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| Detail of a horse by Delacroix |
As
the male carnivore is away this week, and I've got no money to buy
fresh food, I'm relying on what's left in the kitchen cupboad:
porridge oats and red wine. If they were good enough for the hero's horse in The Horseman on the Roof, they're good enough for me.
Le hussard sur le toit (1995 movie based on an historical novel) is the romantic love story between Juliette Binoche, at her most wistfully lovely, and Olivier Martinez as a passionate Italian liberator irresistible to women and animals, fighting fate and cholera in the towns and yearningly beautiful landscape of Provence in 1832.
Never has disease, death, and self-sacrifice looked so edifying and exquisitely dressed; the story and film-making transcend melodrama to find poetic truth, with the nonchalent realism that only French cinema has managed to achieve in the period costume genre.
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| Corot: Orphée ramenant Eurydice des enfers Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
