Category Archives: Culture

Actor Noémie Merlant: ‘Women have been taught to see ourselves through other people’s desire’

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The Portrait of a Lady on Fire star talks about her role in Jacques Audiard’s new dating drama, making a documentary about her own family, and the Hollywood actor who inspires her

The French actor Noémie Merlant is in demand these days – especially since 2019, when Céline Sciamma’s acclaimed Portrait of a Lady on Fire massively boosted her international profile. When I talk to her on Zoom, she’s rushing between two films, on her mobile in a car travelling from one shoot in Brest in northern France to another in the Pyrenees.

Despite her busy schedule, and the distraction of having just lost her bank card, Merlant is focused enough to talk with enthusiastic intensity (and no, she’s not driving the car) about Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District, which is released in the UK next month. The film is something of a departure for the 69-year-old director, who is often associated with crime dramas (A Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped). It’s about young people in a multiracial Paris, and the 21st-century digital economy of passion: dating apps, instant hookups and webcam sex. And given that he’s often considered a very male film-maker, this feature notably adopts a very female perspective; it’s co-written, in fact, with Sciamma, and the writer-director Léa Mysius.

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The rumba radio station, the DJ … and 110,000 albums looking for a noisy new home

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The unique Gladys Palmera archive may cross the Atlantic from Madrid to secure a permanent base

On a hillside an hour from Madrid, not far from the sepulchral splendour of the Escorial monastery, with its royal tombs, imperial maps and sacred relics, lies another, rather less austere, treasure house.

The Gladys Palmera collection, kept in a sprawling, tropical-hued complex crammed with 1950s Mexican film posters and prowled by the odd decorative monkey and jaguar, is the largest private archive of Latin American music in the world.

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Too close for comfort: the pitfalls of parasocial relationships

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Social media means adoring fans can keep up with the ins and outs of their favourite celebrities. But for those in the public eye, a dedicated fanbase isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be – especially for women

A few years ago, I had a fan. She had read my writing and listened to my podcast, and often replied warmly to my tweets. Occasionally, she would send me private messages, and eventually I started following her back. It was nice. At some point, the volume of communication increased – I began receiving emails, and the notifications and messages spread to Instagram. Then they grew more frequent, uncomfortably so. She wanted things from me: to work for me, to meet up with me, to know how my weekend had gone, to tell me how hers had gone, to tell me about the job she disliked, for me to help her with a project she was launching.

My heart began to sink whenever I saw her name appear on my phone and I started responding less and less in the hope of discouraging her overtures. Then she came to an event I’d organised – the first time we’d actually met – and to my mortification, presented me with a bundle of gifts (which I obviously sent a thank you message for – I’m not a monster).

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Maria Friedman: ‘Sondheim was a kind man, but God, he could be very direct’

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The musical theatre star on her new tribute show to Stephen Sondheim, her unconventional upbringing, and her happiest song…

Maria Friedman, 61, is a singer, actor and director who has a natural musicality (her parents were classical musicians) and knows how to get inside a song and make it her own – and ours – with emotional precision. An eight-time Olivier nominee (she has won the prize three times), she is known for her interpretations of Stephen Sondheim’s songbook, and is about to celebrate him and the composers Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand in Legacy, a show at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Friedman is married to the actor Adrian Der Gregorian and has two sons.

Tell me about the first time you met Stephen Sondheim…
I was in my early 20s and in a gala as a replacement for a singer who had flu. I had two days to learn Broadway Baby [from Sondheim’s Follies]. The lyrics fitted me like a glove: it was about a girl with aspirations who wanted to land a great job and not work in cafes or live in a bedsit with no money. Everyone considered Broadway Baby Elaine Stritch’s song [she was also on the bill that night]. The music started and a spotlight went on to the middle of the stage. I took a deep breath and was about to start my song when, from the top of the gods, someone shouted: “Get off, we want Elaine!” I had tears in my eyes but dug really deep into those lyrics. It’s what I have done ever since. Sondheim’s work is extraordinary: when you trust it and live in it, it keeps you safe. The place went berserk. Sondheim was in the audience; at the party afterwards he asked: “Who was that girl?”

