She's Spanish (Elena Anaya, a familiar face from Sex and Lucia and Talk to Her), seven months pregnant and having an ultrasound scan. The film then cuts to Samuel and Nadia Pierret, a happily married Parisian couple, and the pace slows. It ends in an underpass where the quarry, whom we recognise as the ruggedly handsome north African actor Roschdy Zem (star of Days of Glory and Outside the Law) is seriously injured in a car crash just as he's about to be murdered. Our attention is hooked from the start by a chase through the night streets of Paris. Cavayé's new film (which he co-scripted with Guillaume Lemans) has a similar theme but takes place within a much shorter time span and is even better than Anything for Her. Paul Haggis's American remake, The Next Three Days, transposed to Pittsburgh and starring Russell Crowe, is much inferior. I'd travel from Calais to Lille to see it.Ī couple of years ago, Cavayé made a good thriller called Anything for Her (aka Pour elle) in which a happily married French schoolteacher turns in desperation to dangerous criminal activities to spring his wife from jail after her wrongful conviction for murder. This is all by way of saying that I'm away for a month and while I cannot recommend the principal summer entertainments being offered in British cinemas (steer clear especially of X-Men: First Class and The Hangover Part II), I highly recommend Fred Cavayé's Point Blank (aka A bout portant) for a good summer's night out. I was much younger when I made that cross- country journey to see Vilgot Sjöman's outrageous I Am Curious (Yellow) when it was banned in Britain. Would I go 180 miles to see it in Stockholm? That's what sports commentators call a big ask. So I was ready to interrupt my annual Scandinavian cinematic detox and drive 12 miles to the provincial capital of Karlstad if Malick's film was on. Torsby, Sven-Göran Eriksson's hometown to the north of where I'll be, has a main street called Biografgatan but no longer has a biograph. Well, I'm just off on holiday to a remote corner of Värmland, a Swedish province largely denuded of cinemas. Fortunately, the rights problem has been resolved and the picture opens here on 8 July. Owing to some dispute over distribution rights, it wasn't being shown in Britain, and the Calais multiplex was only screening a French-dubbed version. O ne of Time Out's movie critics, David Jenkins, began a piece last week by asking: "How far would you travel to see a film?" In his case, the answer was a day trip to Lille to see The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or winner.
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