This is so brilliant!
Tinsel Korey has an amazing voice! If you're in the US, we hope you already have your DVD!
Remember, though, for the rest of us in the UK/Ireland... we've to wait until March 12th to get our copy... *sigh*
"Full marks to Pattinson for tearing into his Edward Cullen persona
with plenty of arse-bearing sex scenes and peevishness."
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All grown up: Robert Pattinson plays a villain in his new film, Bel Ami |
Having made his name as Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe must now spend the years ahead stamping on his childhood image. He could take a lesson from Robert Pattinson, who appears in the astonishing new film Bel Ami, as the most charismatically repellent leading man I can recall. He makes Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses look like a puppy. In another piece of counter-casting, Kristin Scott Thomas plays a lovesick matron, humiliatingly scorned. It is an unsettling premise that a handsome young man can pick off the wives of powerful men. Newspaper proprietors and politicians will keep a much closer eye on their domestic arrangements after seeing this film.
Set in a church, in the first scene Pattinson's ambitious ex-soldier Georges Duroy plays (very determinedly) a game of seduction with Older Woman Kristin Scott Thomas. In the second, Pattinson convincingly plays a drunk Duroy in a cabaret. That's when he runs into the obnoxious publisher Charles Forestier, who will inadvertently assist Duroy in his ascent in Parisian society.
The third scene is set at the Forrestier dinner table. The issue of class is all too apparent — Duroy doesn't know which knife to use — and so are the various seduction games despite all the surface talk about life in the desert and French colonial politics. Even though Pattinson, Christina Ricci, and Uma Thurman are perfectly fine —Pattinson's facial expressions, a mix of shyness and self-assertion, are particularly impressive — the scene-stealer here is Scott Thomas: "I was told that the [desert] sands … sing?"
In the fourth scene, Duroy performs a different sort of seduction, as a little girl falls for her playful "bel ami." The brief follow-up scene features Pattinson/Duroy and his conquest Ricci/Clotilde de Marelle in his dingy apartment.
Though a low-budget production, Bel Ami — as its trailer (and even its poster) promised — is gorgeous to look at.