Welcome back one and all to Multiplex Goes Retro, the place to revisit films from all eras and see whether they've improved with age like a fine wine or grown old so badly they've become a dusty old relic.
Anyone who relished Melanie Laurent's breakthrough performance as the vengeful, cinema-torching orphan Shosanna in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds will be curious about this, her directorial breakthrough. It's the tale of Lisa (Laurent) and her adoptive sister Marine (Marie Denarnaud). The two couldn't be closer, but at the same time they are very different – Lisa is buttoned-up and controlling, while Marine lacks self-confidence and yearns for better things. Tension flares between the sisters when Marine falls in love with kindly food-writer Alex (Denis Menochet.) Then the pregnant Marine is struck down by a car and winds up in a coma, forcing Lisa and and Alex to confront their differences.
In the late 1930s, as WWII loomed on the horizon, Jean Renoir, French film director par excellence, made two films which have beguiled cinephiles ever since – La Regle du Jeu (1939,) the tale of a country house party which turns into a merciless dissection of society, and La Grande Illusion (1937,) a meditation upon the stupidity of war.
There is a scene in Zoolander where Derek Zoolander challenges fellow model Hansel to a walk off, overseen by David Bowie. As Bowie explains "Now, this'll be a straight walk-off, old school rules. First model walks; second model duplicates, then elaborates. Okay, boys - let's go to work!"
