A French Picture Show

French art house film meets fashion shoot meets storyboard meets slide show meets silent film. A French Picture Show, by Thoman Zanon-Larcher and Jules Wright, showing at the The Wapping Project (11. Feb - 10. Apr 10), is an odd meeting of half realised artistic concepts, concepts which together test the limits of various forms of narration - fashion, photography, film, music and theatre - in a dreamlike creation. The overall effect is like a flirtation - a mysterious, intriguing flirtation that leaves only a hazy mark, much like the light lingering of scent after someone has kissed your cheek - barely discernible except to those who have been similarly kissed.

In The Wapping Project's draughty basement exhibition room, in the midst of a floor strewn with broken chalk (to evoke the landscape of Cognac, where the story is partially set), sit two rows of shabby chic, vintage, red-velvet covered cinema seats. Before them hangs a cinema screen, upon which 80 photographs are flashed up; photographs which silently tell a story - a love story of happiness, tragedy, loss, betrayal, passion, sex and disillusionment, and which, despite any absence of dialogue, manages to have a powerful narrative thread, even flashes of a back story where necessary. The scenes are a mixture of being invasively raw, in their unabashed stealing of seemingly intimate private moments, and extraordinarily stagey, as if having been literally taken from a fashion magazine (the clothes are all designer, and have been carefully styled, and have, in various collected groups, been featured elsewhere as stand alone fashion stories). The characters move from London to Paris to Cognac, from kitchen to vineyard, orchard to bedroom, school to metro carriage. With its captivating classical score that's dreamy, wistful, and tragic, it's a haunting story composed of elements which really stay with you... abandoned in a bar in a ballgown... staring out of the train window, glassy eyed as the world crumbles... the first kiss in an orchard on a crisp, cold day... how far apart two people can be from one another whilst sharing the same bed...