On s'est connus: Jeanne Moreau

I think of this as the iconic Moreau look. Bare face, cat eyes, unfussy hair, and the plainest little black dress.

Sometime in my teens (was it when I started studying French in college?), my mom decided we needed to watch Jules and Jim. Mom said she'd seen it years earlier but "the only thing I remember about it is that she sings a little song with a guitar."

"She" was Jeanne Moreau, of course, and the song was "Le Tourbillon," a perfect little grace note of suspended time in the middle of this perfect, daring, how-the-fuck-did-Truffaut-pull-this-off-before-he-was-thirty film.

I think of this as my introduction to Jeanne Moreau, though I guess technically I'd seen her as the old lady in the frame story of Ever After, her distinctive voice grown gravelly with time and lending a gravitas to the film's final lines that you don't often find in children's fairy-tale films.

But in the years to come, she became my favorite French actress. She was intense and sexy and had a piercing kind of intelligence. She was never an ingenue (the early-career glossy publicity photos where she tries to look like a '50s ingenue are kind of hilarious). She was always a fully grown, if petite, woman who needed the rougher edges of the French New Wave, handheld cameras and minimal makeup and intelligent scripts and complex characters. She did her best work after she was thirty. She had Resting Sad Face (like me). She had a tart little voice, like green apples, and even recorded some other jazz-pop songs besides "Le Tourbillon." The Lovers, a movie she made in 1958 that included a nude love scene, eventually prompted the famous U.S. Supreme Court case where Justice Potter Stewart ruled "That's not obscene, I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it." She was the first woman elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts. (Although, as praiseworthy as that is, it's also kind of shameful that it took until 2001 to break that glass ceiling.) She was Maggie the Cat in the French premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and can you even imagine?

I watch her movies and I want to take up smoking and wander around cities at night being intense and brooding and melancholy and restless and dissatisfied. One thing I think we don't talk about enough is how there are a lot of male stars who embody a disaffected, brooding quality, but among women, there's pretty much only Jeanne Moreau. Women, too, sometimes want to be romantic existentialists. Women, too, want film-star icons who were uncompromising and iconoclastic, lonely and proud.

I did feel a physical shock on reading the news that she died but, if I take a step back, I mean... she was 89. She worked with the best filmmakers of her era. She smoked like a chimney and made it to the end of her ninth decade on Earth. I sang "Le tourbillon" in the shower this morning. RIP et adieu, Mme Moreau.

Country House Books: Edward Gorey & Cécile David-Weill

Quick reviews of two books I read recently that take place at two very different kinds of country houses.

 The Dwindling Party by Edward Gorey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Edward Gorey pop-up book means that you can almost move and play around inside his elegant but eerie world! And even though The Dwindling Party looks like a kids' book, Gorey doesn't tone down any of his trademark dark humor, in this story of a Victorian family who tours a country house and, one by one, gets eaten by monsters. The verse is a bit verbose and there's really only the one joke throughout, but this is still a fun and interactive distillation of Gorey's style.

The Suitors by Cécile David-Weill
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Oh la la, here’s a book that promises to reveal what French old-money high society is really like! Unlike some authors who write lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous novels but have no firsthand experience with the world they describe, Cécile David-Weill comes by it honestly: her father and grandfather were chairmen of the Lazard Frères bank. As such, The Suitors could function as a handbook for how to behave (and how not to behave) if you are invited to a house party hosted by a fancy French family. They will love you if you are polite, gracious, and quietly elegant; they will despise you if you are effusive or ostentatious or try-hard. It’s rather like old-money American WASP society with more of an emphasis on good food, art collecting, and philosophical conversation.

Unfortunately, while David-Weill knows a lot about high society and the people who frequent it, she hasn’t figured out how to embed this knowledge in a captivating story. Her set-up is a fine premise for a romantic comedy: two sisters in their early 30s, learning that their parents wish to sell the family’s summer villa on the Cap d’Antibes, make a half-serious attempt to find wealthy husbands so that the property can stay in the family. But The Suitors quickly becomes an endless list of descriptions of the family’s houseguests and servants, their foibles and faux pas. Some of the observations are keen, but there are just too many characters and too little narrative drive. Scenes that are intended as farce or as drama fall flat, get resolved within a page or two, and are quickly forgotten. Worst of all are the moments when David-Weill tries to convince us that her characters are paragons of wit, charm, and decorum: the jokes they make are at best unfunny and at worst truly distasteful (as when the narrator tells her sister that her “shorty pajama set” is “an invitation to rape”).

Like something out of Balzac or Colette

The happy couple: Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron. Photo: AFP/Getty.

It has come to my attention that not nearly enough Americans know that the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has a love life like something out of a Balzac novel. And because Macron won the first round of the presidential election today and it looks like (fingers crossed) he’ll defeat his Fascist opponent in the second round, I feel justified in being a total gossip and telling you this very French, very juicy story.

OK, so Emmanuel Macron is a fresh-faced 39-year-old who started his own, centrist/independent political party. The established parties in France imploded this year; Macron surged to the top of the polls despite having an unpopular economic-reform law named after him in 2015. I could say a lot more about the wacky French presidential race of 2017, but you didn’t come here for politics, you came here for gossip.