Legacy is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, 3-20 March

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‘Don’t take the damn thing’: how Spotify playlists push dangerous anti-vaccine tunes

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Conspiracy theory songs claiming Covid-19 is fake and calling vaccine ‘poison’ are being actively promoted in Spotify playlists

Songs that claim Covid-19 is fake and describe the vaccines as “poison” are being actively promoted to Spotify users in playlists generated by its content recommendation engine.

Tracks found on the world’s largest music streaming service explicitly encourage people not to get vaccinated and say those who do are “slaves”, “sheep”, and victims of Satan. Others call for an uprising, urging listeners to “fight for your life”.

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What does your music taste say about you? Nothing actually | Barbara Ellen

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A study that finds ‘agreeable’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘open’ types are fans of the same artists misses the point of music – and people

Does music taste reflect personality? A study from the University of Cambridge involving 350,000 participants, from 50 countries, across six continents, posits that people with similar traits across the globe are drawn to similar music genres. So, “extroverts” love Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. The “open” thrill to Daft Punk, Radiohead and Jimi Hendrix. The “agreeable” are into Marvin Gaye, U2 and Taylor Swift. The “neurotic” enjoy, presumably as much they can, the work of David Bowie, Nirvana, and the Killers. And so on.

While the study doesn’t claim to be definitive, how strange to be allotted only one personality trait/genre each. It sounds like Colour Me Beautiful for music. “What sound best goes with my personality? Did you bring along swatches?” Certainly, back when I worked for the New Musical Express, journalists, musicians and readers alike resisted being wrangled into such rigid categories.

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I’ll fight to overturn US ban on my ‘Queer Bible’, says British author

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Former model Jack Guinness caught up in furore over Mississippi mayor’s attempt to withhold funding for library until ‘homosexual materials’ are withdrawn

A British writer, presenter and former model says he is shocked to find himself at the centre of an unprecedented wave of book banning in the US.

A Mississippi mayor has told the Madison County Library to remove LGBTQ+ books from its shelves or lose funding. One of the books singled out as an example was The Queer Bible, a collection of LGBTQ+ history essays edited by Jack Guinness. Ridgeland’s Republican mayor, Gene McGee, has refused to release funds to the library until “homosexual materials” are withdrawn.

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The Great Gapsby? How modern editions of classics lost the plot

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F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is the latest title to appear in a cheap modern version after copyright expires

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is one of the most memorable literary payoffs in history, the end of F Scott Fitzgerald’s defining novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby.

Yet this famous ending will be lost to many readers thanks to the proliferation of substandard editions, one of which loses the last three pages and instead finishes tantalisingly halfway through a paragraph.

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Rimini review – Ulrich Seidl’s lounge singer is so horrible, he may be brilliant

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The Austrian director torments everyone, including the audience, in this grotesque tale set in the Italian resort out of season

Wretchedness, sadness and confrontational grotesquerie once again come together in a movie by Ulrich Seidl, although it’s leavened by something almost – but not quite – like ordinary human compassion. If you’ve seen Seidl’s other movies you’ll know what to expect and you’ll know to steel yourself for horror. Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.

The Italian coastal resort of Rimini in winter is an eerie, melancholy place; Seidl shows it in freezing mist and actual snow. Refugees huddle on the street and some groups of German and Austrian tourists take what must be bargain-basement package vacations at off-season rates in the tackiest hotels. It is here that Ritchie Bravo, played by Seidl regular Michael Thomas, plies his dismal trade. He is an ageing lounge singer with a drinking problem, a cheery, bleary style, an Islamophobic attitude, a bleached-blond hairdo of 80s vintage and a spreading paunch. Ritchie makes a living crooning to his adoring senior-female fanbase, who show up in their coach parties to catch his act. (You could compare him to Nick Apollo Forte in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose or Gerard Dépardieu in Xavier Giannoli’s The Singer – except much, much more horrible.) He also tops up his income by having sex with some of the fans for money – truly gruesome scenes in the starkly unforgiving Seidl style.

