Bonne Vacances

This is a seaside-destination holiday film that has a beautifully judged scent of torpor, emptiness, drift, dog-day, and inconsequentiality.

A believable teenage girl (why do French actresses effortlessly do Teenage, while their Brit equivalents are struggling to be any more convincing than Byker Grove) visits a tatty seaside town with her paralysingly beach-ready and hopelessly self-regarding cousin, on the rebound from a brief failed marriage. Men notice them. There is flirting and posturing from the adults, already far too attached to their dramas.

The most wonderful element to this is the disregarded, unhip, virtually deserted town all the heaving sexual gamesmanship (and gameswomanship) plays itself out against. There's literally no audience worth the mention for the adults' arch, bored manipulation of eachother. Beautifully judged stuff.

Family Snapshot

"Tokyo Story" is a static and glacially paced film, with the camera consistently below the eyeline of a person sat on a mat on the floor. Slightly dowdy, dusty interiors, shot from the disregarded far sides of rooms, lit by diffused sunlight and un-shaded bulbs predominate.

I've never seem Kabuki theatre before, but assume that the quietly effective use of the almost unchanging expressions on the mother and father's faces, is what gives the power to their responses to the bumptiously, offhandedly graceless behaviour of their children, whom they've travelled a long distance to Tokyo to see.

There's genuine heartbreak in the moments when the preoccupation of in-laws and high-minded social probity mean that the elderly parents are essentially homeless for the night, and simply work out for themselves where they might best be housed.

It's a very simple moral universe, but a wonderfully restrainedly drawn one.

Kitchenette

It's a brilliantly titled play, as even the characters don't have surnames; they're identified only as 'Peter, grilled fish', 'Hans, fry', 'Gaston, grill'. The set is a cluttered dance-floor of a space, with some wonderful choreographed moments of stirring, whisking, spooning, and triumphant pouring and a celebratorily deranged act-ending danse-culinaire.

The pan-European staff lapse into French and German, East-End slang regularly, giving the dialogue a smorgasbord texture, and Tom Brooke as Peter, the German fish cook is noisily the best of the cast: aloof, arch, stagey and very fragile.