Cinema, series, books, music: our weekend selection

Cinema: Viggo Mortensen, a female western

OWe weren’t expecting Viggo Mortensen on the classic western terrain with its grandiose landscapes, its sheriff, its saloon and its trigger-happy villains. In Till the end of the world (The Dead Don’t Hurt), his second film behind and in front of the camera, shot in the wild settings of Durango, Mexico, the Danish-American actor and director ventures there. In a poetic, singular way, diverting the codes of the genre to direct them towards the romantic and a love story where the woman plays the leading role here, on an equal footing with the man.

Here he is in the shoes of Holger Olsen, a cowboy of Scandinavian origin, taciturn, solitary until the day he meets Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) in San Francisco, a pretty Quebecer as independent as him. Irresistibly attracted to each other, they settle in a small town in Nevada where Holger has his house. It is 1861, the Civil War will separate them when Holger enlists in the Union army.

When he returned, everything changed. This is the moment chosen by Mortensen to play his score, in which he explores with finesse the feelings of his two characters, offering Vicky Krieps the role of a woman of character who pays dearly for her freedom, left to her own devices in a city plagued by corruption and evil. The actress of Three Musketeers gives a crazy charm to this Vivienne who escapes the conventions of the time. As for Mortensen, he avoids the exercise of style to sign, not without a certain candor, this beautiful feminine western. Jean-Luc Wachthausen

” Till the end of the world “by Viggo Mortensen (Mexico, Canada, Denmark), 2:09 a.m., with Viggo Mortensen, Vicky Krieps, Solly McLeod…, in theaters.

Novel: the Marie Vareille phenomenon

Half a million sales in France alone and translations in around ten countries: Marie Vareille, born in 1985, is the phenomenon to watch. And it’s not with The Last Match that the fire will go out. Twenty-seven years have passed since Abigaëlle, the heroine of this new novel, retired to a convent in Burgundy. Why ? She doesn’t know it very well anymore, but we feel that an old, deep and dirty shadow hangs over this decision. Gabriel, her artist brother, is drowning in laurels, but “is not who you think,” she writes in the first sentence.

Two Saturdays a month he visits her. She has taken a vow of silence, but her childhood notebooks speak for her. He talks a lot about his life, and especially about the radiant Zoé, who, “in the cold night that inhabited my brother, had just struck a match”. Alternating past and present, confessions and silences, playing with time, space and her reader’s capacity to feel the tragedy by only gradually giving him the keys, Marie Vareille increases the tension and brings together in this novel a crowd of solitudes, denouncing family violence and broken childhoods, as much as it consoles us. Marine De Tilly

“The Last Match”by Marie Vareille, Charleston, March 2024, 336 pages, 20.90 euros.READ ALSO Daniel Radcliffe responds to JK Rowling

The pocket: twenty queens in the arena

“At my end is my beginning”, embroidered Mary I Stuart from the first day of her captivity – twenty years – to that of her deliverance, on an English scaffold, at Fotheringay Castle, on February 8, 1587. That she was tragic, unexpected, heroic or miserable, it is with the end that the story of the sovereigns of this book begins. Twenty queens (from Cleopatra, in 30 BC, to Queen Astrid of Belgium, in 1935, including Agrippina, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Catherine de Medici, Anne of Austria, Marie-Antoinette, Catherine II , Sissi, Queen Victoria, or Empress Eugénie), twenty chapters and twenty writers and historians with learned and limpid pens to tell “the monarchical dignity of the farewell”, writes Jean-Christophe Buisson, who directs the work with Jean Sevillia. A mine of stories, conspiracies and anecdotes that punctuate the supreme power of the feminine. Truly, we had never seen his last breaths more alive. M.d. T.

“The Last Days of Queens”under the direction of Jean-Christophe Buisson and Jean Sévillia, Tempus, 432 pages, 9 euros.

Story: true thriller in the Vatican

It is a forgotten episode of history that journalist Michaël Darmon unearths. The meeting between two giants: Paul VI, one of the most discreet but also the most fruitful popes, and Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, first woman to lead a democratic state. On January 16, 1973, “Golda” traveled to the Vatican to meet the head of the Catholic Church so that it would recognize the State of Israel. Eight years after the declaration Nostra Aetate, initiated by John XXIII and concluded by Paul VI, which solemnly condemns anti-Semitism. But it was not until 1994 that the Vatican officially recognized the Jewish state. At the same time that Golda Meir is talking with Paul VI, Mossad agents are trying to infiltrate the Holy See. Because the day before, they foiled an attempted attack against the Prime Minister… Michaël Darmon signs a truly historic investigation worthy of a thriller. Jerome Cordelier

“The Pope and the Matriarch. Secret history of relations between Israel and the Vatican »by Michaël Darmon, Passés/Composés, April 2024, 202 pages, 19 euros.

Beautiful book: Busby Berkeley, the magician of the big screen

Who still remembers Busby Berkeley? A little-known genius whose breathtaking visual discoveries inspired Beyoncé and Pixar and the Coen brothers. In a wonderful, beautifully illustrated story, Séverine Danflous and Pierre-Julien Marest tell the story of the man we called Buzz. A child of the ball who displays a flamboyant imagination on the big screen. “Leg squares, arms in compasses, he bends space to his desires,” write the authors, not only in the films he directs (like Gold Diggers of 1935), but also in those – signed Minnelli or Fleming – whose choreographies he created for MGM. This work gives the full measure of this essential character of Golden Age Hollywood… Florence Colombani

“Busby Berkeley, the man who stared dizzily”by Séverine Danflous and Pierre-Julien Marest, Marest publisher, March 2024, 484 pages, 24 euros.

The detective story: confessions of a spy

Kim Philby is a legend. It is him that John le Carré takes as a model for his Mole after having served his majesty’s MI6 for three decades and, at the same time, out of communist conviction, the USSR. In this exceptional testimony, his diary, first published in 1968, we discover his journey in Franco’s Spain, in the heart of London during the Blitz or in the Middle East. With the most famous double agent, we are afraid of being unmasked at any time.

The one who was the correspondent of the British secret services in the United States recounts the rivalry of the CIA with the FBI in the 1950s and numerous clandestine operations. Like this one, when Philby was the boss of MI6’s Istanbul office, where he formed a cell intended to infiltrate Soviet Georgia Bay of Pigs style (with the same result). Or these attempts to prepare an insurrection in Soviet Ukraine with the help of former followers of Stepan Bandera. History is never far from current events. Romain Gubert

“My silent war”by Kim Philby, Nouveau Monde, April 2024, 326 pages 9.90 euros.

And also

Movie theater. Civil War : it’s the film we’ve been waiting for about America and its demons. Alex Garland imagines that the United States has split into two camps and is starting a new Civil War. In a country over-armed and polarized as never before, the result is breathtaking, powerful, terrifying, especially after the assault on the Capitol. Indoors

Exposure. Bemberg Foundation : redesigned scenography, revised spaces, new acquisitions… The Hôtel d’Assézat, in Toulouse, which houses the collection of Georges Bemberg (1915-2011), reopens after three years of work. The opportunity to discover a rich collection including Bonnard, Matisse, Braque, Gauguin, Picasso, but also Titian and Tintoretto.

Series. Fiasco : eight years later FivePierre Niney and François Civil (with Vincent Cassel, Géraldine Nakache, Leslie Medina) find their friend Igor Gotesman in Fiasco (on Netflix), crazy series very inspired by The Office and the world of Ricky Gervais. The story of a director who experiences a nightmare on the set of his first film, a tribute to his grandmother, a resistance fighter during the Second World War. Just for Laughs.