell is cast on the Prince, we meet Belle (Watson), who is a great deal different from the other girls in the small French provincial village. 'The hardest to get is the most appealing', according to hilariously narcissistic Gaston (Luke Evans), who has no shortage of admirers, but who is intent on marrying Belle, who in turn wants more than a provincial life. Josh Gad is also hugely entertaining as Gaston's camp sidekick LeFou. The coming alive of the Castle's key (animated) characters is charming with the ooh la-la French candelabra Lumiere (voiced by Ewan McGregor), meticulous antique clock Cogsworth (Ian McKellen) and the elegant china teapot Mrs Potts (Emma Thompson), who sings the film's title song.
Also there’s a charming, restrained performance from Kevin Kline as Belle's protective father. Dan Stevens offers a rich, booming voice as The Beast, played as a brooding fur-covered giant - a tormented man trapped within a hideous exterior and whose plight as each rose petal falls and brings him to eternal doom, makes him more and more despondent. The darkness of the character is reflected in the production design and offbeat world in which he lives. She may be reading Romeo and Juliet, but it is Shakespeare's line 'Love looks with the mind, not the eyes' from A Midsummer Night's Dream that’s featured, when The Beast's library becomes the pathway that leads to Belle's heart. The most moving scene involves Belle and the Beast, when he transports her to the place where she most wants to be.
Director Bill Condon has included all the elements we expect and unsurprisingly, the scene when the three enchanted words 'I Love You' are uttered brings its own magic. The Beast's anticipated transformation takes place amid gold dust and rose petals. Wonderful indeed.
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eldinger, Nora von Waldstatten
Director: Olivier Assayas
Duration: 110 mins
Personal Shopper is undercut by the French writer-director Olivier Assayas’ on-the-nose English-language dialogue. This is a bigger issue for the supporting cast than for Stewart, who received one of her finest showcases in Assayas' earlier Clouds of Sils Maria where she also played a celebrity’s personal assistant, and has a way of infecting scripted action with naturalism.
Her character is the remnant of a pair of twins - she is in a sense haunting Paris, even though her boyfriend (Ty Olwin, seen only via Skype), apparently some kind of IT contractor, has already moved on to Oman. The ghosts here aren’t merely implied and Stewart’s performance remains Personal Shopper’s most consistent effect. The gloomy, ominous atmosphere that the film creates whenever it decides that it is, in fact, a horror film, is surprisingly potent, considering the many conventions or expectations it otherwise defies. But the bulk rests on Maureen’s tightly drawn shoulders. Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the film were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else. A lot of it is the magic of casual gesture—things she does with cups of espresso, boarding passes, keys, her iPhone. Of course, she resembles so many other roving millennials.
Personal Shopper isn’t always successful; there are periods where it borders on nonsense. It rarely links wants with satisfactions, clues with solutions. And whether she is decked out in high-end evening-wear borrowed without permission or confronted with a mutating, translucent ectoplasmic presence, Maureen never appears completely convinced of what she is seeing or experiencing. Perhaps the film is as much about recasting modern ennui in the deeply evocative terms of the supernatural and irrational, as it is about one young woman’s personal and spiritual crisis.
