Table Of Content
- Review: In ‘Housekeeping for Beginners,’ a makeshift family evokes universal pain
- Le Otto Montagne, Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch at the heart of an unswerving friendship
- For the first time ever, ‘Blood In Blood Out’ will be available for streaming
- The 13 best novels (and 2 best short story collections) of 2023
- The best movies of 2023 — and where to find them
Although the room is no longer a kitchen, knowing it once was made me want to turn this into a “heart of the home” casual gathering space, just as our kitchens are today. House of Nomad’s Berkeley Minkhorst & Kelley Lentini shares with us a glimpse into their favorite home design, along with how this kitchen and dining area was inspired and came together to create a modern oasis. CIRCA’s Heather Smith shares with us a glimpse into one of her favorite design projects, along with how this dining room, lounge and entry was inspired and came together to provide creative possibilities. Charlotte Munder Design is based in West Palm Beach, Florida, and has recently worked on projects in New York City, The Hamptons, Boston, and Palm Beach. “Pacifiction” and “R.M.N.” Two hypnotically absorbing, cryptically titled, insidiously damning panoramas of life in, respectively, the sun-drenched island of Tahiti and a snow-bound Transylvanian village, neither of which you’ll be in a hurry to visit afterward.
Review: In ‘Housekeeping for Beginners,’ a makeshift family evokes universal pain
Vandermeersch pointed out that it’s a multilayered story spanning over 30 years in which the viewer witnesses different phases in the life of these two friends. This room sings “springtime”with shades of blue, muted pinks, pops of green, and lots of sunshine. Lucy and Company’s Beth Conant-Keim shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this family room was inspired and came together with a calming mixture of materials. Charlotte Lucas shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this master bedroom was inspired and came together with endless pattern play. We asked several local designers to share their favorite rooms with us.
Le Otto Montagne, Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch at the heart of an unswerving friendship
By the time Giovanni dies suddenly, he and Pietro haven’t spoken or seen each other in years. In many ways, their collaboration behind the camera gracefully complements the narrative that transpires in front of it. The Eight Mountains is a gentle two-hander following two friends, the impetuous Bruno and the introverted Pietro (played respectively as adults by Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli), that charts the ups and downs of their relationship over the course of four decades. These two childhood pals bond as boys in the Italian Alps, a tender connection disrupted by Bruno’s departure for education and business in an urban environment. For those looking for something a little more modern, look no further than Kimberly from KBN Interiors.
For the first time ever, ‘Blood In Blood Out’ will be available for streaming
By the time he is in his early 30s, he is a man with a full beard and an inconsequential résumé. A sensitive, charismatic melancholic, Pietro is unattached and existentially unsettled. Cut off from his past and uncertain about the future, he suffers from a familiar contemporary complaint that this story restively circles without naming, one that looks a lot like the modern condition.
The Belgian directing duo discuss how how they translated Paolo Coginetti’s novel into cinematic terms, their approach to music, and more.
The 13 best novels (and 2 best short story collections) of 2023
In Le Otto Montagne (The Eight Mountains) - and for their first selection In Competition - the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch explore the bonds that unite childhood friends over time. A film where the mountain stands out as a majestic backdrop to this unswerving relationship, portrayed on the screen by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi. Before long we’re with Bruno, Pietro and Giovanni on that prematurely aborted mountain climb — a visually stunning scene that drives home the most obvious difference between Bruno, the country boy entirely at ease outdoors, and Pietro, the city kid gasping for air. The scene also hints at a fast-forming bond between Giovanni and Bruno, a development that leaves Pietro on the outside looking in. He’s never really connected with his father, an unhappy engineer whose attitude shifts with his altitude; distant and distracted at sea level, he comes to life in these snowy heights. That erratic temperament is a turn-off for Pietro, who becomes ever more estranged from his father as a teenager (played, briefly, by Andrea Palma) and eventually an adult.
‘Nature is great. But when it becomes real, it’s something else’: filming The Eight Mountains
Vandermeersch, primarily known for her work as an actress, had previously appeared in several of her husband’s other movies and received a screenplay collaboration credit on his Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown. But as Van Groeningen began to approach shooting the adaptation of Paolo Coginetti’s novel that he’d co-written with his wife during pandemic lockdowns, he suggested that she join him in helming the film. Based on the award-winning Italian bestseller “Le Otto Montagne” by Paolo Cognetti, the movie is novelistic in the best sense. It immerses you in the world of its characters – both human and Alpine – on that chimingly deep level that usually only literature can access. But it lives and breathes in beautifully cinematic terms, with each one of Ruben Impens’ stunning academy-ratio pictures worth a thousand words. Although this classic bildungsroman may have been nipped and tucked in the transition from page to screen, in terms of scale and sweep and emotion, little appears to have been lost in translation.
