On French TV series

For many years — decades, even — French writers and directors thought of television as the ugly stepchild of cinema. There were few connections between the two fields: No filmmaker would consider working for the small screen. Which isn't to say that there weren't good shows, but even the best were considered inferior to movies. This is pretty crazy, as we had some good home-grown TV. I remember avidly watching miniseries like La Poupée sanglante , Les Rois maudits (the original, not the remake), and series like Les Nouvelles aventures de Vidocq (ah, the saucy Danièle Lebrun, my childhood crush), Arsène Lupin and Chéri-Bibi.

Things began to change in the early 1990s, when the French-German ARTE channel started drawing film directors to work on miniseries and films that often also played in cinemas at the same time as they were broadcast. André Téchiné's Wild Reeds, for instance, started off as a 60-minute made-for-ARTE movie.

But this was all pretty arty. The latest development has been the marked improvement of commercial French series — especially the ones produced by Canal Plus — and most of them influenced by HBO. Thanks to my family's busy DVR recorder, I've been able to watch quite a few. My favorites so far have been Engrenages, a great procedural that wrapped its third season in June, and Pigalle, entirely shot docu-style on location. Appeal to IFC: Show them in the US!

I had mixed feelings about Braquo, about a cop with ethical issues played by Jean-Hughes Anglade, but watched the whole first season anyway. And I haven't been very far with Mafiosa, even though it takes place in Corsica.

Right now I'm in the middle of Maison close, which takes place in a high-end Parisian brothel in 1871, right after the Commune. It's pretty good so far, even though some of the aesthetic choices are slightly cheesy. Playing George Jackson's "If I Could Open Up My Heart" while two prostitutes put on a sapphic show for a client's benefit was the equivalent of a runny brie. Still, there's good stuff in there. I even like the sour lesbian madame hopelessly in love with her star employee. It's a cliché character straight out of the 1950s, and nobody in the US would dare show someone like this now. That's something I regret, in a twisted way, as it only adds to the pulpy ambiance. Here's the start of the first episode.

The one, the only Jeanne Balibar

I've written about Jeanne Balibar's idiosyncratic ways before (go here for some background) but she just topped herself — and that wasn't easy. At the recent Césars awards ceremony in Paris, she came in to announce the winner for best music. She started by saying "I'm really honored to announce the next César. I'll let you guess what it's for thanks to this short interlude."

And then she proceeded to sing a Baudelaire poem, augmented with pig noises. Make sure you watch the whole thing, as it gets crazier and crazier as it goes along. Hosts Valérie Lemercier and comedian Gad Elmaleh look startled, which of course adds to the scene's surreal tone. (The shots of the audience are choice as well.)

Jeunet on Hollywood

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has been making the rounds in France lately, plugging his latest film, Micmacs à tire-larigot (trailer here). In an interview, which I translated below, he talked about his experience in Hollywood, directing Alien: Resurrection in 1997. A bit of context: Jeunet was hired to work on the fourth installment in the Alien franchise after he directed Delicatessen and City of Lost Children; he went on to make Amélie and A Very Long Engagement (in the interview he also mentioned that Emily Watson was originally cast in the latter movie, only to be replaced by Audrey Tautou).

Interviewer: Was it nice to work in the US?
JPJ: Do you have two or three hours? It was a great adventure. I remember at the time I said it was the hardest day of my life, every day. I had almost total artistic freedom but they constricted me from a financial viewpoint, which is exactly the opposite of what I had expected. I can still hear the producers telling me, Can you do this in one shot instead of three? Can you trim? It was really reductionist. It's a perverse game. On the one hand I had actors like Sigourney Weaver who wanted perfection, on the other hand I had producers who wanted me to go as fast as possible. It was difficult to negotiate. And in Hollywood there's the good ones and the bad ones. I saw the Hollywood myth collapse like the towers on 9/11. Nothing worked. Aside from the aliens themselves, which were amazing, the special effects didn't work — I'm talking about explosions, doors that are supposed to be blasted. Nothing worked. I felt I was in The Dictator when —
Interviewer: — are you serious? I feel like you're talking about Albania.
JPJ: Yeah, yeah.
Interviewer: Albania in 1972.
JPJ: Just a bit below that, Albania in 1967. Maybe I didn't get the best crew… A symbol: my first day of shooting. The first time I'm saying "Action!" — the camera didn't work. It never did, we put it out to pasture. That was a symbol for the entire shoot.

