Suite Française

Suite Française is an adaptation of an incomplete novel by Ukrainian-Jew Irène Némirovsky who died in Auschwitz in 1942.

France has fallen to the Nazis and the whole country is in disarray. There has been a mass exodus from Paris and in Bussy the refugees arrive in their masses. These are soon followed by a regiment of German soldiers who take control, bark orders, impose 'German time' and billet themselves with the locals.

Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas), a landlord and part-time extortionist (from her tenants) is horrified to have the jackbooted officer Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts) as an enforced house guest. Her daughter-in-law Lucile (Michelle Williams) doesn’t really know what to think except what Madame Angellier tells her to.

Lucile is a quiet and repressed young girl with a peculiar absence of anything substantial to her character. Yes I know there's a war on but FFS smile girl. Her husband is a prisoner of war in Germany, not that she’s really that bothered where he is. They’re not close.

Generally the villagers’ feelings towards their invaders are mixed. The local women, starved of male scenery, drool at the strapping soldiers in their midst and many like Celine (Margot Robbie) have no qualms about sleeping with the enemy. For others it is a chance to settle old scores and for the local Viscount (Lambert Wilson) it’s about organising picnics with their conquerors. Farmhand Benoît Labarie (Sam Riley) thinks his billeted officer Kurt Bonnet (Tom Schilling) wants to get his hands on his wife (Ruth Wilson), so he kills him.

Lucille meanwhile would just really really like to play the piano but it’s banned until her bloody husband comes home. When their German lodger unlocks Madame Angellier’s piano and plays poignant melodies on it he seems to have also stumbled across the key to unlocking the dreary Lucile as well. Her dreariness dissolves significantly when she realises that he’s a music lover too, that is when he isn’t carrying out executions in the town’s square. Suddenly her character is transformed and she briefly becomes a passionate minx.

All this happens with no language problems at all. The multilingual Germans speak real German to each other and then French (presumably, voiced in English) to everyone else. Impressive.

It’s mainly a love story but not a very riveting one. Boy invades girl’s village. Boy isn't as horrid as girl first thought. Girl falls in love with boy.

War wise, the opening scenes capture well the chaos that followed the Nazi invasion but the film is only superficially about the struggle to survive the German occupation. Many of the scenes just simply don't ring true as to how things would have actually happened in an occupied town.

Still Alice

Still Alice is based on Lisa Genova's 2007 novel and it tells the story of Dr Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), a linguistics professor at Columbia University who is diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer's disease at the age of just 50.

When Alice starts to forget certain words, she meets with her doctor and is given the terrible news. Gaining such detailed knowledge of your eventual demise can’t be much fun.

The film deals with things mostly from Alice’s point of view. At first, she tries to carry on as normal but she is soon released from her teaching job. While she still can, she gives a speech on Alzheimer following the words with a highlighter. She also leaves a video for herself with instructions on how to take her own life when things get really bad.

Soon though her disease progresses, she gets lost whilst jogging and is unable to remember where the bathroom is. Executing her suicide plan also doesn’t work out, in what is probably the film’s best scene.

If Alice mostly gets on with her life, then so do her family. While hysteria would not have been welcome, it’s all a bit too deadpan at times. 

For her husband (Alec Baldwin), Alice’s diagnosis comes at a time when he is pursuing a plum new job in Minnesota. He doesn’t seem the loving type anyway but her diagnosis doesn’t seem to soften him much and he spends little time with his ill wife.

Their three grown up children, more understandably, also get on with their own lives even when finding out that the disease is of a rare, hereditary kind. Her eldest, the tightly-wound and pregnant Anna (Kate Bosworth) finds she has the gene but their son doesn’t. Their youngest daughter, the slightly wayward Lydia (Kristen Stewart), doesn’t want to know. Alice is not happy that Lydia is putting acting ahead of a college education. Yet it is this wayward daughter who eventually volunteers to take care of her.

The film is Oscar bait for sure and Moore did win. She is excellent as are many of the cast but the film itself is a little underwhelming.