Pietro is the story’s font and focus, which gives Marinelli the more central, psychologically developed role, though the adult actors share the screen as comfortably and generously as the child performers do. “The Eight Mountains” is a memory movie — it opens with a voice-over from the adult Pietro — and Marinelli, with his lilting intonation and startled, near-protuberant eyes, makes a natural and sympathetic lodestar, even when his character (or the story) makes some false moves. (Marinelli played a very different searcher in the 2020 movie “Martin Eden.”) Borghi has far fewer lines, but he brings eloquence to Bruno’s silences. Some obvious drone shots are included, but much of the hiking sequences appear to have been done with Steadicams, following the men through their treacherous treks.
‘All of Us Strangers’ 2. ‘The Boy and the Heron’
In an interview with the directors, Van Groeningen said they were very moved by the characters in the book, which he called “a simple story, an epic really, set against a beautiful backdrop” that spoke to him directly, with elements “That were very very personal to me,” he said. Designed for a young family with ties to New York, this whole home design is just what the clients had in mind—modern but warm and functional for their daily life with two young children. Anne Buresh shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this family room was inspired and came together to create timeless serenity. Feeling dissatisfied with his aimless life, Pietro decides to reinvent himself by visiting Nepal.
In this story, it isn’t an act of betrayal or redemption when a man turns out to be a better, more attentive father to a child other than his own; it simply is what it is, a testament to nature’s unpredictability, a wound and a balm rolled into one. Indeed, one of the more graceful surprises in a story suffused with loss and regret is the way Giovanni and Bruno’s surrogate bond ultimately opens the door, for Pietro, to a deeper kind of reconciliation. It allows him to make peace with a father he barely knew, and with a friend he loves more than he understands. The narration — so often a crutch that book-to-film adaptations rely on too heavily — is sparing. Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch smoothly carry Pietro and Bruno across time, which by turns expands and contracts, races forward and decelerates.
At Cannes, critics praised the film’s attention to detail and the way it used elements of nature to conjure the feelings of magic that childhood friendships can create. It’s been a long time since Pietro has seen Bruno too; like so many childhood friendships, theirs faded as the two grew up and went their separate ways. The house is soon finished, and over time it becomes a place for them to reunite every summer, a high-altitude oasis amid lives often adrift in confusion and uncertainty.
Think where man’s glory most begins and endsAnd say my glory was I had such friends. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies. Charlotte, have you been back in front of the cameras since working behind them? I’m curious if having served as a director has affected at all the way that you approach being an actress.
Two British filmmakers with a fearless command of the medium ventured into the well-trod territory of World War II from chillingly oblique angles, raising tough new questions about culpability, deniability and cinematic representations of violence. In each story, a machinery of mass death is ruthlessly implemented, and a man realizes, with a blank stare into the void, the crucial role he has played in its devising. As news about the 2023 Cannes lineup begins to trickle in, American audiences are finally getting a chance to catch up on some of the films that played at last year’s festival. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s “The Eight Mountains” made waves when it competed for the Palme d’Or and won the Prix Jury prize in 2022, and now the film is just weeks away from premiering at arthouses in New York and Los Angeles.
Diel’s signature style perfectly reflects the balance of the city of Charlotte. Her years of living in faraway lands have helped her create a signature style that all of her clients love. Although you’ll find that Geri has a more euro-centric approach to her work, from the architecture to the overall environment to the space, she keeps grabbing attention with her awe-inspiring work. That’s how I came to watch Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers,” for me the best movie of 2023, first in an empty screening room with only a tight-lipped Searchlight-hired security guard present. It’s a film so breathtaking in its impact, it actually hurt not to be able to talk about it for another few months. On a completely different note, I saw Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” at a morning press screening at Cannes and couldn’t get its images out of my mind or its sounds out of my ears.
In the months since, that disconnect has been playing in my head on a loop, and it’s come to feel like a metaphor for my own distance from the readers I write for — a distance I try my best to close with every review, every essay and, yes, every list like this one. One of the necessary privileges of being a critic is the opportunity to see new movies early, sometimes a week or two before they’re released (in the case of most studio pictures), and sometimes months in advance at film festivals. This year, my NYFF duties meant seeing more than a few major movies in unfinished form, which made them all the more intriguing to revisit later, with fresh eyes, when the time came to actually write about them. For both boys, their friendship proves a soul-sustaining connection, one that begins with them dubiously eyeing each other in Pietro’s dark, claustrophobic holiday home but that rapidly shifts once they dash outside. They walk, race and tumble through the area, exploring and sharing.
No comments:
Post a Comment