Penelope Cruz and Audrey Tautou - symbols of summer?
With GI Joe about to seize control of our cinema screens and no doubt mount a devastating raid on the nation’s box office who would have thought that the likes of French gamine Audrey Tautou or Spanish head-turner Penelope Cruz may end up as the symbol of summer 2009.
Last week Tautou’s well reviewed bio-pic Coco Before Chanel opened on a limited print run playing at 91 cinemas across the country – as opposed to Harry Potter’s all-conquering 568 screens – but the chic French language film managed to attract enough customers to push its way into 9th place in a top ten packed with highly expensive blockbusters like Bruno, Ice Age, The Proposal and The Taking of Pelham 123.
It may not of out-performed these films when you look at the total box office but it did when you look at the average takings for the sites where it is playing. Coco Before Chanel did far better than the majority of the Hollywood blockbusters in the top ten. In fact its site average of £4,651 is virtually three times that of Bruno – Sasha Baron Cohen’s bad taste comedy about a gay Austrian fashion journo.
Also what has got movie pundits all excited is that Coco’s opening week’s gross box office of £423,268 is higher than other recent foreign language hits that then went on to smash through the all-important £1 million barrier at the UK box office.
These super-hits include Audrey Tautou’s A Very Long Engagement, the thriller Tell No One, Caché (Hidden), the Edith Piaf bio-pic La Vie En Rose, the Oscar-winning The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and the Kristin Scott-Thomas’ relationship drama I've Loved You So Long.
Some pundits are already talking that Coco could also challenge the box office records set by other well received foreign language movies such as The Orphanage and Pan's Labyrinth as well as the period Chinese epic Curse of the Golden Flower.
With this in mind big things are also expected of Pedro Almodovar’s latest movie Broken Embraces starring his muse Penelope Cruz. This is Almodovar’s follow-up to his own £1 million plus hit Volver which quickly made the jump from the art-house circuit to mainstream cinema.
Broken Embraces has been described as an audience friendly thriller and with the presence of Penelope Cruz, who for part of the time sports a platinum blonde hairstyle is expected to do well.
Foreign language thrillers often do well with UK audiences as Tell No One and Hidden have proved. Later this month French star Vincent Cassel will be playing French gangster Jacques Mesrine in a two-part crime extravaganza Mesrine: Part 1 - Death Instinct and then later in the autumn Mesrine: Part 2 - Public Enemy No 1. The film co-stars French star Ludivine Sagnier who recently made audiences sit up and take notice in Swimming Pool and A Girl Cut In Two.
The fact that these films are starting to make serious inroads into the summer box office must tell cinema owners and film-makers that there is an audience for movies that are not mindless, effects-driven romps.
What we need are a range of films. We need family movies like Harry Potter and Ice Age but also need grown up movies like Public Enemies and films from other parts of the world with a different slant on life. Films that engage us and perhaps make us see things a little differently.