The greatest living actress

In these giddy post-Oscar days, it's important to keep things in perspective. Seeing Claude Autant-Lara's rare 1949 film Occupe-toi d'Amélie (left) a few days ago in Paris, for instance, I was reminded once again that Danielle Darrieux—who's turning 92 in May and was just the object of a 100-film retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française—is the greatest living actress.

American readers/viewers familiar with her most likely know Darrieux from her star turns in Max Ophüls's The Earrings of Madame de…, La Ronde and Le Plaisir, all from the 1950s, as well as from her appearance in Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, where she played Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac's mother. But she's so much more: She embodies both the very history of French cinema and a certain idea of the country itself—witty, elegant, alternately suggesting wounded melancholy and irrepressible grace. Few actors share her versatility. (Meryl Streep perhaps? Let's check back in 30 years.)

Oh, and Darrieux could sing, too. She started her career in a string of musicals in the 1930s and stayed faithful to the genre with Demy in the 1960s and all the way through François Ozon's 8 Women in 2002. She even made it to Broadway in 1970, when she replaced Katharine Hepburn in Coco.

In this clip from Norman Taurog's 1951 movie Rich, Young and Pretty, Darrieux performs "There's Danger in Your Eyes." (In the film she plays Jane Powell's mother despite being only 34; a few years later, she'd be Richard Burton's mom, even though he was only seven years older than she was.) And here she sings a setting of Aragon's "Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux" in 8 Femmes.

A quick note about Occupe-toi d'Amélie: The film, extremely rare for decades because the Feydeau estate thought it took liberties with the play, is an absolute jewel. Autant-Lara constantly plays off the porous border between stage and life by setting things up as a play within the film—and a play in which the spectators periodically interrupt the action, Purple Rose of Cairo–style. The pace is downright dizzying as well: This is how farce needs to be done, with speed but also absolute precision.

French film follies

A couple more days in Paris. The overcast sky gives the perfect excuse go to the movies and hit the museums. Sticking to localfare, so far I've seen Nicolas Saada's debut, Espion(s), and Danièle Thompson's latest, Le code a changé. Two fine, if very different, examples of quality filmmaking, French-style.

The former is a brooding thriller that's been embraced by the critics here--unsurprisingly, perhaps, as Saada is one of their own (he used to write for Cahiers du Cinéma). The movie's been compared to some of Hitchcock's best and most romantic flicks, like Notorious, but it reminded me more of the British series MI5. And while I liked the slow pace (we're very, very far from spy shenanigans à la Bourne), if you're going to do the classic set piece in which somebody transfers information from a computer onto a USB key while trying not to be caught by a bad guyelse coming up the elevator (cue closeup of screen with "copy" status bar moving maddeningly slowly), you'd better come up with a new twist; alas, Saada doesn't. Still, a lovely performance by Géraldine Pailhas lifts things up.

As for Thompson's movie, it's yet another "choral" on, a style the writer-director particularly loves. I admit going mostly for the splendid cast, which includes two of my favorite comediennes, Marina Fois and Karin Viard--together at last. A scene in which gynecologist Fois gives lawyer Viard an exam was the icing on the religieuse.

Next stop: a reissue of Claude Autant-Lara's cult 1949 adaptation of the Feydeau farce Occuppe-toi d'Amélie, starring the scrumptious Danielle Darrieux, and François Ozon's new Ricky.

