How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

There's another Tilda Swinton movie out. I used to think she was too, er, removed from herself - a figure posing in a tableaux or something, not wanting to soil herself with the emotions of everyone around her.

But then I saw her as Eve and she was such a bundle of angry hopped-up sex, ripping the role apart with her bare teeth and hurtling over the top without looking down to see that she's ten miles above the surface of the earth and if she fell, it would no doubt be a nasty, smelly mess to clean up.

But she didn't fall, oh no.

The scene where she smears lipstick on her blouse in a fit of anger, or the one where she's trying on some piece of haute couture lingerie, strutting and tugging at the utterly sheer fabric that's giving her a wedgie both front and back- it's a size too small for her - parading her stuff in front of a baffled man waiting for his wife to come out of the changing room. Holy shit.

The movie itself is pretty flawed, some parts are awful. But her performance turns the thing into a spectacular film. It's weird how so many of the greatest movies just seem to crash and burn at the end, like Apocalypse Now, or sometimes on and off throughout the whole movie, crashing and then picking themselves up from the wreckage only to crash again - My Own Private Idaho or Satyricon, for instance.

I wonder if it's true that Tilda Swinton is a countess or a baroness or some other member of the English peerage. As if that would mean anything. I don't like to admit I still have that sad American fascination with noble blueblood types. - Francis S.