Reviews

Films

A Comedy of Power

Directed by Claude Chabrol; starring Isabelle Huppert, Francoise Berleand, Patrick Bruel

Claude Chabrol, now 77 and still going strong after making the Nouvelle Vague's first feature film Le Beau Serge 50 years ago, has never been as indulgent toward the bourgeoisie as Honore is. He's stayed the course as the most productive director of his generation, and A Comedy of Power, while not his best, is a smooth, perceptive thriller tinged with suave Gallic cynicism and resigned anger.

A svelte Isabelle Huppert, slimmer and less freckled than in her youth, makes her seventh appearance in a Chabrol film, playing a tough investigative judge turning over the corrupt president of a national corporation (edgy, heavy Francois Berleand), who thinks he's above the law. There are two knockout performances here, and the French title, L'Ivresse de Pouvoir, conveys more accurately than the English one how power intoxicates its possessor.

The Guardian

Chromophobia

Directed by Martha Fiennes; starring Ben Chaplin, Penelope Cruz, Damian Lewis

Martha Fiennes has gathered a strong British cast for the pretentiously named Chromophobia.

A panoramic portrait of corruption, responsibility and exploitation in Tony Blair's Britain, it links people ranging from a sad foreign prostitute (Penelope Cruz) dying of cancer in a damp basement to a sad rich bitch (Kristin Scott Thomas) living in modernist luxury while devoted to fashionable art and haute couture.

It's ambitious, schematic, heavy-handed, and like numerous recent films, offers Norman Foster's Gherkin tower as a monument to Mammon.

The Guardian

Books

Sacred games

Vikram Chandra's sprawling second novel Sacred Games, set in Mumbai, is a thriller, mob saga and police procedural full of sex and violence that also addresses themes like the partition of India and nuclear terrorism.

It involves a gang boss who tells his life story (interrupted only briefly by his suicide) and an insomniac Sikh police inspector who investigates him.

Paul Gray, the New York Times reviewer, called Sacred Games an "immense, demanding novel" - it is 947 pages long, not counting the glossary of the Hindi words left untranslated in the text - and Gray noted that Chandra is "paying homage to both Ian Fleming and James Joyce".

New York Times Syndicate

Secret life

Vera Atkins was still an imposing figure, with a haughty demeanor and an upper-class accent, when she died in her 90s in 2000. During World War II, she had overseen the network of British spies in France.

Sarah Helm, a British journalist, describes the workings of F Section, the French division of Britain's Special Operations Executive, in fascinating detail in A Life In Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII.

But Helm is most interested in Atkins' activity after the war, when she traveled through France and Germany in search of 100 missing agents, 12 women among them.

And Atkins, Helm discovered, had secrets of her own: Despite the aristocratic accent, she was a Romanian Jew. In the New York Times, William Grimes praised Helms' "stupendous job of reporting", which unearthed "enough material to generate a dozen Len Deighton novels".

New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 12/21/2007 page20)