Beatrice Dalle forever

Upon the release of her latest movie, New Wave (made for the ARTE channel), the French weekly arts mag Les Inrockuptibles recently ran a great Q&A with Béatrice Dalle, one of my favorite actresses. When Dalle burst onto the French film scene with Betty Blue in 1986, she felt like an untameable force of nature. And she hasn't calmed down since, remaining an idiosyncratic presence both on and off screen. She brings a nuclear intensity to everything she does, making an impression in the shortest scenes, even doing next to nothing—few have her ability to be magnetic just being there. Check out this scene from Christophe Honoré's first feature, 17 fois Cécile Cassard, where she dances with Romain Duris then just smokes by herself. (By the way, it's pretty insulting that YouTube feels the need to post a disclaimer that the video may be insuitable for minors considering that it's completely chaste, so the only red flag has got to be the fact that two men slow-dance together.) And then there are berserk starring roles in berserk movies, like Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day and the recent horror flick A l'intérieur, in which she plays a psychopath trying to steal a baby—while it's still in the womb. (Can I just say how good these trailers are, especially compared to American ones? None of that Moviefone-guy voiceover crap, and they don't give away the entire plot either.)

Plus whereas most French actors are happy to lead completely boring lives, Dalle lives. She was with rapper Joey Starr, from NTM, for ten years or something, has been arrested for shoplifting and cocaine possession, is now married to an inmate she met while volunteering in prisons. This carefree attitude leads to her giving fantastic interviews. Here she is on a French talk show, for instance, ostensibly to plug A l'intérieur.

Some choice quotes from the aforementioned interview in Les Inrockuptibles:

Q: You play an incestuous mother in New Wave. Was it difficult?
A: She wasn't very far from me. Well, you understand her when you look at the kid—he's too cute (laughs). The scene I enjoyed shooting most actually was the most dramatic of the movie. But it was much easier for me to play than the scene where I make crepes. I've never done that in my life, or ever put anything on a plate! I think I'd be more comfortable doing a gang-bang scene!

Q: Do you think you're typecast in dramatic parts?
A: Yeah, but that's all I'd like to do. Besides, ever since making A l'interieur, I really want gore and special effects. I'd love to play an elf but they don't think of me for those parts. I'm tired of going to family-planning offices, to play realistic or social roles!

Q: Were you new wave in the 80s?
A: New wave, me? Don't insult me! I hung out with punks.

Q: Do you follow the American presidential campaign?
A: It's not my country but I still have to put up with them. It's really going to suck if this McCain is elected. Especially since he pulled out his joker with Sarah Palin. She's a devil this one: She's got overly tailored suits, a son in the army, the works! She even put Obama on the defensive by saying he's not proud of his country. Asked about her, Obama said, "Yeah, I'm not sure." He wasn't asked if he screwed her but what he thinks about her. He was like a kid who just got spanked.

France in the 1970s

France Culture, part of the French public-radio network, has been running great summer series. I mentioned the one about François Truffaut, but I've also been hooked to Les Années 70, which has been devoting two-hour shows of audio archives to each year of the 1970s. What's particularly inspired is that while the shows do mention big events, they also broadcast rather long, uninterrupted excerpts of less obvious but very 70s documents, like several minutes of Marguerite Duras explaining why it's okay to steal books (even if she herself doesn't have the guts to do it); Solzhenitsyn's appearance on the hit literary TV show Apostrophes; a report on Bertolucci filming Last Tango in Paris; the French Communist Party's head, Georges Marchais, interviewed about a strike; the mayor of a small town complaining about gay cruising; a news report a month after abortion was legalized; and so on.

And while I can't remember lyrics of the songs I hear now, even the ones I get obsessed with, lyrics from songs I heard when I was 10 or 12 are still crystal-clear in my memory, particularly Franco-Frenchy-French hits like Joe Dassin's hideous "L'été indien" (Joe was the son of director Jules Dassin), Johnny Halliday and Sylvie Vartan's "J'ai un problême" (I love the addition of vrooming sounds for the video) or Alain Souchon's "Bidon" (sensitive Alain was one of my mom's favorites and we listened to him a lot in the family Peugeot). Needless to say, none of these songs ever made it outside of France.

