Two excellent films in the one evening.  First up was my last foray into the French Film Festival with a delightful comedy that poked fun at many French preoccupations: immigration, wartime deportations, laicity, the war in Algeria, citizenship, bureaucracy, politics.

Our heroine in The Names of Love cries as she joins the rest of the left in voting for Chirac to keep out Le Pen in the shock election of 2002 when Jospin was eliminated in the first round.  She's even more upset when she accidentally votes for Sarko in 2007.

But then she is particulary keen on making rightwingers into better people, but believing in the slogan make love not war that's what she does and a period between her sheets seems to work wonders of political re-education.  And she's happy to marry for identity papers from time to time.

Of course love intervenes when Baya meets a man who seems as staid and bourgeois as she is wacky and revolutionary.  It's great fun.  I can't find a British review of it so here's what the Vancouver Observer had to say.

Then a film about another vivacious woman but one who was much more troubled than Baya.  My Week With Marilyn is not a comedy though there is plenty of humour in it. Marilyn Monroe came to Pinewood studios in 1956 to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier and this is a memoir of that event by the then young third assistant director (whose family affiliations I have learnt thanks to The Guardian review) with whom Marilyn developed a friendship.

It's a lovely film with amongst many others excellent performances from Kenneth Branagh as Olivier and Judy Dench as Sybil Thorndyke and an outstanding Michelle Winter as Monroe.  For me she captured the character entirely, both physically and emotionally and I hope she gets a just reward come the Oscars.