Snapshots & Stories
August 12th – 15th, 2025
Tuesday, August 12th
Paris – Saw the delightful Korean film A Normal Family (2023), reportedly the fourth adaptation of Dutch writer Herman Koch’s 2009 novel The Dinner. There may be a couple of plot twists too many, and some are telegraphed from miles away, but I was nonetheless enthralled by the overall quality of the acting and cinematography. I particularly enjoyed the way music is used throughout to comment on the action, sometimes with distinctly ironic overtones.
Wednesday, August 13th
Paris – A remarkable retrospective of Robert Doisneau’s Photographs at the Musée Maillol offered fascinating insights into the photographer’s œuvre beyond the well-known “street kids” scenes and the world-famous Baiser de l’Hôtel de ville. His work for Renault, for Vogue, his portraits of contemporary artists, even his assignments for advertising or his documentation of the changing landscapes of Paris’s suburbs revealed the many facets of a talent for dramatising the everyday. The exhibition was titled Instants donnés (“Given Moments”), implying a deliberate process that goes beyond the mere act of immortalising a fleeting scene.
Highlights included a little-known portrait of Liliane Montevecchi from a series devoted to dance, as well as the witty series Un regard oblique, which captures passersby reacting to a nude painting glimpsed through the window of Galerie Romi on Paris’s rue de Seine. Also memorable were the switch to colour photography and the curatorial choice to create a dialogue of sorts between some of Doisneau’s images and Aristide Maillol’s sculptures.
Thursday, August 14th
Paris – An exhibition of Eugène Boudin at the Musée Marmottan–Monet brought back memories of a Boudin retrospective I once saw in his hometown of Honfleur. Strangely, I derived more pleasure from looking at the photos I took during my visit than from observing the paintings in situ. Perhaps this was due to the decision to paint the gallery walls red, a choice I wanted to like but which may have inadvertently distracted from Boudin’s striking ability to combine painstaking attention to detail with deliberate departures from hyper-realistic representation.
Friday, August 15th
On a flight to New York — Watched Wicked Little Letters (2023), a British comedy that had vanished from Paris screens before I had the chance to catch it. The film brims with delightful performances from a roster of fine British actors, led by Olivia Colman and Anjana Vasan.
I also watched Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights (2025), a movie about real-life Mafia kingpins Frank Costello and Vito Genovese — both played by Robert De Niro, in what feels more like a gimmick than an actor’s tour de force. The film teems with clichés and offers little in the way of dramatic punch, except perhaps in the final scenes.
For all its shortcomings, it does provide a nostalgic glance at the evolution of American popular culture across several decades, including a short excerpt from What’s My Line? and several musical interludes from the Great American Songbook, like “Anything Goes.” Debra Messing and Kathrine Narducci, meanwhile, give first-rate performances as the mobsters’ wives.
And so, for now, the lights dim… until the next act.