The Swing

This could hardly be more different from Adlon's earlier Celeste; where that sombre duologue crept at a stately (not to say sluggish) pace, The Swing fairly races along as it traces the changing fortunes of a French/German family in Munich towards the end of the 19th century. It's not merely the colourful sequence of events - parties, theatre visits, hesitant romantic trysts, country outings - that hold the interest, but also the generally playful tone and the energetic, even eccentric direction, which manages to invest the most mundane of domestic occurrences with a bright, breathless vitality. The film effortlessly avoids the dull conventions of TV costume drama by means of its breezy way with narrative and its eye-catching style.