Scottish ceremony blog

Nine-year old Anna (Nina Kervel) leads a happy life with her well-to-do
Spanish lawyer dad, Fernando (Stephano Accorsi), and French glam magazine
writer mom, Marie (Julie Depardieu). But, this stable world is about to turn
upside down when her parents are bitten by the bug to right the world's wrongs,
disrupting the girl's idyllic life, and Anna will "Blame It on Fidel."

Robin:



Julie Gavras (daughter of the iconic Costas) makes her feature film debut
(her first film was the documentary, "Le Corsaire, Le Magician, Le Voleur
et Les Enfants") with a wonderful little story seen through the eyes of precocious
little Anna.

Things begin to break down in Anna's secure, Catholic school-nurtured life
when her Aunt Marga (Mar Sodupe) and cousin Pilar (Raphaelle Molinier) arrive
on the de la Mesa family doorstep. Marga's husband was killed by Generalissimo
Francisco Franco's troops in the guerilla war against fascism in Spain. Marga's
leftist beliefs rub off on Fernando and Marie and they make plans to save
the world or, at least, part of it. They move out of their spacious home
into more proletariat digs where they make plan to go to Chile to take part
in Salvador Allende's bid for that country's presidency. This shift to the
left by the de la Mesa couple means that Anna?s once stolid life is going
to be turned asunder.

"Blame It on Fidel" is wry political drama that is, in fact, a comedy about
a little girl who just wants things to be as they were before. Anna excels
at her catechism class and begins a transformation, with the help of Fidel
Castro-hating housekeeper Filomena (Marie-Noelle Bordeaux), to conservative
thinking the polar opposite of her liberal parents. Of course, their naïve
optimism also helps push the youngster to the right.

This sounds like serious stuff but, with Anna at the film's center, there
is a light, good-natured feeling to "Blame It on Fidel." Anna, in her new,
cramped home, must deal with the constant comings and goings of her parents
and their leftist activist friends - the 'barbudos,' as Filomena calls them,
the 'bearded' in reference to Castro's famous whiskers. The youngster is
so smart, though, she easily engages these men in political discussion. In
one delightful scene, Anna plays store with them to get these barbudos to
understand the need for a capitalist system. This is both a deeply philosophical
scene and one that is laugh out-loud funny. Young Nina Kervel commands the
screen as few young actors can and is the real draw to this terrifically
complex kids-in-the-world tale.

It helps, too, that helmer Garvas has a first class cast of adults revolving
around Anna's world. From her mom and dad, to her grandparents (Martine Chevallier
and Olivier Perrier), to the trio of barudos, Emilio (Francisco Lopez Ballo),
Pierre (Francisco Pizarro Saenz de (Urtury) and Le Barbu (Alexander Gavras),
all flesh out the characters beyond their two-dimensional political lives.
Even Anna's younger brother, Francois (Benjamin Feuillet), gets shrift as
the sibling Anna must tolerate, sometimes to subtle comic relief moments.
Julie Gavras handles her large cast with a sure hand.

Gavras adapts novelist Domitilla Calamai's "Tutta colpa di Fidel" (with collaborator
Arnaud Catherine) and creates a period world that is turbulent and exciting.
The helmer and her first-rate production crew capture the early 1970's political
activism in France while also showing the influence of the Catholic Church
on such an intelligent mind as Anna's. Historical moments of the time - the
death of Charles de Gaulle in 1970, the rise of Salvador Allende in Chile
and his fall to a CIA-backed military junta in 1973, the persecution by Franco
of the leftists in Spain - all get good attention.

"Blame It on Fidel" is an adult-level film that does a great job of giving
a child's view of a world in the throes of change. I do hope that this gets
a kids audience, somewhere, as Anna is a great role model for her peers.
This is a spectacular feature film debut for director Gavras and its wonderful
little moppet star. I give it an A-.

Julie Gavras, daughter of Costa, makes an portentous main attraction coming out with
a work that shows her dad's political chops in a craze all her own. 
This is simply story of the best film's even from a child's point of view. 
Adapted from a story by Gavras and Arnaud Cathrine, this exquisitely told
tale presents us with Anna de la Mesa (the astounding Nina Kervel-Bey), a
pampered princess angered that she have to share her home with an unknown aunt
and cousin from Spain. Marga (Mar Sodupe) has been extricated from the country
by her solicitor brother Fernando (Stefano Accorsi, "L'Ultimo bacio") after
her anti-Franco manage was killed.  Now Anna's father's guilt leads
him and his feminist ball Marie (Julie Depardieu, "A Darned Long Engagement")
into a leftist lifestyle that rips the rug out from under their daughter,
who goes kicking and screaming into a smaller apartment, a world peopled with
foreign sitters and bearded revolutionaries, curious foods and forced removal
from her valued Divinity class.
Time after time hilarious (watch Anna attempt to movement 'shop' with three Communist
barbudos) and always exceptionally intelligent, "Blame It on Fidel" shows
both sides of its state arguments and gives its pouting anti-hero an
open intelligence that habitually leaves her parents' arguments stranded (what
is the difference between sheep and solidarity, for example).  Playing
the type of brood girl who only must find out of the closet on meridian in manner, issue Nina
Kervel-Bey could so easily have grow unpleasant with her baby fat lour,
but the perplexing state of affairs of affairs she finds herself in diminish on a consummation
that is fascinating to watch.  Gavras's direction of the laddie as adult
and the adults often infantile is pitch perfect.  Hands down, of the
half films previewed in the service of the MFA's 12th Boston French Coating Entertainment, "Blame
it on Fidel" is the best discovery.  It's also one of the best films
of the year.
A

A schoolboy is suspected of murder in this Australian-British thriller touch off at a boarding clique in the UK. Toni Collette is Sally Rowe, a police psychologist who spends much of the screen interviewing posh, sulky Alex (Eddie Redmayne) in a wavering English apart. Alex denies shooting his equally posh, sulky classmate Nigel (Tom Sturridge), and as he relates his version of events, flashbacks show how bright taxidermist Nigel began to suck in Alex into his night-time world.

And so Rowe requirement venture to struggle the actuality from the supposedly brilliant young have any objection to. But debut writer-administrator Gregory J Read makes it hard to care, offering up superficial, monotonal characters (you never escape the feeling that you’re watching pretty boys playing psychopaths). Interesting plot developments – such as Alex’s murderous crush on a schoolgirl – are all too in a word, buried under heavy-handed scoring and semi-intelligible waffle about secret societies, pacts and so on. The ending is unclear: the old descriptive-flashback dido might take helped in this case. Toni Collette must have owed the steersman quite a bias.

Easy to pick holes in Huston’s colourful gore at Melville’s master-work, which opens with breathtaking boldness as a solitary wanderer appears over the brow of a hill, comes to camera to proclaim his ‘Call me…Ishmael’, then leaves it to follow in the wake of his odyssey. Granted the great white whale is significantly less impressive when lifting bodily out of the lots to repress the Pequod than when cardinal glimpsed one moonlit night, a dim deathly white mass of menace lurking in a outrageous sea. Granted, too, a lightweight Ahab (Peck) and a pitifully weak Starbuck (Genn). But there are marvy things here: Ishmael’s alarming initiation into the whaling community at the tavern; Pa Mapple’s sermon (superbly delivered by Welles); Queequeg’s casting of the bones and his preparation for death; nearly all the whaling scenes. Lent a doughty total homogeneity by Ray Bradbury’s intelligent adaptation, by colour grading which gives the images the tonal importance of old whaling prints, and by the discreet use of a commentary drawn from Melville’s text which imposes the resonance of story, it is repeatedly staggeringly goodness.