Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

“The hotel business is about strangers, and strangers will surprise you.”

            Dirty Pretty Things is a movie I have wanted to see for a while. I never had any idea what on earth it was about all I knew about is that Audrey Tautou is on the poster and I had to see it since she is one of my favorite actresses. Based off the title it has a story I definitely was not expecting.

            Okwe (Chiwetel Ejofor) is an undocumented immigrant working multiple jobs in a rough section of London. One of his several jobs is as a concierge and maintenance attendant at a shady hotel called The Baltic Hotel. A prostitute who frequents the hotel comes down one day and tells Okwe that the toilet in the room she just came out of is backed up. He rigs up a clothes hanger to try to get whatever was backing the toilet up down. When the blockage does not move Okwe sticks his hand in and pulls it out. In his hand is a human heart. He knows it is definitely a human heart he used to be a doctor in his country.

            Sometime later two African men come into the staff room. The younger man is in serious pain. When Okwe takes a look the younger man has a serious wound that has become infected. Okwe realizes that the man has had his kidney crudely removed.

            After these events Okwe’s world in London starts to spiral. He and his roommate and fellow hotel employee, refugee Senay Gelik (Audrey Tautou), are in trouble with immigration services and their boss at the hotel. Their sleazy boss forces Okwe into performing illegal surgery and Senay has had to take another job to stay away from the hotel in order to not be taken in by immigration. Senay is given the opportunity to get out of the country on a fake passport from the hotel boss but she has to give up a kidney and do some sexual things with the boss. Okwe has to perform the surgery. Okwe and Senay turn the tables on the boss by drugging his drink, performing the surgery on him, and getting away with their fake passports.

            Dirty Pretty Things was alright. The story was interesting but to me there were more slow parts than ones that grabbed my attention. The story almost turned my stomach because all the characters were so sleazy and off putting. Dirty Pretty Things is worth watching at least once especially because this is Audrey Tautou’s first English speaking role and she is of course she is just an awesome actress.

 

Amelie (2001)

“Amelie has a strange feeling of absolute harmony. It's a perfect moment. A soft light, a scent in the air, the quiet murmur of the city. A surge of love, an urge to help mankind overcomes her.” 

            I cannot remember the first time I watched Amélie. I must have seen it when I was taking French in school because quite a number of years ago I bought the DVD. I can actually remember buying the DVD like it was yesterday.  Ever since I bought the DVD and watched it I have not seen Amélie since. I watched it with new eyes and the mind of a movie lover. Amélie was just as fantastic as I remembered it.

            The movie is about a woman named Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou). She grew up a lonely child because her doctor father thought she had a heart condition. Since she did not get a chance to go to school and make friends so she had to use her imagination. Now as a grown up Amélie has a job in Paris at a café called The Two Windmills.

            One night she drops the cap to a bottle she was holding and the cap rolls to a tile on the floor knocking it loose. Amélie removes the loose tile and discovers a tin box full of old toys. Amélie decides to find out who lived in her apartment during the fifties. She finds out the man’s name and manages to track him down. Without meeting the man Amélie returns his old box of toys to him. The man walks into the café where she works and he talks about how this box as made him happy and how this makes him want to reconnect with his daughter and see his grandson.

            This event makes Amélie want to help others around her. She helps a woman she works with find a man who helps her get her mind off of being  hypochondriac, she helps her superintendent of her building find closer over the death of her husband twenty years before. The most important person Amélie helps is a man named Nino who collects torn photographs from photo booths in train stations.

            There are so many stories and situations in this movie that it would be too long to explain them all and it is more fun to watch the movie than have it explained.

            Every cast member was perfect. No one could have played Amélie any better than Audrey Tautou. With Tautou in the main role you can believe her character is a naïve woman with a wild imagination and a big heart.

            What I love about Amélie is how it takes you into an imaginary world in Paris. Paris is the dream of millions. So many idealize the city as this fantastic bright place of love and captures the imagination. The colors and the story help to bring this Paris of imagination to life.

            Amélie not only one of the best French movies ever to be made but one of the best all around movies ever made. You truly do feel so much better after have watched this not just because of the story but by how well it was created from the acting to the direction to the lighting. Amélie is a movie I feel anyone with a heart and anyone who says they love movies should see. Amélie for two hours and two minutes let you escape into the Paris and a world of imagination you did not know you needed and wanted to escape to. 

Delicacy (2011)

I read a review of Delicacy where the reviewer starts off by saying “Expectations can be such a bitch…” Delicacy was not terrible in the slightest but I was hoping the film would be better than it turned out because Audrey Tautou is the star.

            Three years have passed since Nathalie Kerr (Tautou) lost her husband Francois in an accident. Francois was her true love and the years have not helped her at all to move on. She has a job as manager at an office. Her boss has been trying to put the moves on her ever since she started working for him. One day sitting in her office Nathalie opens the draw in her desk and finds Francois’s key ring. The door opens, a man named Markus walks in for an appointment to go over something with her. Nathalie gets up and out of nowhere kisses him!

            Markus feels like the luckiest guy on earth since he not good looking in the slightest. Nathalie cannot believe what she did and just wants to forget the whole thing. Markus goes to her the next day to speak about the incident but Nathalie just tells him to go away it was a huge mistake.

