Oceans hopes to lead 2010 films
We look at some of the blockbusters coming to French cinema screens in 2010
FOUR years of diving in 75 expeditions to 50 locations worldwide have produced the dazzling underwater spectacle of Oceans, which opened in cinemas across France at the end of January.
Produced in France and Spain as a co-production with Walt Disney Studios, the €50m masterpiece is a triumph of film-making that delivers a powerful message on the need to respect the global environment above and below the water line.
Jacques Perrin, the co-director with Jacques Cluzaud, said he wanted "to show the extraordinary diversity and importance of the species that live in the ocean".
Coming just over 50 years after pioneer Jacques Cousteau first followed marine animals into their own habitat in his 1956 film The Silent World, Perrin and Cluzaud had to develop equipment that could follow swordfish at speeds of up to 40kph.
Perrin told Reuters: "We invented all these devices to be like fish amongst the fish, to witness what we have done to our environment and, when there are big catches or pollution, to see it as the fish see it."
Other French blockbusters to be launched this year include Marion Cotillard’s Sahara adventure-romance The Last Flight and Roselyne Bosch’s The Roundup (La Rafle) which tells the story of the detention of 13,000 Paris Jews in 1942.
Gérard Depardieu returns to the screen in Safy Nebbou’s costume drama L’Autre Dumas.
He plays author Alexandre Dumas in the film which sees the author’s friend and collaborateur Auguste Maquet pose as Dumas in order to seduce Charlotte, an admirer of the more famous author.
Novelist Marc Dugain makes his debut as a director with An Ordinary Execution, starring André Dussollier and Marina Hands, about a dying Stalin and his nurse.
British actress Kristin Scott Thomas stars in Crime d'Amour, an Alain Corneau film about a young woman’s bid for vengeance against her tyrant boss.
Elsewhere, the premiere of Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) was overshadowed by the suicide last year of star Lucy Gordon, who played Jane Birkin. Her performance in the Joann Sfar movie has been hugely praised.
The Printemps du Cinéma festival - which offers the chance to see any film in participating cinema in France for just €3.50 - runs from March 21-23.