Well, Macron is married to a woman named Brigitte, who is 24 years older than him and has grown children of her own from a previous marriage. Already, this is pretty unusual, even if younger-man older-woman relationships have more of a place in European culture than in American. (In Colette’s novel Chéri, Chéri and Léa are also 24 years apart.) It’s also been pointed out that 24 years is the same age disparity between Donald and Melania Trump – we just think it’s strange when a woman is the one who’s older.

But Donald was never Melania’s high school teacher.

That’s right: Macron is married to his former high school literature and drama teacher.

Now do you see why I am obsessed with this story?

Both of the Macrons are coy about how, exactly, the romance progressed. Brigitte is quoted as saying “Nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story. That belongs to us. That is our secret.” (Of course, giving quotes like this to the media practically invites everyone to speculate about the details of this “secret love story” and the French are eating it up.)

But what’s known is this: they grew very close when Emmanuel was in 11th grade and worked with Brigitte to adapt The Art of Comedy by Eduardo di Filippo. Then, he transferred to a high school in Paris for his senior year—some accounts say his parents made him transfer to put a stop to the relationship, some say that Brigitte herself asked him to go away. But before leaving for the capital, the boy promised his teacher, “I will come back and I will marry you.”

So maybe this isn’t exactly like a classic French novel after all. In a novel, the boy would still make this rash romantic promise, but either he wouldn’t follow through with it, or circumstances would intervene to thwart the couple’s love. But that didn’t happen here: Brigitte eventually divorced her husband, joined Emmanuel in Paris, and married him in 2007. She has been quoted as saying “We rub and polish each other's brains,” which is pretty much the greatest innuendo I’ve ever heard and is my new #RelationshipGoals.

In short: everybody should hope that Macron wins the second round on May 7, not only so that the Fascists will be defeated, but also so that France can continue its grand tradition of having leaders with scandalous love lives.

After All, Miss, This is France: Historical Accuracy and the New "Beauty and the Beast"

I saw the new live-action Beauty and the Beast on Saturday and I've been overthinking it ever since. (This is what happens when a bookish Millennial girl with degrees in Drama and French sees a remake of a beloved childhood classic about a bookish French girl.) So I have a few things to say about the adaptation, the changes it makes, and its historical accuracy or lack thereof.

Are you reading Shakespeare there? (CGI) Dan Stevens as the Beast, Emma Watson as Belle.

I appreciated some of the changes to the new version: the filling in of plot holes, and the attempt to show more of how Belle and the Beast's relationship develops. To that end, the filmmakers have included scenes where the characters bond over Shakespeare. (Belle is pleased to be living with a fellow book-lover and reads to the Beast from Midsummer's "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind" speech.) Cute, but also rather anachronistic. In France in the 1700s, it's just possible that the Beast might have translated versions of Shakespeare's plays in that vast library of his, but it's unlikely that both he and Belle would revere Shakespeare above all other authors. At that time, the French still saw Shakespeare as déclassé, an uncultured Englishman writing sprawling plays that did not respect the all-important Three Unities. Belle and the Beast would be much more likely to read and discuss literature from their own country: the plays of Racine and Corneille, or maybe the essays of Montaigne. It's fun to imagine them reading Corneille's The Illusion, a play that has themes about artifice and looking deeper, and features a magic mirror that can show you what your loved ones are doing! (Also, it's a delightful play that was far ahead of its time.)

Another change in the new version is the addition of a lot of unnecessary backstory about Belle's family. We learn that Belle and her father Maurice moved to their "provincial" village when she was a baby, after her mother died of the plague. At first, this sounds slightly odd: wasn't plague a medieval disease, and doesn't this movie take place in the 1700s? (Why not smallpox or tuberculosis?) However, there were scattered outbreaks of plague long after the medieval Black Death epidemic, including a really devastating one in Marseille in 1720 (the Great Plague of Marseille). And if we assume that that outbreak killed Belle's mother, and further assume that Belle is about 20 years old when the main action of Beauty and the Beast takes place, we can pinpoint the exact setting of the film as 1740 — which was the year the original French "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale was published! Brilliant!

The only problem with this theory is that the film makes clear that Belle and Maurice are from Paris, not Marseille, and as far as I can tell from Wikipedia, there were no Parisian plague outbreaks in the 1700s. I am left angrily shaking my fist at the screenwriters: "It would have been so easy to say they are from Marseille and not Paris and it would have been a great Easter egg for us history nerds!"

I suspect that both of these matters — having Belle and the Beast discuss Shakespeare, and saying that Belle and Maurice come from Paris — can be traced to a larger problem with movies made for mass audiences: the fear of including information that isn't 100% familiar to everyone. Belle and Maurice are Parisian, not Marseillais, because American audiences can be trusted to know where Paris is but may have never heard of Marseille. Belle and the Beast read Shakespeare, not Racine or Corneille, because those French authors are not part of Anglo-American culture. (I do like that they also show the Beast reading Arthurian romances; this strikes me as historically plausible, understandable to a modern American audience, and not quite as much of a lazy choice as Shakespeare.) Perhaps this is even why Belle's mother dies of the plague, rather than of something like tuberculosis. I suppose I shouldn't be looking to a nostalgia-flavored Disney remake to expose people to unfamiliar ideas, but it makes me sad when mass culture doesn't take the opportunity to try to tell a mass audience something they may not have heard before.

