Mick LaSalle talks about The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses ($24.95). In this new book, the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle offers up an informal and fascinating exploration of contemporary French cinema and its brilliant array of female actors – actresses with a difference.
“LaSalle understands how women in French movies are allowed to be deeper, older, and more real than most Hollywood characters.”—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Mick LaSalle has been the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1985. He is the author of Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) and Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002), both of which were named “Book of the Month” by Turner Classic Movies. LaSalle has been a panelist at the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals and has served on the jury for the Cinema for Peace Gala in Berlin.
“France, a country that is serious about love, has a cinema that adores its women. In this fascinating exploration of contemporary French actresses, Mick LaSalle gives riveting interviews with both headliners and the lesser-known stars and offers astute analysis of how they’ve evolved in the rich soil of their native cinema. He provides a mouthwatering list of films—mostly unseen in this country. The unfavorable comparison with Hollywood and timid American distributors is inevitable. How can it be, how can we have let this happen? I want to see them all, and LaSalle’s compendium is both a splendid reference book and a call to arms.”—Molly Haskell, author and critic
“Mick LaSalle’s informal, lucid prose brings alive the magic of French cinema and its brilliant array of female actors, contrasting them with their American equivalents and, in so doing, revealing the distinctive character of French filmmaking. This book is especially valuable for its first-hand interviews with some of France’s greatest screen actresses.”—Peter Cowie, Film historian, author, and founding editor of the International Film Guide
