Hanif Kureishi’s VENUS Inspiration, A GOOD YEAR Panned in France
by Andre Soares
"On most Fridays for years I have had breakfast with a group of friends in Notting Hill. Occasionally we would persuade a couple of younger women to join us. Mostly, though, it was only older men — actors, writers, theatre and film directors — people I’d known since I first began to work in London, in the mid-1970s. One morning we were talking about sleep and how to induce it, a popular and important subject among the over-40s. We discussed sleeping pills and sleeping draughts, and then about how to overcome the inevitable addiction. One of my friends and I would then shuffle off to the chemist, where he would get his pills. This friend said he found our Friday mornings to be particularly relaxing, compared to the difficulty of the rest of his life. He suggested he’d be happy sitting in a coffee shop, like old men he’d seen in Cairo, discussing world affairs while drinking tea and smoking a hookah."
That’s screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, 52, in "The debt to pleasure." In the article, Kureishi explains that he was inspired to write Venus after reading Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1961 novella Diary of a Mad Old Man, in which a dying old man becomes infatuated with his son’s cruel wife.
I’m not a Venus fan — much to the contrary — though the film has generally been well received in both the US and the UK, especially because of Peter O’Toole’s performance, which I find one of the worst of his long career.
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News Corp.’s Big Boss Rupert Murdoch called "a flop" the Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe collaboration A Good Year, based on Peter Mayle’s novel about an Englishman’s life in the French countryside. French critics have been calling it other things — though anything but Good.
Via Kim Willsher’s article "A Good Year? It’s no vintage Scott, say French critics" in The [London] Guardian:
"Now the French press has lined up to put the collective boot into the film critics describe as ‘appalling,’ ‘cliched,’ a ‘pitiful Anglo-Saxon caricature of France’ and just plain ‘boring.’
"The newspaper Libération was scathing about A Good Year, titled Une Grande Année (A Big Year) in French. It accused Scott of leaving no cliche unturned and of pandering to British middle-class fantasies of life in France.
"’Appalling from start to finish, A Good Year collapses under the weight of cliches of an ochre-tinted Luberon made for a wealthy Anglo-Saxon elite,’ it blasted."
Academy Awards 2007 - Nominated Producers
Berlin Film Festival 2007 Film Line-Up
Swiss Film Awards - 2006 Winners
Golden Beetle Swedish Film Awards - 2006 Winners
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