Memorable Theatergoing 2016 -- "Glass Menagerie" in Paris

When I was in Paris last April, I took myself to see La ménagerie de verre (The Glass Menagerie), directed by Daniel Jeanneteau at the Théâtre National de la Colline. It was definitely a European-style staging: minimalist set, barefoot actors, some stylized movement seemingly influenced by modern dance. But because Glass Menagerie is a memory play (not a work of strict realism), much of the abstraction and minimalism worked for me. The production also made very effective use of scrims: most of the scenes happened behind a veil so when the actors emerged from behind it, it was very powerful.

Moreover, that scene between Laura and Jim is so damn well written, so delicate and romantic and heartbreaking, and the production played it completely straight, and even though I was in the very last row of the theater, I got tears in my eyes when the glass unicorn broke and Laura said "Maintenant il est comme tous les autres chevaux" ("Now he is like all the other horses").

I understood probably 95% of the dialogue; Tennessee Williams doesn't strike me as incredibly hard to translate to French, and the actors spoke fairly slowly. Even now, months later, I can hear Amanda's final words to Tom from this version: "Va à la lune, espèce de reveur... EGOISTE!" ("Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer!") The "pleurosis"/"blue roses" pun, which I thought might be the most difficult bit of the play to translate, actually lent itself to a direct translation: it became "pleurésie"/"Bleu-Rosie." And "gentleman caller" got translated as "galant," which is kind of the best.

And I love going to the theater in France and making the actors do five curtain calls and applauding so much my arms hurt. And I totally got an instant crush on the slim, tousled French dude with hipster glasses and a blazer who was running the theater bookstore. And I went to a café afterwards on Place Gambetta and ordered chocolate mousse and a laughably large carafe of red wine, because I was rusty on the metric system, and when I apologized to the waiter, he reassured me "Well, you'll sleep well tonight, non?" And I giddy-giggled, slightly tipsy from that wine, on an empty Métro car, as I checked Facebook and saw what was happening with my friends, nine hours behind me on the other side of the world. And I changed trains at République station and encountered a cloud of tear gas on the platform: protests about a new labor law were going on above, in the Place de la République. And, mercifully, my train arrived about thirty seconds later, so I just held my breath till I could escape into its cleaner air. And I spoke French the whole night and nobody tried to speak to me in English. And I learned that seeing a beautiful play that brings tears to your eyes will more than make up for minor irritations, like running into a cloud of gas that brings tears to your eyes. And it was one of the best nights I had all year.

"Mustang" and the cinema of sisterhood

I admit I have a kind of reflexive habit to root for France when they are nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. I’m a Francophile, France tends to make good movies, they haven’t won Best Foreign Film in over twenty years, so why not root for them?

This year, though, I’ll be rooting for France out of something more than habit. Yesterday I went to see their nominated film, Mustang, and found it a lovely and accomplished piece of cinema. Moreover, it feels like an important film: an unabashedly feminine and feminist work, and one of the only female-directed films to score any Oscar nominations this year. (The only other nominations for female-helmed films are are three Documentary Shorts, one Documentary Feature, and a Best Song nod for Fifty Shades of Grey.) I am impressed with France for choosing a Turkish-language, Turkish-set film by a first-time director for their Oscar submission, and impressed that the Academy nominated it.

Mustang is the story of five sisters, ranging in age from maybe 11 to 17. Their parents are dead and they live with their grandmother and uncle in a small town on the Black Sea. (An incidental pleasure of Mustang was learning how beautiful this part of the world is, with rugged wooded mountains above smooth blue waters.) After the girls are caught horsing around with boys at the beach, their relatives lock them in the house, remove anything that might “corrupt” them, and set about trying to marry them off. But the girls fight back and sneak out and engage in many acts of overt and covert defiance. Their willpower and love and loyalty and lust for life cannot be contained.

So yes, there’s more than a hint of “what if The Virgin Suicides, but Turkish,” about this set-up. But then again, despite its female director, The Virgin Suicides is really a study of the male gaze, the fascination that the neighborhood boys have for the beautiful but inaccessible Lisbon sisters. Whereas Mustang is a wonderful example of the female gaze in cinema. It’s narrated by Lale, the youngest sister. Moreover, as a woman, Deniz Gamze Ergüven is able to film these teenage girls in a way that honors their beauty and their power but never feels the least bit prurient or exploitative. And, while the situation of the Mustang sisters is much worse than that of the Virgin Suicides girls (no one ever threatened to marry the Lisbon sisters off against their will) they fight back more fiercely, they do not succumb to despair.

It’s a simple, fable-like story, but very well told. The climax is super tense and there were gasps in the movie theater at several moments when the girls were in danger. There’s also some interesting commentary on how older women often keenly enforce patriarchal values but on occasion will support the girls’ rebellion.

And, okay, since I self-produced a play in the summer of 2014 about beautiful long-haired young sisters struggling against patriarchal expectations (in fact my play’s poster has some similarities to the Mustang poster), this movie hits a particular soft spot of mine, but I can’t remember the last time I saw such a powerful depiction of sisterhood in cinema.

