It's an odd deman, considering James Bond is a British icon. Despite the entente cordiale there's still a fractious relationship between the UK and France; we can't just look past a thousand years of attacking one another. They find us arrogant and rude; we find them, erm, arrogant and rude. The only thing we can properly agree on is that everyone else in the world is just awful.
However, here at Anya's Woolly Hat, we deal with facts, and the fact is, almost every time a French person turned up in a Bond film, the film was much better for it.
Leaving aside the brief hors d'oeuvres of Gallicism that was Mitsouko's Mme. La Porte, Thunderball delivered our first French dish in the form of Claudine Auger's Domino. Saucy, flirtatious, and seemingly incapable of wearing much more than a bikini, Claudine made a stunning impression. The fact that she wasn't burnt to a crisp by Fiona Volpe's hyper-awesomeness shows how good she must have been.
Moonraker, in 1979, was actually filmed in France, and in a manner that probably entitled the producers to tax breaks, the cast was filled with a certain ooh la la. Michel Lonsdale - or Michael, as he is credited in English-language productions; I'd love to go up to him and say "alright Mike?" and see how he reacts - took the part of Hugo Drax, and he was amazing. It's hard to convey how genuinely creepy and evil Drax is when Lonsdale seems to do so little. He manages to curl his tongue around the dialogue and twist it into a threat. "You appear with the tedious inevitability - pfft! - of an unloved season," is a pretty good line on the page, but that little snicker in the middle makes it terrifying. And his address to the perfect people aboard the space station is the greatest villain's speech in Bond movie history, bar none.
Filling out the lower ranks of the cast are a load of Euro-babes playing Drax's girls - I am slightly obsessed with the one with the perm - and Corinne Clery playing Corinne. As anyone who's read the excellent novelisation James Bond and Moonraker will know, this character was a Valley Girl called Trudi Parker in the original script. The casting of Ms Clery changed her into Ms Dufour, but nobody thought to change the dialogue, a source of frustration for Christopher Wood. He laments in his autobiography that Corinne was just too sophisticated for his dialogue, which makes me thankful we didn't see his original vision of a blonde bimbo bouncing around the chateau. It shows how casting a French actress can immediately add class and style to the most uninspired characters.
Carole Bouquet's Melina came next, an actress about as Hellenic as a croissant ("But I'm half-Greek," she purrs, in an accent straight out of 'Allo 'Allo). Bouquet's steely determination could have been off putting but her undeniable beauty and glimpses of humanity made her a great choice. She carried herself with intelligence and grace, convincing us that she was both an expert markswoman with a crossbow and also a highly qualified marine archaeologist (is marine archeologist an actual job?).
Fast forward to 1997 and we get Sophie Marceau's Elektra, and I have to reign myself in now from just typing "AWESOME" over and over. Marceau was sexy, frightening, provocative and disturbing - sometimes all within the same line of dialogue. "You can't kill me - you'd miss me," is delivered with a smirk and a flirt, even as she's calculating how to send Renard off to destroy Istanbul. I love Sharon Stone, the original choice for Elektra, but she would have been far too obvious in the part. Sophie Marceau keeps us guessing about her character's motives throughout, even after we've found out she's the super villain.
And then there's Eva Green as Vesper. I admit, the accent isn't great. She's just a little bit too English, while at the same time being a little bit too foreign. But her many other assets overwhelm this flaw. She's gorgeous, but in an unconventional way; for me she's at her best when she's not made up, in the "tuxedo" scene or on the beach with Bond. That's not to say she's not stunning when she strides into the Casino in a tight black dress. She's funny - never underestimate how hard it is to find a Bond Girl who can do comedy; just look at Halle Berry's eye rolling delivery in Die Another Day. She's clever, and she's heartfelt, and she's just wonderful. She does everything she needs to as Bond's first love.
Mathieu Almaric, our newest French villain, is very different to Drax. He's oily and weasly. I like that. I like that he's not all grand gestures and pontificating. I love the way he fights, all scrappy and desperate, grunting as he swings the axe at Bond, a bit desperate. Dominic Greene is not a great villain, but that's due to the script, not Almaric's performance.
Lastly, Berenice (Lim) Marlohe as Severine, and once again I have to hold back from gushing. She's barely in Skyfall, but she makes a hell of an impression - just that shot of her staring out of the apartment building, hair blowing in the wind, would blow you away, and then she turns up dressed as a dragon lady in Macao. It's all an act, and the way Marlohe lets the cracks show is wonderful. In a film full of great performances, this was the one that surprised me the most, and the one I was most grateful to have. Severine is the best "villain's girlfriend" in the series, and I wish they'd release the scenes she was cut out of - her excised entrance at the airport looks fierce as hell.
As you can, see there hasn't been a single incidence of a French person being in a Bond film where they haven't been eighty kinds of amazing (and before you say anything, Patrick Bauchau is Belgian). More French villains please. More French Bond Girls. It's a decision that no-one will regret. Not even Nigel Farage.
No comments:
Post a Comment