Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
£3.80
A razor-sharp and achingly funny memoir of the men and movies that shaped one woman’s life…
A unique memoir, ‘Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers’ is the story of how a young female film critic’s love-life is affected and nearly ruined by her obsession with male movie stars. As her increasingly hapless hunt for the right man unfolds and her television and newspaper career unravels, our heroine finally begins to understand that difficult truth: that life is not like the movies.
Entwined with the narrative of her real-life love affairs is a kaleidoscope of digressions on great screen actors – her dream-life with Gerard Depardieu, a personal ad seeking out Tom Cruise, a disastrous climactic encounter with Jeff Bridges. It’s a helter skelter ride through love and the movies which reads like a screwball comedy. And the screwball is our heroine, who seems to know everything about movies and the human heart, and nothing about anything else.
Written in a fresh and utterly engaging voice, ‘Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers’ is both moving and hilarious, a bittersweet and endearingly honest one-off.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Fourth Estate (3 April 2009) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 704 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 320 pages |
by Paul McDonald
quick service excellent book!
by Tucker
Part autobiography mixed with fantasy movie stars. Quite an awkward format. Funny, but goes on a bit, skip read a lot of the film fantasy stuff.
by Gary 65
I have tried to get through this book but to be honest I found it hard going. Antonia is at her best when talking film and the various actors involved. But when the story continues about her life and experiences is when I lose interest. The writing is disjointed and doesn’t tend to flow smoothly. You really have to be a film buff to get all the references but her comments about actors are spot on. I would be far more interested if this book focused only on film. She really is a good reviewer.
by Caroline Lawrence
‘You know how I knew I loved him? It’s those sequences in films of men getting up, getting dressed, going across the road to buy groceries, putting the kettle on – but on their own – those little private dances of the everyday. My favourite sequences. Michael Caine, David Hemmings, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Elliott Gould, brown paper bags, catfood, coffee pots, keys, the sorting of post, the handling of money, the pace at which the stairs are taken, the crossing of the road, yawns, toothbrushings, fingers and wrists, fingers and wrists.’
Antonia Quirke’s quirky book is a paean to men, to movies, to men in movies, to London… If you like any of those things you will love it, too, and like me, you won’t be able to put it down.
by Samrarick
Antonia Quirke’s style is completely beguiling. She swoons and persuades at the same time, so is able to appeal to heart and head. Who knows how much is autobiographical and who cares? And it made me dig out so many old DVDs – who could resist watching David Thewlis in Naked, or revisiting Gregory Peck films just to see how he wears slacks? Wonderful!
by Robert Machin
What a very strange book this is. Part highly personal film crit, part equally personal memoir of Antonia’s fragmented love life, the two conjoined by an approach to film (and film actors) which is more, shall we say, ‘physical’ than you would expect from Phillip Norman or David Thompson, and none the worse for that. An academic treatise it is not, but it does carry a substantial freight of opinion on what makes film great or otherwise, which for most people has a great deal more to do with emotion invested or inspired than it has to do with technique or any other factors.
I suspect Bridget Jones will be much cited in reviews of this book, but that would be lazy; though she’s also a twenty-something singleton, there is little to connect the Misses Quirke and Jones, and Ms Quirke is a much smarter cookie. The writing is great, often laugh-out-loud funny and the insights, into men and movies are occasionally really penetrating. I’m not absolutely sure that the two sides of the book fully coalesce, and the whole could do with trimming by maybe 25%, but it’s a lot of fun… like reading an apprentice
Nobody’s Perfect
.
by Amazon Customer
A great read
by Sebastian Scotney
Chapter 25, is wonderful, a hidden gem. It’s a hilarious reflection on promiscuity written as a massively uberlong, single, Proustian sentence. Clive Bell’s words about Proust describe the method: “the interminable dependent clauses, instead of following one another duckwise, go side by side, like horses driven abreast, and sometimes higgledy-piggledy like a flock of feeding starlings…” Antonia Quirke carries off the difficult feat in considerable style.