April on the Theater Pub Blog

The way the calendar for April 2015 shook out, I ended up writing 3 posts on the SF Theater Pub blog instead of my usual 2. Here's the links:

• I interviewed Thrillpeddlers' Artistic Director, Russell Blackwood, about his company and their Paris-themed burlesque musical revue Jewels of Paris. I loved that when my editor received the Jewels of Paris press release, he took one look at it and said "this is definitely an assignment for Marissa!"
• Continuing the "Parisian avant-garde" theme, and tying in with Theater Pub's experimental April show, I wrote about the French playwrights' collective Outrapo -- the Workshop of Potential Tragicomedy -- and my attempts to get in touch with the Outrapistes when I was an exchange student in Paris in 2007.
• On the last day of April, I wrote about how my political beliefs and my tastes in theater aren't always 100% congruent; sometimes I feel like a bad feminist when I don't like a play that has a message I agree with... or when I enjoy a play that I know is politically iffy. This practice of reducing a work of art to its sociopolitical message seems pretty common in the two locales where I spend most of my time: in the SF Bay Area, and online. I yearn for criticism and conversation that explores other dimensions of works of art.

Slavic Love at the Opening Ceremonies

I adore the Parade of Nations in the Olympics opening ceremony because it allows me to geek out about two of my favorite things: geopolitics and fashion.

For instance, I'm still wondering if it was intentional, or just a happy accident, that the Czech and Slovak teams both had heart motifs on their opening ceremony uniforms:

 The Czechs

The Slovaks

The sentimentalist in me likes to think that the similarity was intentional, and the heart motifs are a message to the world that, even though Czechoslovakia split over 20 years ago, their two countries are still united in love! Aww. Or perhaps a more likely explanation is that the hearts are a subtle form of protest against Russia's brutal anti-gay laws (though interestingly enough, Wikipedia tells me that the Czech Republic is much more liberal on LGBT issues than Slovakia is). At any rate, these uniforms are too adorable, and my own Czech heart is touched.

But I think my favorite uniforms among the Slavic countries might be Poland, combining a chic snowflake motif with the colors of the Polish flag and gray, my favorite neutral.



Speaking of gray... France, you know I love you, and those jackets with the nipped-in waist and the big Lacoste tricouleur crocodile are pretty fantastic, but I just CAN'T with the khakis. Put these athletes in navy blue pants, though, and it'd be a win.

Photos of the Czech, Slovak, and Polish teams by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images. Photo of the French team by Mark Humphrey/The Associated Press.

"Dreaming in French": the American girl in Paris

I started this blog about a month after I returned from studying abroad in Paris. The transition from living in one of the world's most beautiful cities, with its elegant and easily navigable Métro system, to living in a suburban subdivision, was not an easy one to make. I felt terribly bored, and terribly lonely, and burst with thoughts that I had no way of sharing with anybody. Thus, a blog was born. For this and for many other reasons, I definitely feel like my time in Paris marked and changed me as a person... yet perhaps not as much as it did for the three women discussed in the book Dreaming in French...

Dreaming in French by Alice Kaplan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Dreaming in French" is more analytical and scholarly-minded than its romantic title would suggest. It's a study of how three important mid-century American women were shaped by spending time in Paris in their early twenties. The women are considered as individual personalities, but also as stand-ins for the different types of young women who tend to become attracted to French culture: Jacqueline Bouvier the aesthete, Susan Sontag the intellectual, and Angela Davis the revolutionary.

In the case of Bouvier, author Alice Kaplan does her best to sift the facts from the myths that have sprung up around this glamorous, Francophilic first lady. Still, I disagree with some of Kaplan's conclusions. She unearthed a French translation that Jackie made of an American pop song, and claims that it shows Jackie's special sensitivity to the poetry of the French language, but, in my opinion, it seems like a fairly literal and schoolgirlish translation job.

Of the three women, Susan Sontag kept the most extensive diaries and journals from her time in Paris. This is good, because it enables Kaplan to use Sontag's own words to tell her story, but it also made me wonder if I shouldn't have just read Sontag's journals (which have been published as "Reborn") instead.

I really didn't know anything about Angela Davis before reading this book, and I found her story fascinating. Kaplan makes a convincing case for how living in France awakened Davis' social consciousness; and then, how Davis became a cultural icon among French people (to a much greater extent than in the United States).

I myself spent a semester abroad in Paris (in 2007) and enjoyed reading about how the day-to-day experiences of these three illustrious women were similar to and different from my own. Still, I realize (and I think Kaplan does, too) that the profound effects that Paris can have on a young woman's psyche, may be too personal and intimate to be dredged up by an academic historian. Kaplan bases this book on primary-source documents: letters, diaries, newspapers, interviews, transcripts. But no primary source can convey the feeling of what it's like to ramble around the Latin Quarter, or sit down to dinner with a French host family, or, indeed, to dream in a foreign language.

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Comme les rois mages

On the Feast of the Epiphany I always find myself thinking of France, where they really know how to celebrate this holiday.

