内容摘要：“My ultimate goal has always been family time — something to do together that’s engaging, but also important to get them off their phones or iPads,” Leebove said.

“My ultimate goal has always been family time — something to do together that’s engaging, but also important to get them off their phones or iPads,” Leebove said.

The actors had to brush up, too.Voisin says he knew about “the victories and defeats of Bonaparte,” but had to learn from scratch the story of Carême.

Lyna Khoudri, who plays mysterious Henriette — who may or may not be on her lover’s side — notes: “We’re making a series about the heritage of French culinary art, a story I didn’t know. I found out why we’re so famous for our cuisine in France.”Da Luz had studied the period at school but dove into it more deeply once she was cast. There was not a lot to read about Agathe, but she read everything she could find. And then, she says, “I let my imagination go,” inspired to bring a woman out of the shadows of history.Jérémie Renier, who plays Talleyrand (actual name Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord), also engaged in extensive research. “It’s a character who has led a thousand lives,” he said, “who lived through almost a century of history, at a time when people were guillotined for not much. So ... he must have been very clever.”

The show, for Renier, is in large part about ambition. “All these characters have a goal, a dream to achieve,” he says. “The question is, what are we ready to win or lose to achieve this dream?”The production is lush throughout the whole season, beginning with the gorgeous country homes — filmmakers scouted 60 of them, and chose 12. They created new dinner services to dress the tables, and made 3,000 candles to light all the candelabras — different hues for different rooms. There were 96 vases of fresh flowers at all times in Talleyrand’s home, according to production notes.

As for costumes, some 1,000 of them were made from scratch, because the filmmakers had a specific vision of clothing that was not period-accurate but also not completely modern.

Then there was that crazy banquet that ends the season. Filming at the Parc de Saint-Cloud, which boasts dramatic fountains, the production created a giant tent covered with “an extraordinary amount of velvet,” and loaded down the tables with food, including a 60 kilo (132 pound) leg of lamb and a 50 kilo (110-pound) tuna.The seas were particularly rough that day, with winds up to 35 knots, common for the North Sea but also not what one might call safe. Chris and Dave were in the middle of their work when they heard the urgent calls to abort: The dynamic positioning system in the support vessel above had failed and they were in drift. Chris scrambled to maneuver out of the pipeline corridors, but his umbilical got caught. For a brief, awful moment he’s the anchor to the ship above, but soon enough the cord snapped, and he was thrown back to the ocean floor in pitch black with no coms, no heat and very little hope for survival. News articles about the incident clock his backup oxygen supply as being closer to five or six minutes – perhaps the movie wanted to give the audience a little buffer.

If this sounds at all familiar, it may be because it was made into a documentary, also called “Last Breath” and released in 2019. While it was well-received, some true stories are just too gripping to exist solely in that form. It’s not exactly a surprise that a narrative film was made as well. There’s a good track record of recent complimentary adaptations — think Ron Howard’s “13 Lives” and “The Rescue” about the Thai boys soccer team stuck in the cave.This one was made by Alex Parkinson, the same director who co-directed the doc, and it’s a well-executed narrative interpretation that doesn’t get in its own way with padding. Harrelson gets to be the wise mentor who really doesn’t want to lose someone on his last mission. Liu gets to flex his action muscles (literally and figuratively) in a modest but solid role. And they don’t go out of their way to shoehorn in a villain — this is just a group of people trying their best to save a life.

The only real problem, if one can even call it that, is that it’s so short. The film doesn’t take liberties with stretching out the timeline much at all and after 93 minutes, the whole thing is over. It feels strange to want a movie to be longer, but in the case of “Last Breath” I was both desperate for it to end, for anxiety reasons, and also wanting more.“Last Breath,” a Focus Features release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 Motion Picture Association for “brief strong language.” Running time: 93 minutes. Three stars out of four.