I was listening to the show about 1976 this morning, and they were playing excerpts from the very first Césars ceremony (France's answer to the Oscars). For Best Actress, the nominees were Isabelle Adjani in Truffaut's The Story of Adèle H, Delphine Seyrig in Duras' India Song, Catherine Deneuve in Rappeneau's Le Sauvage and Romy Schneider in Zulawski's L'Important c'est d'aimer. Schneider won and gave a speech magnificent in its economy and elegance. Here it is in its entirety: "Thank you very much. I'm very happy and very proud. And I'd like to tell you that tonight I'm especially thinking about one man who taught me my job, who was my master and my great friend. He'll be happy for me. It's Luchino Visconti."

A film that had a huge impact in 1976 France was Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos. Partly it was because of the stupendous acting by young Ana Torrent, but also because the film's song, Jeanette's "Porque te Vas," was a hit. It remains a personal favorite to this day.

MP3 Jeanette "Porque te Vas"

In praise of French film noir

My short overview of Film Forum's series on French noir is now online (props to film editor Melissa Anderson for the most excellent title). Lots of nuggets are scheduled to hit Houston Street in the coming weeks, including one of my top five favorite films of all time, Quai des Orfèvres.

If you like François Truffaut

If you speak French (or want some serious practice) and like François Truffaut, French public radio has just completed a weeklong tribute to the director that adds up to a whopping 16 hours of programming. And for a while at least, you can listen to it all spread out on several podcasts. Just go to the France Culture site and scroll down to F to download the shows to iTunes. "Archives" consists of Truffaut himself talking about his work; "Documentaire" has a documentary approach with film excerpts, archival audio clips of people talking about Truffaut, etc.; "Débat" is made up of roundtables with some of the director's collaborators and film scholars discussing his career.

I've only listened to about four hours so far and I'm completely addicted, especially since the series is about a lot more than just one director—it covers the birth of both modern cinephilia and film criticism, French cinema in the postwar years, the relationship between French and American cinemas, etc.

A memorable moment among many, many others. On April 29, 1974, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a tribute to Hitchcock at Avery Fisher Hall; Ingrid Bergman introduces Truffaut, who delivers a short speech in his strongly accented English, familiar to viewers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

"Bonsoir mesdames et messieurs. I beg your pardon in advance because my English is terrible. You just saw the dubbing version—the dubbed version, not the French version. In America, you call this man 'Hitch'; In France, we call him 'Monsieur Hitchcock.' [audience laughs] You respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder; we respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love [laughter, applause]. Anyway, it is the same man we are talking about, the same man and the same artist. When I began to direct films, I thought Monsieur Hitchcock was fantastique, maybe because he weighed more than 200 pounds. Therefore I tried to eat more and more. I gained 20 pounds but it obviously didn't work. I knew I had to find another way to understand the proportions of his genius. So I asked Monsieur Hitchcock to give me an interview of 50 hours and to reveal all his secrets. The result was a book. Actually it was like a cookbook, full of recipes for making films. But the great secret of Monsieur Hitchcock is a secret of cinema itself. People used to say, 'A film is good when it gives fear or pleasure to the audience watching it.' But I don't believe that. A film is really good when you can read between the images the director's fears when he made this film, or his pleasure making this film [chuckles]. I see it must be pleasure that Monsieur Hitchcock felt when he put his camera on the summit of Mount Rushmore."

The doc podcasts conclude with excerpts from Truffaut's aforementioned interviews with Hitchcock, which were recorded and saved. There was simultaneous translation by Helen Scott since Truffaut's English wasn't good and Hitchcock didn't speak French, so it's very easy to follow. And if you want to focus exclusively on the Truffaut/Hitchcock tapes, the blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger… has posted huge chunks of them. Craziness!

About Jacques Nolot

Oops, forgot to mention that my interview with director Jacques Nolot came out in Time Out New York last week.

I'm loathe to interview young artists these days because for the most part, they don't have much to say. Sorry, they just don't. Older ones, on the on other hand, do have stories, and it's hard to find somebody with better stories than Nolot, a wonderfully wry raconteur who's seen it all and is not afraid to say it all. Read on…

Northern lights

Oops, one more: My piece on the phenomenon that is Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis came out in the New York Times' Week in Review yesterday.