In 2008, for a production of Twelfth Night at Portland Center Stage, I wrote a playbill essay that began with an anecdote of spending Epiphany in France:

It is January 6, 2007 -- my third day as an exchange student in Bordeaux, France. That night at dinner, my host mother, Sévérine, brings out a flat, flaky golden cake with a metallic paper crown on top of it, and slices it into seven pieces, one for each guest. Then things get really crazy, especially to my jet-lagged eyes. Maxence, age 12, crawls under the table. Justine, 16, and her father, Guy, close their eyes tight. Guy turns the cake plate while Justine stands over it with a dangerously long knife. "Arrête!" Maxence shouts at random, whereupon Guy's hands stop moving and Justine stabs the nearest slice of cake. Then Maxence designates to whom she should serve that slice. After this finishes, I find a little porcelain tile in my slice of almond-flavored cake. The guests crown me and hail me as Queen; I suspect they rigged things so that I won, but can't figure out how.

Such are the modern-day vestiges of Twelfth Night, Epiphany, in a historically Catholic part of Europe. It's a night when bakeries from Seville to New Orleans do a brisk business in cakes with a plastic baby inside; when outwardly respectable, bourgeois French people enact an ancient, anarchic ritual. Epiphany, the "twelfth day of Christmas," is an excuse to have one last really good party to end the holiday season. It extends the egalitarian spirit of Christmas for one more night, making servants into masters and dazed exchange students into queens.

(I also wrote an Epiphany-themed blog post in 2008, but I think my playbill essay is more interesting, don't you?)

Nowadays, I count myself fortunate to live in a city where you can buy a king cake at any La Boulange, and to have found a group of friends who indulge my efforts to bring this French custom to our shores. Tonight, I'm headed to the first 2013 Olympians Festival writers' meeting at Stuart Bousel's house, king cake in tow. (Stuart is the kind of person who geeks out about hosting a party on Twelfth Night -- he even directed a production of Twelfth Night a year and a half ago.)

And, to bring this back around to my Francophilia, I was pleased to discover, a few weeks ago, that there is a catchy French pop song from 1971 that uses the Three Wise Men as a metaphor. The song is called "Les rois mages" ("The Wise Men") and was performed by Sheila.



Roughly translated, the chorus means "Like the Wise Men / in Galilee / Followed the shepherd's star with their eyes / I will follow you / Where you go, I will go / Faithful as a shadow / until the destination."

I don't think the French particularly associate this song with the Epiphany holiday (according to Wikipedia, it was originally released during the month of March), but to me, it's the perfect thing to sing while eating your king cake.

La vie est ailleurs

Having one of those insanely busy weeks where I am being hit with about a dozen deadlines at once, so even though there's a lot of stuff I'd like to blog about here, I'll have to put that off. In the meantime, you can find me elsewhere:

• I'm conducting interviews with the Bay One-Acts (BOA) playwrights for the BOA blog. First two interviews (with Bennett Fisher and Anthony Clarvoe) are up now -- more are on the way!
• Twitter! Yes, I finally joined. Find me @MarissaSkud.
• I'll be at the Cafe Royale tomorrow night for the Super Secret Kickstarter Fundraising Party for BOA! OK, not sure why the event title includes the word "secret," because we want LOTS of people to show up and help us reach our Kickstarter goal! And if you're not in the Bay Area or can't make it tomorrow night... you can donate online here.

And a little music before I go: French-Canadian singer Coeur de Pirate performs "La vie est ailleurs" (which means "Life is Elsewhere" -- like the Kundera novel)

 

Leap Day Headlines

I was astounded to see a theater making above-the-fold, headline news this morning!  Full article here.

Additional links for the day:

Fun story about a French leap-year tradition: a newspaper that only publishes on February 29

My own leap-year post from 4 years ago, recounting a leap year that happened 8 years before that -- still the most memorable one I've had.

What I Liked and What I Didn't about Martin Scorsese's "Hugo"

THINGS I LIKED

• The opening shot took my breath away and the first scene is the best example of over-the-top cinematic Francophilia since Moulin Rouge. I wasn't even paying attention to the plot or characters at first -- I was just luxuriating in the art direction and the 1930s atmosphere. That train station! That café!

• As far as I could tell, every bit of printed text in the movie (signs, books, posters) was in French. Amazing attention to detail and I appreciate that they resisted the temptation to make things easier for an English-speaking audience.

• Two of my favorite time periods, in terms of art and aesthetics (and I think this is true for a lot of people) are the Art Nouveau fin-de-siècle and the Art Deco 1920s-30s. Hugo has a plot that accommodates both periods, and is set in Paris, the epicenter of both of these movements, to boot.

• Hugo is the second 3-D movie I've ever seen (Avatar was the first) and IMO it used the medium very, very well. By the end of Avatar, I was kind of over the 3-D, but Hugo kept surprising me with innovative ways of employing it. At the same time, it knew when to hold back and revert to a flatter picture plane, e.g. for the more intimate scenes in Papa Georges' house.

• Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths as two late-middle-aged folks striking up a tentative romance in the train station. This plot has no purpose other than to be charming and delightful, and it delivers. It's even more charming if you saw and admired these talented character actors in The History Boys -- I was so happy to see them working together again.

