Post-Easter Tuesday. Two films to report - Daddy Nostalgie (These Foolish Things in English, which I prefer to the French title) and The Neverending Story, which most people remember for the Limahl title song rather than the film.

First the easy one - I saw The Neverending Story in the late 80s at Birmingham's Midland Arts Centre in an afternoon performance full of children. Not the most convivial atmosphere, but I recollect being swept along by a good story. It stands up well today - what it manages to thankfully avoid are those regulation cutesy kid moments that no film today involving children can be without. Well maybe Billy Eliot, where the yuk factor came in the last reel when B.E. grew up. In fact in Neverending Story the child actors really came up trumps. The most moving scene was when the horse got swallowed up in the swamp. Such a loss would never be shown to children now.

Daddy Nostalgie is a film I saw on its release in Cambridge at the Arts Cinema. It really had a strong affect on me, and for years I was looking for the VHS tape. It was available briefly then disappeared, in the UK at least. So when I saw the DVD at FNAC the other week I snapped it up at full price too!

In a sense what is more important than the story to me is the fact that it had two of the greatest British exile actors of the late 20th - Dirk Bogarde and Jane Birkin. Well perhaps Birkin is not such a great actor, but she is unsurpassed as an institution. The chemistry between the two is very strong on screen. There is a palpable sense of the damage the father has done on the daughter, emotionally. Part of the power of the film is the realisation of this by Daddy, and how the years of selfish hedonism has inevitably left a hollow feeling near the end of his life. It's in the acting that this comes. There is a wonderful piece of Bogarde acting in the scene about halfway on the terrace with the daughter. He ends a longish speech (including the line about his horror at the possibility of ending up in retirement on the South Coast with gardens full of gnomes hating anything foreign - this had such an affect on me at the time that I am writing from a foreign country, never intending to return to the sceptic isle) with the words, delivered with a smile, "I was spoilt rotten - and I loved every minute of it." Then as he sits back, a shadow is cast across his face, and you realise that this isn't the case at all. Or if it was, it was all for nothing.

Birkin makes a powerful performance too. The lonely wanderings on the beach where she seems very girl like. The switching from French to English, which by the way annoyed an american commentator on IMDb - she said she found it annoying and unnecessary. Well, that's how we talk missy. It's not for effect...

A re-occurring image is that of birds wheeling around in the sky. To me this indicates a spirit trying to escape but not being able to - just circling, maybe just contemplating the past and not moving on.

Re-viewing the film I appreciate Odette Laure's performance. She seems to embody this french woman of a certain age, the style, the way she holds and lights her cigarettes, the bedclothes, watching the pope on the typically french inappropriately placed TV. And the frost with Daddy and strange bond with the daughter all work very well. Her's is the underrated performance, but vital to put the other two in context.

The film's opening is one of my favourite first reels - the view of Paris apartments as dawn rises filmed in stop-motion is very haunting. The end is wonderful and memorable as well - Birkin walking lost through the grey city of Paris in the rain. That image stuck with me the strongest from the original viewing.