The movie is about to overcome Titanic as the biggest-grossing film ever in France, and it's launched an unparalleled wave of affection for the titular Ch'tis (the nickname of both the inhabitants of the Nord–Pas de Calais region and their patois). As far as I'm concerned, any region where the local delicacies—that would be french fries and sausages—are sold out of a van and consumed standing up is A-OK.

Songs of Paris

My TONY interview with director Christophe Honoré and actor Louis Garrel can be found here. In the main piece they discuss mostly their collaboration on their new musical, Love Songs (Les Chansons d'amour); if you want want more, there's also a bonus Q&A in which Honoré expends on the film's shoot and on the one he just completed, an adaptation of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves.

Two striking things about Love Songs: It's a French musical that does not remind the viewer of Jacques Demy every other second, and it features one of the most gorgeous casts I've ever seen. I mean, it's like some beauty bomb exploded on the set.

The songs were written by Alex Beaupain, who can actually be seen in the movie, performing "Brooklyn Bridge" in a club. Honoré, Beaupain and the cast members participated in a special DVD-release party-slash-show back in December, and it looked like a ton of fun.

Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier "De bonnes raisons" (from Les Chansons d'amour soundtrack)
Louis Garrel, Clotilde Hesme and Ludivine Sagnier "Je n'aime que toi" (from Les Chansons d'amour soundtrack)
Chiara Mastroianni "Au parc" (from Les Chansons d'amour soundtrack)

Dance, girl, dance!

There's a long tradition of French actresses branching out into singing: Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Kiberlain, Agnès Jaoui, among others, have all recorded albums. Jeanne Balibar (currently on NYC screens in Rivette's Duchess of Langeais) joined the music fray not so long ago and has made two records. I just read that this fall she'll be adding to her extra-curricular résumé when she appears in a dance by Boris Charmatz. Here we've seen Claire Danes dip her toes in the modern-dance waters at PS 122, but Balibar seems to be pushing the envelope a little further.

As if this weren't enough, another prominent French actress is due to make her dance debut this fall: Juliette Binoche is going to be in a show choreographed by Akram Khan, who himself will dance in the duo; this will be done first in London then in Paris. A bit more info here. (Binoche bugged me for a long time but I'm digging her more and more as she ages; she was surprisingly likable in Dan in Real Life for instance.)

I wouldn't be surprised if BAM wasn't already sniffing around these shows, especially the Khan/Binoche one. After all, they offer everything that institution loves: high-brow veneer and brand-name appeal.

French laurels

Once again, the French film awards aka the Césars have showered praise on an "auteur" movie by giving best film, best director and best script to Abdellatif Kechiche and his La graine et le mulet. (Remember that Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley had won last year.) I'd loved Kechiche's previous movie, L'Esquive (Games of Love and Chance in English), which displayed one of the most dazzling uses of the French language I'd ever seen; startingly, it had also won the top prizes at the Césars, launching the ongoing trend of crowning decidedly arty movies.

Unsurprisingly, Marion Cotillard won best actress for La vie en rose, a feat she may repeat at the Oscars Sunday night as the current common "wisdom," if you can call it that, holds that Julie Christie is too old to win. It's an insane reasoning and now I'm torn because I'd like Christie to win just to shut up the hatas and of course I'd love my homegirl to get rewarded as well. In the meantime, you can see Marion accepting her César from Alain Delon here. Unfortunately the video gets cut off at 2:25 but we get the gist.

The heat of the limelight

Two interviews in this week's Time Out New York, and coincidentally both are related to the way some performers come alive on stage.

First off is Marion Cotillard, who is stupendous as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (I much prefer the French title, La Môme). I usually have no patience for biopics—and have to admit that Piaf had never clicked for me—but I was completely moved by this one. Olivier Dahan cleverly plays around with chronology, introducing the dying Piaf very early on for instance. But his strength really lays with his mise en scène, which is most in evidence in the live scenes, like Piaf's big concert debut (shown sans sound) and the sequence in which she transcends her howling pain at Marcel Cerdan's death by going on stage, a transference process beautifully suggested by a long tracking shot.