• My friend Stuart saw Hugo last week and posted on Facebook that it made him "think a lot about Marissa Skudlarek as there is essentially a character who is her (tall, big vocabulary, wears a beret)."  Ha!  He was referring to Isabelle (played by Chloë Grace Moretz), a young girl who befriends Hugo. She's a type of character we've seen in other movies -- spunky, bookish, romantic, precocious. In the scene in the bookshop she reminded me so much of Disney's Belle.  And when Hugo asks Isabelle why she's helping him, I could predict Isabelle's response before she said it: "Because this is an adventure!"  So she's not the most original character, but she's an archetype that I enjoy. And even if she is a 13-year-old girl, she's one of Scorsese's few female characters that it's OK to be compared with. I may have just found my Halloween costume for next year (and if I do dress up as Isabelle, I will carry the vintage 1930s edition of Les Miserables that Stuart gave me for Christmas).

• Early on, I was convinced that I caught a glimpse of someone costumed and made up to look like James Joyce. Sure enough, "James Joyce" is listed in the credits. So is "Salvador Dalí" but I guess I missed him. (It could not have been as memorable as Adrien Brody's portrayal of Dalí in Midnight in Paris!)

• I also enjoyed playing "spot the cinema reference" throughout the movie. E.g., I'm pretty sure that an allusion to Vertigo was intended during the final scene with Hugo in the clock tower.  Making Hugo the second 2011 film that owes a debt to Vertigo, after The Artist swiped Bernard Herrmann's music for the climactic sequence.

• Another similarity to The Artist: the fake-out dream sequence in Hugo is very well done.

• Innuendo that would only be mildly amusing in an adult movie is somehow made funnier by being in a kids' movie, where you know it will go over the heads of the children in the audience.

• Throughout the whole movie, I was convinced that Olivia Williams was playing Mama Jeanne, Georges' wife. Turns out that the role is played by Helen McCrory, an actress I was not familiar with before. She gives a lovely performance.

• I had a teenage crush on Jude Law and he is still an incredibly good-looking man. (He appears in a flashback as Hugo's father.)  Hey, this movie is all about cinephilia, and one reason we love the movies is that they let us stare into the faces of beautiful people whom we would never have met otherwise.

THINGS I WAS LESS KEEN ON

• I'm not sure it was a good idea to have the character of the Station Inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, function both as the movie's principal villain (chasing Hugo through the station and threatening to send him to an orphanage) and as its principal comic relief (in his amusingly awkward flirtation with a pretty florist played by Emily Mortimer). While I appreciate the desire to depict the Inspector as a real person with some complexity and some heart, as opposed to an incarnation of evil, we can't take the Inspector seriously as a threat to Hugo if he is also a harmless buffoon.

• The first part of the movie hinges on an Idiot Plot. When Papa Georges discovers Hugo's notebook, accuses him of stealing it, and demands to know who drew the pictures in the notebook, why does Hugo remain silent instead of saying "My father did those sketches"? I know that Hugo is a cautious, scared little boy who is still mourning his father, but he never promised to keep the notebook secret, and would it have hurt anyone if he admitted that it was his father's?

• Much is made of how Hugo likes to "fix things" and how his repairing the broken automaton parallels his healing the broken and depressed Papa Georges. Yet I never got a sense that Hugo genuinely loves fixing things and playing with clockwork and gizmos. He repairs the automaton because it is his last connection to his dead father, he fixes the train station clocks because he sees it as his duty... but I never felt that he took sheer delight in mechanical things for their own sake. The character of Isabelle is on hand to supply plenty of wide-eyed wonder, but I could have used some of that from Hugo as well.

• When Hugo uses the word "panache," the script missed an opportunity for Isabelle to respond "Panache! Just like Cyrano de Bergerac!"  I may have been the only person in the theater who would have appreciated this joke, but I would have loved it SO MUCH.

• The little boy next to me was very bored by the movie and began sucking noisily on the dregs of his soda until I had to tell him to knock it off. In fairness, his parents shouldn't have taken him to the 8:30 show and they shouldn't have bought him the industrial-size Coca-Cola. Nonetheless, if this is a "family film," it should not bore children. Even I thought that the movie moved too slowly in parts and contained a few too many scenes of Hugo being chased through the train station and Hugo fiddling with clockwork.

• Now is the time to mention that the international terminal at the San Francisco airport currently has an exhibit of vintage French automata on display (was it timed to the release of this movie?) and if you're there you should check it out. I stumbled upon it last week on my way to Portland and even got to talk with the exhibition's "registrar" (its caretaker) who happened to be unlocking the glass cases and inspecting the automata at the time.  It was super cool, but it also made me realize that the automaton depicted in Hugo is a bit of an exaggeration.  The automata in the museum display can do nifty things, but nothing nearly as elaborate or complex as the automaton in Hugo. And, all right, it's a movie, we can't expect it to be 100% accurate, but it annoys me that the filmmakers felt that the automaton had to be even better than it would be in real life, when real automata are plenty amazing on their own. In fact, the same goes for the portrayal of silent cinema in Hugo -- Scorsese makes it look even more exciting than it actually was by using brief snippets, concentrating on Meliès' special effects, showing several films that were hand-tinted rather than black-and-white, and 3-D converting some of the Meliès films. Will a child who wants to see a silent movie after watching Hugo be bored by the real thing?

Bonjour "Adieu"

A while back I posted a music video from French-Canadian singer-songwriter Coeur de Pirate, whose album of piano-driven chansons quickly became one of my favorites. I just learned that she has a new album out, Blonde. Here is the the first single, "Adieu":



Judging by this, it sounds like her sound on the new album is a little less folk and a little more '60s pop -- and who doesn't love '60s pop?  And the music video casts her as a sassy, tattooed version of Samantha from Bewitched.

