高中英语 Module 3 Adventure in Literature and the Cinema A famous director训练 外研版必修5.docVIP

PAGE  A famous director ON the sliding scale of Frenchness, “Angel-A” — a low-budget black-and-white romance in which a desperate couple travel the streets of Paris, alternately running from and chasing after a gangster as they debate the nature and meaning of existence — would seem at first glance to register pretty high. Unless you were a member of the French cinematic elite, in which case your animus toward the writer-director, Luc Besson, long the most Hollywood of French filmmakers, might make you suspect its authenticity. When it opened in Paris in December 2005, critics were predictably hostile: Under the headline “Besson Stupid and Talkative,” the reviewer for the newspaper Libération sneeringly wrote, “Besson thinks he can buy himself the title of auteur, but all he attains is a parvenu’s vulgarity.” In the United States, Mr. Besson is primarily known as a superior director of stylish, mayhemic, even soulful films like “La Femme Nikita” and “Léon: The Professional.” But in France, across Europe and throughout Asia he is a bona fide celebrity: auteur and entrepreneur, star maker and mogul, and a first-class purveyor of blockbuster escapist fantasy. Over a 30-year career he has not only directed 10 features (Sony Pictures Classics will release “Angel-A” here on May 25) but has also written and produced dozens more, including a handful of the most commercially successful French movies ever. In the process he has almost single-handedly dragged French cinema, kicking and screaming, from the art house into the multiplex. To the chagrin of French critics and cinephiles, the scale of this success has reoriented French filmmaking away from the literary-intellectual tradition for which it is famed. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amelie,” a sentimental crowd pleaser that straddled Hollywood and French romantic comedy conventions, would be unthinkable without Mr. Besson; so too the slick, explosive big-budget genre films like “The Crimson Rivers” and “Brotherhood of the Wo