Subtitles
The day began early, but there were dishes to wash up from last night's dinner for five persons in four courses. (Plat principal: two Porterhouse steaks, to celebrate M le Neveu's recent attainments - he has been asked to deliver papers at several prestigious venues. He and the other gentleman at the table savored the bones.) Kathleen had to go in to the office - she lost much of last week to a time-consuming attack of bureaucratic pettifogging. I meant to spend the afternoon reading, but I had an inexplicable panic attack that made it impossible to concentrate on the Treaty of Sèvres. Eventually, I found a Xanax to calm me down, but by then I was watching French movies, Touchez-pas au grisbi and L'auberge espagnole. These pictures have nothing in common, but they've been sitting in my 'get to' pile for too long, because it's been hard to find time for sitting deliberately in front of the screen and reading subtitles. The title of Jacques Becker's 1954 film translates as "Hands off the loot," and the loot in question is two hundred pounds of gold bars, stolen in an unsolved crime by two polished thieves, Max and Riton. Jean Gabin plays Max, an imperturbable man who is determined to retire. That has become a familiar posture in a lot of recent American movies, but this story does not embroil Max in one last heist. Rather, he's got to protect the loot, now that a drug lord knows that he stole it. (Riton, played by René Dary, blabbed about it to impress his faithless girlfriend, Josy, played in turn by the young and slightly unrecognizable Jeanne Moreau. The excitement stems from the steady focus on Max's point of view. We don't see much of the drug lord, and have to piece together his plans right along with Max, as he anticipates every move while trying to keep the hapless Riton out of danger. There is a big scene of fascinating violence near the end, but, aside from an interlude in pajamas, Jean Gabin proceeds through Grisbi in a succession of bespoke suits and opulent neckties, with never a hair out of place. L'auberge espagnole (2002) is a charmer by Cédric Klapisch that does not feature Audrey Tautou, as the DVD box would lead an unsuspecting viewer to believe. The star of Amélie is a cast member, certainly, but she represents the life that Xavier (Romain Duris) leaves behind when he goes to spend a year in Barcelona studying Spanish and economics - and sharing an apartment with six other Europeans, all of them, like him, participants in Erasmus, the intra-EU exchange-student program. (The movie might have been named after the great writer, of whom the narrator never seems to have heard.) The movie depends on the moody authenticity of its young cast (on M Duris in particular), and on the fresh and intriguing use of split screens.... When Kathleen comes home, I'm thinking of making patty melts, which I've just figured out how to do, and then we're going to crawl in with Inspector Morse on the SDP 2700.
Comments
Max and I watched the Erasmus flick a few months ago, which, by the way, I was pleased did not feature Ms. Tatou, as she is just too cute-as-a-button for me. The movie was entertaining, although I remember the split-screen shots as utterly irritating rather than "fresh and intriguing", and I thought there were too many things going on at once, and also that the general progression of the movie was so typically "coming-of-age" it seemed almost American (horrors!) to me. Predictable. Perhaps because I'm not that far out of school myself. Also, the costume designer was not very good. I was too aware of how Xavier's clothes and appearance were supposed to track his 'becoming cool" trajectory, and kept saying things to Max like "oh look, his hair is a little more rumpled now, and he got that shirt at Zara, where he probably never shopped in Paris."
Posted by: Biscuit | February 22, 2005 09:24 AM
L'auberge espagnole is indeed a cute picture - pleased with itself and not shy about showing off - and cute is deadly when underlying character is not appealing. The underlying character of L'auberge is indeed a coming-of-age story. What might appear to be an unfocused, too-much-going-on heap of details, however, struck me as beautifully tied to the principal character's resolution: in retrospect, we can see the narrative as a writer's sketchbook: not the finished work but the notes.
I must confess that I didn't attend to the clothes. The two women in the apartment (as well as Martine back in Paris) appeared to have an adult sense of clothes that the men seemed almost willfully to lack, and the finale's flight from uncomfortably-suited bureaucrat to bare-chested writer was for the me the movie's one tedious note, even if it did teach me something about writers. Writers writing are the most invisible of people, because to the extent that they're successful (putting plausible words onto pages) they're invisible to themselves. For this reason, I would suggest that they always be represented in the most artless, unassuming way. Writing ought never to be made to look interesting.
Posted by: R J Keefe | February 22, 2005 11:04 AM
I liked L'Auberge espagnole OK, but found it to be a bit of a trifle. I have liked some of Klapisch's spotty oeuvre more, especially Chacun cherche son chat (terribly translated as "When the Cat's Away"). Audrey Tautou can be annoying, but she is awfully cute.
I have discovered the miracle of using Amy's computer to watch movies. Her display is much nicer than my desktop machine's display, and the sound is far better (I have a whiny soundcard that I don't feel like troubleshooting; best just wait until this machine is aged out in a couple of years. Too much effort.) So I had the great joy of rediscovering Antonioni's Blow-Up this weekend, which I hadn't seen in at least 15, and probably 20, years. Fantastic in every respect – visual, audial, story, overall atmosphere. London in the mid-60s is in some strange midpoint between the Second World War and ultra-modernity, and it's intoxicating.
One reviewer – I think it was in the NYT – put it very well when he or she said that what shocked in the 1960s was the nudity, and what is shocking now is the way the protagonist treats women.
Posted by: Max | February 22, 2005 04:09 PM
As French gangster films go, I find Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge) hard to beat, but I will have to check out Touchez pas au grisbi, if only because I like bespoke suits and the word "grisbi."
Now I have to read what the Treaty of Sèvres was about, as it's slipped my memory.
Posted by: Max | February 22, 2005 04:13 PM
Ah yes, that one. (Carving up of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, for those who don't know.) Yeah, that didn't work out so well, especially with the bizarre Greek nationalist incursions into Anatolian Turkey, and the Armenian genocide -- though the first phase of the genocide predated the end of WW1.
One distant cousin-by-marriage was a Ladino-and-Greek-speaking, Alliance Israélite Universelle-educated Jew from Smyrna who had to flee France in WW1 in order not to be arrested as an enemy national. After WW1, he couldn't return to Turkey because of the danger of being shot as a deserter -- even though this was now the Turkish Republic, and he had left the Ottoman Empire as an adolescent. His family ended up in Athens, where some were deported to their deaths during the Nazi occupation, and others hid out in the mountains.
More than anybody wanted to know.
Posted by: Max | February 22, 2005 04:30 PM
David Fromkin's The Peace to End All Peace is the closest things to required reading that I've come across in years, and when I finish it in a few days, I shall provide a fuller account. It's not a screed, not an exposé. It is an extraordinarily fastidious account of the diplomatic maneuverings and strategic objectives that, during and just after World War I, motivated clueless Brits to make the slew of commitments fashioned the modern Middle East. The book has a tragic dimension that brings Wotan and his contracts to mind, all the more powerfully because so many, many people died, and are still dying, as a result. The Peace lays out with the greatest consquence the stages of dismemberment that transformed the Ottoman Empire into Turkey and a clutch of Arab sovereignties. The British attempt to pull these territories into the Twentieth Century was doomed by the same folly that will probably doom our Iraqi misadventure: the vanity of imagining that strangers will love us because we're fair and honest. Will love us for being fair and honest even when we're occupying their countries.
Posted by: R J Keefe | February 22, 2005 07:19 PM