Even better, the actor who plays her cheating boyfriend in the music video also plays the cute guy at the center of the love triangle in Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats), which I think is my favorite movie I've seen in a theater all year. (Not that I've ended up seeing a lot of movies this year, but still.) I keep meaning to blog about Les Amours Imaginaires. Maybe all it does is prove that Québecois hipsters aren't much different from American hipsters, but the film has really stuck with me.

According to her website, Coeur de Pirate also sings on a new Christmas album, Noël! Noël!! Noël!!!, from legendary French composer Michel Legrand. Looks like her track is only available on the French edition of the album, though; the English edition has Rufus Wainwright singing "White Christmas" instead of Coeur de Pirate singing "Noël blanc". Other than that, the album seems to have the potential to become a Christmas kitsch classic, what with the lush orchestral arrangements, the First Lady of France crooning about Christmas trees, and Iggy Pop singing "The Little Drummer Boy." If there are any campy Francophones on your Christmas list, get them this album and a DVD of Les Amours Imaginaires and they will love you forever.

A Sondheim Weekend

Listening to: NPR's stream of the new Follies CD (Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, et al). I've only ever heard the truncated 1971 recording, so this is a revelation for me!  Reading the Follies chapter in Finishing the Hat, one can come away with the impression that this is the strongest set of lyrics that have ever been written for an American musical, due to Sondheim's dead-on pastiche of all of the lyric writers who came before him, plus his own inimitable genius.

Reading: Look, I Made a Hat, volume 2 of Sondheim's collected lyrics, which came out on Tuesday.  It is just as full of odd, interesting insights as Volume 1 and is going to have an equally prized place on my bookshelf.  I brought it to a Thanksgiving party of theater people on Thursday, where it was a big hit. As a friend of mine says, "The only thing better than having these books by Sondheim is if we also had a book by Shakespeare titled How I Wrote My Plays."

and

Ring Round the Moon, the Jean Anouilh/Christopher Fry play that Sondheim and Hal Prince wished to adapt into a musical. When they were unable to obtain the rights, they adapted Smiles of a Summer Night instead -- it has a similar theme of romantic entanglements at a European country house.

I found Ring Round the Moon completely delightful. Its witty aphorisms made me laugh out loud several times, and I love the idea of having one actor play the identical twins Hugo and Frederic. (You'll recall that the one-actor-playing-twins was my favorite part of my experience working with Un-Scripted Theatre last summer!)

My copy, above, is an adorable 1950 edition, I believe the first American edition, which I found at Readers Café and Bookstore. Why do I never hear anyone talk about this used bookstore? It has some amazing items (I once saw a 1910 edition of Playboy of the Western World there!) and the proceeds go to a good cause.

Speaking of supporting a good cause: In 1981, Stephen Sondheim founded Young Playwrights Inc., to foster the work of American playwrights 18 and under. In 2006, I won their National Competition with my first play, Deus ex Machina.  And last week, the Young Playwrights office, on Fifth Avenue in New York City (right across from Lord & Taylor) was gutted by a fire.

This news is very sad, especially because Young Playwrights, like many arts nonprofits, always seemed to be a bit of a shoestring organization and, I know, was having difficulties in our current economic climate. (Young Playwrights used to present full productions of the plays that won the contest, but they have not been able to do that for several years.)  As they rebuild, they are taking donations through PayPal.

In order to thank them for the amazing two weeks that they gave me five years ago (a workshop of my play in New York, tickets to 10 shows, a downtown hotel room with a balcony...) and to support them in their rebuilding efforts, I'm going to give Young Playwrights some money this holiday season. Would you consider doing the same?

Soixante petites secondes

Spending today working on my submissions for the San Francisco One-Minute Play Festival. We are encouraged to think about what can happen in a minute -- how short it can feel, how long it can feel.

Here is a song that lasts only 60 seconds -- Carla Bruni's "La dernière minute":

Starstruck and Starry-Eyed

Image: Jacket designed by Yves Saint Laurent in 1980 as a homage to Jean Cocteau.

I've been in a good mood all day ever since I woke up to an email informing me that the Comité Jean Cocteau has granted me the rights to do an English translation of Orphée!

The head of the Comité Jean Cocteau and the keeper of the moral rights to his work is Pierre Bergé, who was a friend of Cocteau's in the '50s and is best known as the personal and professional partner of Yves Saint Laurent. The email this morning mentioned him by name, saying that he is "tout à fait d'accord" (entirely in agreement) with my plans. I am very grateful and more than a little starstruck!

Starstruck... I guess that's an appropriate word, considering that Jean Cocteau loved star imagery and incorporated it into his signature.

"Suite Française": The Alpha & the Omega

I have seen Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky, referred to as "the first great novel of World War II," because Némirovsky wrote it just a year or two after the events it describes. Its two parts deal with the invasion of France in June 1940, and the occupation of a small French village in spring 1941, and Némirovsky had written it all by summer 1942, when she was taken to Auschwitz. I have also seen it referred to as "the last great novel of World War II," because the manuscript was not published until 2004. And really, after reading an such an authentic novel of World War II, what modern fiction writer (likely born long after World War II ended) would have the hubris to write a novel dealing with that war?

