Roger Ebert, the beloved film critic who died in 2013 having done more than anyone else in history to turn arguing about movies into a mainstream American sport, once observed that “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.”
Big Swiss is a fluffy sex comedy with a dark underbelly. In fact, its dark underbelly has a darker underbelly, which is then startlingly fluffy. There are multiple trauma plotlines: Greta is emotionally stunted by her mother’s suicide when she was 13; Flavia is still coping with aftershocks from the assault that almost killed her; even Greta’s landlady, Sabine, has a dark secret and a recovery arc. Meanwhile, Flavia’s attacker has been released from prison and may be stalking her. It’s an abuse-themed love story with a dash of psychological thriller where everything is played for laughs. Somewhat miraculously, this mixture works. The voice is sharp, the plot is compelling, the jokes are funny and sometimes startling, as the very best comedy is; it’s easy to forgive the odd moments when two elements clash.
Female novelists seem to be getting a bit of a bashing these days. Some literature courses offer trigger warnings for anyone frightened by the “toxicity” of Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey. Tom Rachman’s The Imposters doesn’t let them off too lightly either. His first novel, The Imperfectionists, focused on journalists. Here he offers a convoluted study of a different sort of writer, the ageing novelist Dora, in a treatment that is not unfeeling, though needlessly contorted.
“I Felt the End Before It Came” is Cox’s way of putting his chaotic life experiences into words. In so doing, he has offered up a language for others who might still be searching for the right thing to say.
“We choose our objects and our places of memory,” Annie Ernaux writes near the start of “Look at the Lights, My Love,” “or rather the spirit of the times decides what is worth remembering.” It’s a statement that could apply to her whole career. Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, has long been a writer who occupies the middle ground between experience and recollection, between the life that is lived and the one that is recalled.