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Felicity Chaplin
Felicity Chaplin is Lecturer in European Languages at Monash University. She is the author of two books, Charlotte Gainsbourg: transnational and transmedia stardom (Manchester University Press, 2020) and La Parisienne in cinema: between art and life (Manchester University Press, 2017), and is a contributor to the forthcoming edited collection Refocus: The films of François Ozon (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Felicity has written extensively on cinema, stardom, celebrity, fashion, French female identity, and cultural histories of Paris. Her work appears in Australian Book Review, Australian Journal of French Studies, Celebrity Studies, Metro, Screening the Past, and Senses of Cinema.
The Alliance Française French Film Festival, the world’s largest showcase of French cinema outside of France, returns in 2024 for its thirty-fifth edition, with its usual eclectic mix of films from arthouse to mainstream cinema. Francophiles and cinephiles alike can see films from a range of genres, including drama, romantic comedy, social comedy, thriller, and historical biopic – from renown ... (read more)
La Chimera is the fourth feature film from Italian director and screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher, who made her feature film début in 2011 with Corpo Celeste (Heavenly Body). It is the final piece of a triptych – including Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) (2014) and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) (2018) – which poses, in Rohrwacher’s own words, the central question of what to do with the past. Al ... (read more)
Essentially a creative critical biography, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck belongs to a greater project of re-examining Hollywood and decentring the phallocentrism of film history. It is the latest book in the series Women’s Media History Now! which focuses on the unexplored work of women in film. Established in 2009, this series became even more timely with the advent of #MeToo and with books su ... (read more)
Wes Anderson’s films divide audiences; not so much because of their content (rarely does he openly court controversy) but because of their style. When the trailer for Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, first appeared online, those eager to dismiss it on social media wrote: ‘Wes Anderson has made his film again.’ It is a comment that cuts both ways.
Asteroid City has many featu ... (read more)
There have been nuanced treatments of the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the docuseries November 3: Attack on Paris (2018), the excellent En thérapie (2021), which deals with post-traumatic stress in a counterterrorist agent who is also a Muslim, and Mikhaël Hers’ sublime human drama Amanda (2018) which looks at the aftermath of terrorism in an understated fashion. November, directed b ... (read more)
Michel Franco’s Sundown opens with a close-up of fish slowly suffocating on a boat deck, the first of many enigmatic interjections that punctuate the film. We begin with a family vacation in Acapulco. The Bennetts, an apparently typical nuclear family, swim, sip margaritas, and joke around on the terrace of their luxury resort suite. They attend a cliff-diving contest at the iconic La Queb ... (read more)
Xavier Giannoli calls Lost Illusions less an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s three-volume novel (1837–43) than a transfiguration, comparing it in form to Max Richter’s celebrated reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Richter’s ‘Spring’ appears in the film, and a famous quote from Oscar Wilde finds its way into the dialogue, signalling Giannoli’s intention to remake the novel in a ... (read more)
When a father asks his daughter to help end his life, is it out of love or perversity? In Everything Went Fine, it is both. François Ozon’s films typically belong to the French tradition of intimiste cinema, melodramas centred on the bourgeois patriarchal family. Everything Went Fine (Tout c’est bien passé, 2021), Ozon’s twentieth feature film, is no exception. This preference for melodram ... (read more)
Devotees of Wes Anderson know what to expect, and they certainly get it in spades in The French Dispatch. Those who sensed that the American director lost his way with The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), may feel he has strayed even further from the simplicity of the works that made him famous, such as the understated Bottle Rocket (1996), the quirky and endearing Rushmore (1998), and that masterpiec ... (read more)