Though I am a Francophile, I resisted reading Suite Française because I was almost suspicious of its backstory, which tended to overshadow the writing -- the rediscovered manuscript, Némirovsky's tragic murder at the hands of the Nazis. In such circumstances, the novel itself wouldn't have to be any good in order to become a bestseller. But finally, I picked up a cheap used copy, and I'm so glad I did. Because Suite Française is indeed a good novel; it is valuable not only as a historical document, but as art.

Némirovsky displays a masterful command of the techniques of fiction writing -- controlling the narrative flow, writing in different voices and from different perspectives. For instance, there is a chapter told from the point of view of a Parisian housecat encountering the countryside for the first time as his owners flee the Nazis. A scene that could easily turn melodramatic (it involves a German officer telling a Frenchwoman that he loves her and will never forget her) is saved from melodrama by being told from the perspective of a little girl who observes the two adults, but is too young to understand what's going on.

One of the blurbs in the front matter of my copy compares Suite Française to Flaubert in its "indictment of French manners and morals," and I'd have to agree with that. Like Flaubert, Némirovsky is snarky and ruthless, though not without moments of beauty. The first part of Suite Française, "Storm in June," demonstrates how, in the face of the German invasion, the French people occasionally behave in noble and self-sacrificing ways, but more often are unscrupulous, selfish, and snobbish. The middle- and upper-class characters work all of their connections in order to stay well-fed and sheltered, and when they can't work their connections, they steal from those less fortunate. A young priest attempting to lead a group of orphaned juvenile delinquents to safety ends up murdered by his young charges. (Even the name of the orphanage, the Penitent Children of the 16th Arrondissement, is a snarky joke. The 16th is the wealthiest arrondissement in Paris; it is like saying "The Penitent Children of the Upper East Side" or "The Penitent Children of Pacific Heights.")

As suggested by its title, "Dolce," the second part of Suite Française, is gentler and more reflective. In its depiction of a German officer quartered in the house of a young French woman, it reminded me of another wartime classic, Le Silence de la mer by Vercors. Interestingly, both works use a trope that has now become a cliche -- that of the Nazi who is redeemed through his sensitivity to art and music.

Némirovsky planned a further three parts of Suite Française, which would have linked the Parisian characters of "Storm in June" to the provincial characters of "Dolce," and it is a pity that she was murdered before she had the chance to write them. Still -- believe the hype, and the too-good-to-be-true backstory of the manuscript of Suite Française. We are very lucky that this accomplished writer was able to transform her experiences of World War II into artful fiction, before she herself perished.

The Three Stages of French Manhood

Love this photo:

Did you know that François Truffaut gave his Cannes film festival prize money (Best Director, The 400 Blows) to Jean Cocteau, to help him finance Testament of Orpheus? I like to think that they are hashing this out at the moment this picture was taken... and boring the young Jean-Pierre Léaud in the process.

Bonne Année 219

Bored at work yesterday (and not ashamed to admit to it on my blog, because I will be starting a new job on Monday), I began Wikipedia page-hopping. Because I am reading Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which takes place around the Revolution of 1848, I started on that page, and ended up learning about all kinds of French historical events from 1789 to 1871 (very turbulent years for la belle France). The most fascinating page I discovered explained the French Republican Calendar, a wacky overhaul of the calendar and time-keeping system, which was instituted a few years after the 1789 revolution. Months had new, seasonally appropriate names, and three weeks of 10 days each. Each day had 10 hours, each hour had 100 minutes, and each minute had 100 seconds. Each day no longer commemorated a saint, but instead some important plant, domesticated animal, or farm tool!

I think it's completely nuts to pass a law re-defining what a "week" and an "hour" and a "minute" is, yet some aspects of the Republican Calendar are very appealing. I like the idea of naming each month after the quality of its weather (though, as Wikipedia points out, the calendar was based on typical Parisian weather, and it would be rather chauvinistic to import it to other parts of the world). Indeed, when I was younger, I created a fantasy world with its own language, and the months were named after nature and weather: e.g. March was U'eyvth, meaning Melt-month, and July was Opuivth, meaning Fruit-month. (I hadn't heard of the French Republican Calendar at the time, though--I was probably inspired by the Native American names for full moons: Flower Moon, Strawberry Moon, and the like.) Also, there is something so charmingly French--so appropriate for the land that invented the idea of terroir--to name days after the nation's favorite plants and foodstuffs!

Moreover, because the first day of the French Republican year takes place on the autumn equinox, and I was reading this Wikipedia page on September 22, it was actually the first day of Année Republicaine 219! Bonne année, mes amis!

Learning about this calendar system also caused me to wonder why different cultures celebrate their New Year at different times of the year, and how this might have arisen in each civilization. The French Republican year begins on the autumn equinox; the Jewish New Year is also in early autumn. The modern Gregorian calendar celebrates the New Year on January 1, ten or so days after the winter solstice, but in medieval England (which used the Julian calendar), the New Year began near the spring equinox, March 25. The Chinese New Year is sometime between the winter solstice and spring equinox--late January or early February. Interestingly, I can't think of any calendar whose New Year occurs around the summer solstice. All of this must have to do with the agricultural patterns in each of these civilizations, and other societal values... but still, it's curious.