            As time goes on though Markus and Nathalie become friends. She is not with him because of his looks she is with him because he is a nice, funny, and sensitive man. Markus takes Nathalie out to the theater and out to eat and is just the type of guy she needs in her life. Their boss is pissed off with her because he cannot see how she can be with a man who is not good looking while he is always chasing after her. The boss throws Nathalie over the edge one day when he cruelly brings up Francois. She runs away with Markus to her grandmother’s house in the country. There Markus sees the different stages of Nathalie and ends the film by saying he hopes to put a stamp on her past so she can move forward.

            The story was cute and sweet proving that looks are not important just as long as the person is good. I did not read a summary of Delicacy beforehand so I had no idea what I was getting into and for not knowing what the movie was about it was not terrible but it was not that great. I guess this is one of a handful of times when my expectations got the best of me. Audrey Tautou is such a great actress I love her face and her whole look. She is so French! The actor who played Markus was a really ugly, nasty looking bugger in OSS 117: Nest of Spies. He actually makes my stomach turn a bit when I watch that movie and I feel terrible now because he played such a good guy in Delicacy. As I said Delicacy is not terrible but do not waste your time really trying to look for it.  

Coco Before Chanel (2009)

“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.”

            The quote written above is not a line from the film. It is a quote stated by the woman who created modern, sophisticated, timeless clothing Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. In the 2009 French biopic of the designer Coco Before Chanel we are shown the story of Chanel’s roots. We see where her style and inspirations come from and how she was truly a woman ahead of her time.

            Since this movie is a biopic a summary will be like a biography. Gabrielle and her older sister Adrienne were sent to an orphanage when they were little. There they lived until they were older and gained employment as seamstresses. Chanel was also a milliner making hats for clients as well. At night the sisters would perform a singing act in a local nightclub.

            At the nightclub Chanel meets Etienne Balsan, a rich playboy living for all the pleasures in life. He tells her they should get together but it is not until after he leaves Paris and she realizes that she needs money that she takes him up on his offer. Coco goes out to his family’s house in the country and makes herself home what will eventually become a three year stay.

            Etienne hosts the high society of Paris every weekend with wild parties that go on all day and all night. At first he tells Coco to stay out of sight but she begins to sneak down and everyone becomes charmed by her. Most of all the guests especially the women cannot get over the way she dresses; her clothes look comfortable and almost manly compared to the tight corseted, frilly dresses the women of the time wore. Thanks to a famous stage actress she meets Coco’s small, light hats become the rage in upper society.

 

 

            One weekend Coco meets an English man named Arthur “Boy” Capel. Capel becomes the love of Coco’s life, he is the only man she ever really considered marrying. When Coco has had enough of living with Etienne it is Boy who helps her to set up her own shop in Paris. Unfortunately their happiness is cut short when Boy dies in a car accident.

 

 

            That is all I will say about Chanel because if you really want to know more all you have to do is either watch the movie or simply just look up the designer’s early years… I say watch the movie it is more entertaining than just reading. On this note though do not go into the film thinking you will be truly seeing what made Chanel an icon, those qualities are seen here and there throughout. The movie is more about her two relationships that shaped her attitude and her life.

            What I loved about this film is seeing what inspired Chanel. She saw the limitations of the then modern fashions with the corset that gave women an hourglass shape. She saw the excessive amount of material hanging and dragging from the dresses that limited motion as well and became dirty so quickly. The scene that I really liked what when Coco went to the seaside with Boy and saw these women on the beach with these ridiculously huge hats and their bodies tightly covered in their dresses. Chanel found inspiration from the striped shirts of the fishermen and in turn made her own outfit inspired by them. Looking at the clothing from a modern view and how women would be dresses to go to the beach is ridiculous. This idea and realization that Chanel had just put her so ahead of her time.

 

 

            One of my historic passions besides film and art is fashion. I can study fashion from the mid-1800s to the 1960s all day I love it so much. My favorite time periods for fashion are the early 1900s, the twenties, thirties, and forties. I volunteer at a local historical society and I helped to put together a textile exhibit called “Fabulous Flapper Fashions of the 1920s.” It was fascinating to learn how by the 1925 women were fully liberated from the corset and old restrictive clothing. In my research into 1920s clothing I learned that with the end of World War I and the Suffrage movement women were ready for a change they were ready to be free from the old social restrictions. And what better way to shed the old ways and rebel against them then by wearing and creating a new style of clothing? Chanel, with her forward thinking mind, created clothing that a bra had to be worn instead of a corset. Along with Paul Poiret and his straight cut “Confucius Coat”, Chanel helped to set women free. Poiret stated that he wanted to create a new form of beauty for women and that is what he helped to do. Chanel and Poiret steered women’s clothing away from an artificial form to a natural shape supported by a bra (I thank these two everyday for the bra! I had to wear a (modern) corset once for a dress and it was the most annoying thing known to man!). Looking at the clothes that the historical society has in their collection it was amazing to see how just from the early twenties to 1925 changed so much. The dresses that we have on display look like so much fun and so comfortable to wear.

 

 

            Coco Before Chanel is an excellent film in every aspect. Audrey Tautou was perfect as the designer. The director Anne Fontaine says in the extra features that if Tautou had not been able to make the movie they would not have done it at all because the actress is almost the spitting image of the designer. Coco Before Chanel is one of my favorite movies. This is a great stepping stone for anyone who wants to begin their foray into the world of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel and her beautiful and timeless style.