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‘I just cried’: film stirs memories on Belfast street Branagh left behind

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As director’s movie is nominated for seven Oscars, residents of Mountcollyer Street recall when the Troubles started

Little remains of the street where Kenneth Branagh was raised.

It is the day after the Oscar nominations and Branagh has professed he is “dazed and delighted” and in a “beautiful state of shock” over the seven Oscar nominations his film Belfast has received.

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Ziggy bows out, Madonna scares the pope and Dylan goes electric: 50 gigs that changed music

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Five decades after David Bowie’s seminal tour, our music writers reflect on the concerts that have left a mark, from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish

Café Society, New York City, early 1939
The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. John Fordham

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The Soup Nazi on Marjorie Taylor Green’s gazpacho police: ‘I knew I was in trouble’

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Larry Thomas, the actor behind the Seinfeld character, gives his take on the viral gaffe: ‘You can’t write this shit’

The extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously alerted the US to the dangers of space lasers, issued a new warning to the American people on Thursday: the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has unleashed “gazpacho police” to spy on Greene’s colleagues in Congress.

It is, of course, possible that a clandestine network bent on the regulation of cold soup operates deep under the Capitol cafeteria. But Greene was presumably confusing “gazpacho” with the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

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Lord of the bling: Peter Jackson tops Forbes highest paid entertainer list

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Get Back and Lord of the Rings director made an estimated $580m last year, topping annual list that also features Bruce Springsteen, Dwayne Johnson and Kanye West

The Lord of the Rings and Get Back director, Peter Jackson, has topped the Forbes magazine rich list as the highest paid entertainer of 2021.

Jackson made US$580m (A$809m, £428m) last year, primarily through the sale of part of his visual effects business Weta Digital to Unity Software, for $1.6bn. Forbes estimates Jackson personally made about $600m in cash and $375m in stock from the deal, making him the third person in history to become a billionaire from making films, after Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

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Haley Bennett: ‘I always felt like, what’s wrong with me?’

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The actor never thought she would make it in a lead role – until Terrence Malick had a word. Now she is stepping into the spotlight as Roxanne in Joe Wright’s Cyrano

It’s quite an entrance. Haley Bennett walks into the Soho hotel room flanked by publicists, then breaks theatrically into song, filling the air with lyrics from her new adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. The film is directed by her partner, Joe Wright; she plays Roxanne opposite Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage as Cyrano. It’s a fresh, modern and giddily romantic movie, and will probably do for Edmond Rostand’s classic play what Wright’s Pride & Prejudice did for Austen.

Bennett sits down and places a framed photograph on the coffee table between us, of a sunny little girl with pigtails. Having become slightly obsessed with Bennett’s Instagram account (more later), I assume this is her three-year-old, Virginia. But no, the photo is of Bennett herself, aged four. “I was just visiting my family in Ohio,” she says brightly. “I think it’s important that we nurture the four-year-old in all of us, so I brought her with me.”

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Sting sells back catalogue to Universal Music in deal worth up to $300m

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Musician becomes latest big name to cash in on a long and successful career

Sting has sold his back catalogue, featuring hits including Roxanne, Every Breath You Take and Englishman in New York, to Universal Music in a deal thought to be worth up to $300m (£221m).

The 70-year old, who found global fame as a member of the Police in the late 1970s and early 80s before going solo, becomes the latest big name musician to cash in on a long and successful career.