Second is my current pop fave Darren Hayes, whom I'd already gushed about in these virtual pages. Hayes also illustrates the transformative power of a live show on audience and singer—I found it difficult to reconcile the emo-for-the-masses guy who once sang with Savage Garden with the sexy dervish doing Prince justice at Joe's Pub a few months ago.

We are vampires

What better way to unwind after an exhausting Saturday afternoon shopping at Century 21 (in Bay Ridge, of course, where untouched racks of Ted Baker and Ben Sherman shirts await) than listening to French public radio on podcast? Even better: One of my favorites shows—Kathleen Evin's usually sedate L'humeur vagabonde—ran into a highly entertaining glitch called Jeanne Balibar.

Balibar is a French actress with an immediately identifiable voice (not unlike that of Delphine Seyrig) and immediately identifiable intellectual aspirations (inherited perhaps from her philosophy professor of a father, Etienne Balibar, a disciple of Louis Althusser). She currently stars in Jacques Rivette's latest, Ne touchez pas la hache, a Balzac adaptation.

Evin, who liked the film, invited Rivette to discuss it; he took three weeks to decide that he didn't want to plug his flick on the radio, and so Balibar was dispatched on the promo front. Her segment would be prerecorded by one of Evin's producers then played on the air.

Balibar proceeded to show up late at the hotel room where the interview took place, wore dark glasses the entire time, and responded to questions not only grudgingly, but in a voice dripping with resentment and condescension. When the taped segment ended, Evin explained that it was all the journalist's fault: Balibar was cross because she had been prevented from smoking. But of course!

Here's a translation of some choice moments:

Asked if she had to be particularly precise when dealing with Balzac's text: "You must always be precise when you claim to give the public something artistic."

But how did she approach that particular text? "As usual, with the precision that is always mine, whether there are words or not. Burlesque and silence require as much precision as when there is language. I detest the beautiful, I only love the corrosive. What is beautiful is what Rivette and Balzac do: steel against steel."

How did she work with costar Guillaume Depardieu? "Guillaume and I are animals, wolves, vampires. Each of us howls to death when there's a full moon. That's why we made this movie together. I built the scenes around Guillaume, so you could see that magnificent soul. I literally did that: I built the language around him, the body around him, the movements around him. That's what I suggested to Rivette."

Evin, back in the studio: "We'll wish her a good vacation—I think she needs some rest."

And because I just can't get enough Balibarisms, here are a couple of excerpts from her first album (yes, la Balibar sings, too).
MP3 Jeanne Balibar "Johnny Guitar" from Paramour (2003)
MP3 Jeanne Balibar and Maggie Cheung "Hélas" from Paramour (2003)

Robert Bresson, ascetic genius, sublimizing horndog

Very interesting interview with actress/author Anne Wiazemsky on the France Inter radio show "La Bande à Bonnaud," on the occasion of her new book, Jeune Fille. Wiazemsky's name will be familiar to cinephiles—she was in Godard's La Chinoise and Weekend, as well as in Pasolini's Teorema and Porcile. She's been writing novels for a while now, with some success, and her latest is a largely autobiographical one about the making of her first movie, Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar—yes, the allegory with the donkey—in 1966. Quite a way to start off a film career.

The interview is priceless about Bresson's working methods. Wiazemsky (who has a wonderful radio presence) speaks about working with him when she was 17-18. When they first met, she was totally into commercial cinema, reading about stars in pop magazines, and she wasn't familiar with his work. For her audition, Bresson made Wiazemsky read lines from his own first movie, the 1943 nun flick Les Anges du peché. Her grandfather, Catholic writer and Nobel Prize–winner François Mauriac, authorized her to work with Bresson, with the warning that the director was on the odd side.

