peter’s journey

There is no record of what happened during the trip by boat from independent Brazil to Europe, made by D. Pedro I of Brazil and IV of Portugal, with their companions, between April and June 1831, to come to fight their brother D. Miguel in The Civil War. This film by Laís Bodanzky, a Portuguese-Brazilian co-production, speculates on the event, but it does so in a way that is much more fanciful and allegorical than realistic and plausible, applying elements of the specifications of the “awakened” left to the story, such as the obsession with slavery, “toxic masculinity” and gender ideology, not to mention the most absurd anachronisms (the English frigate has a black rear admiral with a Nordic name among the crew). Played by Cauã Reymond, D. Pedro is presented by the director as a man tormented by family and sentimental memories, delirious and suffering from impotence (hence him…) and despised by slaves and servants. To quickly forget.

paris 13

Jacques Audiard, author of detectives like “On My Lips” or “From So Much Beating My Heart Stopped”, and raw dramas like “Rust and Bone” and “Dheepan”, seems to be out of his territory in “Paris 13”, which he co-wrote with directors Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, based on comics by American artist Adrian Tomine. Shot in black and white, reminiscent of the atmosphere of French cinema of the 1960s, the film follows the journeys and family, professional and, above all, sentimental and sexual problems of a quartet of millennials (three women and one man) who They live and work in the Parisian neighborhood of the Olympics. Apart from the episode of Nora, the deceased law student with a real estate vocation, who is mistaken for a “cam girl” similar to her and begins to be mocked by her classmates and bombarded with pornographic messages, “Paris 13” is a permanent and boring feeling of “déjà vu”, from the situations to the characters.

Eiffel

Directed by Martin Bourboulon, this was the most expensive French production of 2020 (it cost more than 20 million euros), about the construction of the Eiffel Tower by Gustave Eiffel and his team (based on a project by two engineers from his company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier), on the occasion of the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889. The film mixes the history of the construction of the monument with all the problems faced by the man who gave it its name, and a fictional love intrigue, in which Eiffel (Romain Duris), already married with children, meets a woman, also married (and with a friend of his), Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey), with whom he had an affair 30 years earlier, in Bordeaux, where he was building an “Eiffel” bridge was chosen movie of the week by The Observer and you can read the review here.