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Andy Serkis: ‘Living with Gollum would be a nightmare – he’d leave a mess everywhere’

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The actor and director answers readers’ questions about his performance-capture film roles, playing sax at parties in pre-hipster Shoreditch and being mistaken for Michael Sheen

Has performance capture affected your physical condition? ajyates33

It’s kept me fit, especially the more physical roles like Caesar [in the Planet of the Apes films], who goes from an infant chimpanzee right through into adulthood. I’ve always been quite a physical person and enjoy mountaineering, climbing and cycling. But those roles take it out of you, for sure.

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Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy review – a triptych of light-touch philosophy

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Ryusuke Hamaguchi brings a gentle warmth to this ingenious collection of three stories united by themes of fate and mystery

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a Japanese film-maker whose work I first encountered in 2018 with his doppelgänger romance Asako I & II and indirectly via last year’s experimental chamber-piece Domains, whose screenwriter Tomoyuki Takahashi has worked with Hamaguchi. Now he has unveiled this ingenious, playful, sparklingly acted and thoroughly entertaining portmanteau collection of three movie tales.

Their themes and ideas are emerging as keynotes for this director: fate and coincidence, identity and role-play, and the mysteries of erotic pleasure and desire. There is a rather European flavour in the mix – one of its characters is a specialist in French literature – and I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Carrère and Milan Kundera. And although there is no formal connection between the stories (other than the thematic echoes) the simple act of juxtaposition creates something pleasingly cohesive.

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Manic Street Preachers’ 30 greatest songs – ranked!

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Marking 30 years of their debut album, Generation Terrorists, a look back at the Welsh rockers’ best bits: from the song about the Spanish civil war that kept Steps off No 1 to their glorious duets

Manic Street Preachers were always Guns N’ Roses fans: on A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun, they collaborated with the band’s bassist Duff McKagan. Charmingly perverse as ever, they turned in one of their poppiest latterday melodies, liberally decorated with metal guitar.

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‘If we are honest, it wasn’t particularly good’: looking back on the first Netflix original, 10 years later

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Why a little known streaming service put its faith in Lilyhammer, a decidedly average show about the Norwegian adventures of a mafia boss

When you think of Steven Van Zandt’s acting work, your mind will automatically flick to The Sopranos. A vast, swaggering monument of a show, The Sopranos quite rightly holds the reputation of playing a pivotal role in the history of television. But let us also not forget that – 10 years ago this week – Van Zandt followed The Sopranos with another show. And it was a show which was every bit as important a milestone in TV’s evolution. That’s right, let us all wish a happy anniversary to Lilyhammer.

You remember Lilyhammer. It was a Norwegian show about the messy misadventures of a mafia underboss living in the witness protection programme 100 miles north of Oslo. It ran for three seasons and Bruce Springsteen had a cameo in the final episode. If we are being completely honest, it wasn’t particularly good. But, when it debuted in 2012, it was the very first Netflix original series. And what better way to mark its 10th anniversary than rewatching it to see how Netflix has changed over the years? There isn’t any. So we did it. Here are our learnings.

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Bollywood’s new affair: the film bringing complexity to screen infidelity

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With an all-star cast led by Deepika Padukone, Gehraiyaan aims to bring a fresh realism to its love story. She and director Shakun Batra assess the risks they’re taking

“I think it’s pretty fresh for an Indian audience,” says Deepika Padukone of her new movie, Gehraiyaan (“Depths”). “The way this story has been told, and the way in which it explores infidelity is certainly very new.” Gehraiyaan’s promotional material isn’t hiding anything, with clips showing Padukone’s character Alisha losing herself in clinches with her illicit lover Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), her cousin’s fiance. If that wasn’t messy enough, Alisha also has a perfectly nice boyfriend of six years, Karan (Dhairya Karwa), who’s done nothing to deserve this betrayal.

“She feels stuck,” is how Padukone explains her behaviour. A 30-year-old yoga teacher in Mumbai, Alisha seems like an otherwise likable and pleasant human being, and the film dwells closely on how conflicted she is. “She feels like she’s been with this one person for so many years. And now, you know, she is at a stage in her life where she feels stuck.”

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