The first thing Bresson did on the shoot was to order Wiazemsky to live in the same house—she had to go through his bedroom to reach hers, and they shared a bathroom. She could talk only to him, had to have all her meals with him; she was completely separated from the rest of the crew (which nicknamed her "the little captive"). But Wiazemsky also recalls that the captive was complicit, and that she enjoyed submitting to the older man's authority and knowledge. She is really insightful about the love Bresson had for his actresses, including her, a love he sublimated in his movies. Funnier are anecdotes about Bresson going nuts about the donkey, which he apparently tried to direct exactly like the human actors. Walter Green, Wiazemsky's costar, was so shaken by the experience that he gave up acting and became a dentist; he also went on to marry 1970s star Marlène Jobert and sire…Eva Green.

The year after the movie came out, Wiazemsky married Godard. (How's that for a transition?) When Bresson learned about it, he called her and told he she was nuts to marry Godard, who was too old for her; Godard got furious that a director he admired so much would meddle in his private life. The show then played a clip of Godard calling Bresson both a great inquisitor and a humanist, adding that people who go to the movies once a year should make that movie one by Bresson, since a Bresson movie is the world.

Briefs from France

No time to post in Paris as I was busy rediscovering the city on foot (biggest change: the enormous amount of people on bicycles and the effort spent on building new bike paths), spending hours reading the paper in cafés, talking politics with friends (go Ségolène!) and going to the movies. A quick rundown:

- Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris, greeted by very positive reviews, including constant positive nods to the way Honoré honors the New Wave. And he really shoves it down our throats: a direct visual reference to Truffaut's Domicile Conjugal here, a female character named Anna there, and especially Louis Garrel's character, a sub-Jean-Pierre Léaud who didn't get the memo about how Antoine Doinel is meant to remain endearing even when he's irritating. The scene in which Romain Duris and Joana Preiss sing to each other on the phone is really moving, however, a successful Demy pastiche. But the movie tries too hard to be quirky, to be touching, to simply be. Add an awful jazz-lite score and painfully ugly cinematography, and you're left with a piece that does not bode well for French auteur cinema.

- Equally disappointing in a completely different way is Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes, which won its four lead actors an interpretation prize in Cannes. The movie is about men from the French colonies of North Africa fighting in the French army in 1944-45, and a typical example of how meaning well does not often translate into making good. The actors are indeed excellent, though there's a credibility gap as wide as the Grand Canyon at the center of the movie: Jamel Debbouze has a lame right arm and there's no way a man with only one functional arm would have been accepted in the army, and he certainly would not have been sent to battle with a rifle. To have Debbouze in the part does not make sense, and his handicap is never addressed in the film. Insane! From there on I could not take the movie as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

- two Frenchy-French-French comedies: Eric Rochant's L'école pour tous and, er, some no-name director's Poltergay. Both are ripe for American remakes, though only the former is likely to remain the better version. In L'école pour tous, a banlieue dude poses as a French teacher in a middle school smack in the middle of an at-risk neighborhood in order to evade the police. Various shenanigans and hilarity ensues. The best part of the movie is that the main character does not really improve at the end and does not miraculously become a brilliant teacher. The second best part is director Noémie Lvovsky stealing every scene she's in as a flamboyant fellow teacher. Poltergay benefits from a brilliant title and premise (in addition to Clovis Cornillac's pecs, wasp's waist and excellent comic timing): a couple moves into a house haunted by the ghosts of five gay men who died in a disco fire in 1979. Only other men can see them. Genius! The execution does not always follow but there's nothing a team of Hollywood rent-a-hacks couldn't fix.

- Les honneurs de la guerre, a 1960 movie set in 1945 and scripted by future director Jean-Charles Tacchella. No music, very odd mood for this UFO of a film in which the French villagers are shown as pretty deluded and pathetic, especially the eleventh-hour resistants.

As a side note, going to the movies in Paris is an exquisite pleasure: The screening conditions are generally nice (and often superb) and the silence among the audience nearly absolute. None of that constant bovine munching that accompanies movies in the US, and which I am completely fed up with.

Hey, time for Desperate Housewives dubbed in French! Next post: Heiner Müller's Quartett.