A Certain Slant of Light

Galloping toward the end of the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s! I just finished Cyrus Fisher's The Avion My Uncle Flew, which is a fantastic tour de force, what an amazing book.

The book takes place just after the end of World War II. John's father is still doing post-war work in France; John and his mother go to join him, and then John is sent to stay in his mother's ancestral village of St. Chamant with his uncle Paul Langres ("mon oncle"), who is building an airplane (or rather a glider, as John realizes with chagrin) which he hopes will repair the family fortunes, which hit rock bottom when the Nazis burnt down the ancestral Langres home. But the mayor of the town, who is trying to be the Langres land at rock-bottom prices, keeps interfering with his plans...

This book is many things, and one of them is an exciting thriller, which is not a genre much represented among the Newbery award winners. It's quite tense! When John visits the wreck of the Langres house, he finds a knapsack hanging from one of the intact walls, containing... drumroll please!... a Nazi revolver, showing that a Nazi soldier is still hiding in the mountains!

( Spoilers )

La Pointe Courte, Agnes Varda’s first movie, is named after the town where it is set: a small French fishing village. The name is apt, because the movie tells a number of stories which are connected only by their setting: the fishermen’s fight with the health inspectors to continue collecting shellfish in a local lagoon; a local girl’s romance with one of those fishermen; a young Parisian married couple who have are visiting, because this is the husband’s hometown, and they hope to sort out their marital troubles.

Actually, it really feels like two movies knitted together. One is a sort of sociological portrait of this French fishing village in the early fifties. This is Varda’s first film, but this section already feels extremely Varda in its focus on these working class people who are often overlooked by filmmakers, its eye for detail, its interest in the process of gathering things - shellfish, in this case - the interest that eventually developed into The Gleaners and I.

The other half is this story of the bourgeois Parisian couple, who feel like they’ve been parachuted in out of space and possibly out of another directors’ oeuvre. (The one exception is the scene where they crawl into the hulk of an old beached ship, decaying and yet beautiful in its excellent craftsmanship.) They are having an extremely mid-twentieth-century French argument about love (do you love me, or are you in love with love?), often accompanied by close-ups of their overlapping faces.

The first movie is interesting: I particularly enjoyed the scene with the boat jousting, where crews of Viking-type boats row toward each other so the men standing on the prows can try to knock each other off with lances. The second movie fits into it awkwardly, and also feels awkward in itself: a little too theatrical, a little too mannered.

But I suppose you can’t expect even Agnes Varda to burst right out of the gate with her vision fully formed.

Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 covers two hours in the life of Cleo, a singer in Paris who is waiting to hear from her doctor about a potentially fatal diagnosis. (The movie is actually only an hour and a half long; we skip some travel time in there somewhere.) The movie is perhaps as interesting as the things it doesn’t do as the things it does: you might expect meditations on the meaning of life, contemplation about the meaning of death, or at least a life-changing epiphany, but these things happen only in oblique shards.

Instead, Cleo simply wanders, sometimes succumbing to tears as her fears overcome her, sometimes masking her terror in irritation and snapping at the composers who write her songs - and sometimes, briefly, setting aside the sense of impending doom that hangs above her, smiling at herself in the mirror as she tries on new hats.

The movie abounds in these moments of distraction. Not only millinery shops but cafes, mirrors, street performers (including a man who eats live frogs), a silent movie within the movie, all swirl around Cleo as she moves through the streets of Paris. I suspect you could learn quite a bit about Paris in the 1960s just by watching this movie.

I feel that I ought to have something more to say about it, because I did like it, although it didn’t grab at my soul the way Vagabond did; but the film is so dependent on visuals, or rather on the accretion of visual details, many of which seem so small in themselves, that it’s hard to find a way into writing about it. It’s worth seeing, though; I have the feeling that all of Agnes Varda’s films are worth seeing. We’ll see how many I can get my hands on.

In the raw early spring, in the south of France, a vine cutter discovers a young woman frozen to death in a ditch. This is the opening of Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, which then reels backward to tell us the tale of that young woman’s last few weeks as she drifted around the countryside, living in a tent, hitching rides, picking up work or men in order to get money, food, booze, grass.

We learn only a few details about her past. Her name is Mona; she once worked as a secretary, but gave it up. She had the option, then, of a more settled life, but instead took to the road because of... boredom? Laziness? A yearning for freedom? Wanderlust?

She is free do to what she wants, when she wants it, as long as it costs no money: when she went on the road she abandoned not only steady work and soap, but the entire concept of agreeability. Early on, we see her hitch a ride in a truck - which she promptly derides as a piece of junk, when she learns the radio doesn’t work. The truck driver just as promptly drops her off by the side of the road. She’s rude, he complains.

Different people offer different valuations of her character depending on their preconceived notions (all female drifters are grasping and man hungry, charges a garage owner - who we later see crawling out of her tent with his pants undone) or the circumstances under which they meet her. One young girl, disappointed in love herself, catches a glimpse of Mona and her fling-of-the-moment asleep in a gently decaying chateau they’ve broken into, and sees her as a symbol of love. (Soon after, this fling runs out of weed, and then gets beaten up by robbers. Mona ditches him.)

Is her solitude sad or enviable? Her rejection of work, community, obligations of all kinds - is that freedom, or is it living death, as a philosophy student turned goat farmer thinks? (“All my friends who stayed on the road died,” he tells her.) Is she a figure of sexual freedom or sexual vulnerability?

Nothing graphic is ever shown, but it’s clear that sex is one of the ways that Mona provides for herself on the road, along with occasional odd jobs (washing cars, cutting vines) and petty thievery. And her peripatetic life makes her vulnerable: a man attacks her as she camps in the forest, and the camera cuts away as Mona shouts “No!”

(Side note: people sometimes justify graphic rape scenes, for instance on Game of Thrones, on the grounds that it’s necessary for realism, but I’ve become very skeptical of this claim and Vagabond perfectly illustrates why. You don’t have to see the whole damn thing to know what happened.)

Who is the real Mona? I think the genius of the movie lies in the fact that it is, in the end, it commits to no simple interpretation, but shows Mona as a kaleidoscope: her many facets shake together differently at different times. She can be callously dismissive, as with the fling she abandons; or she can be great company, as when she gets roaring drunk with a rich, lonely old woman who no one else has time for.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all interpretations of Mona are equally correct: the garage owner and the romantic girl are clearly seeing what they want to see, for instance. But many seemingly-contradictory interpretations are more or less true. It all depends how the pieces in the kaleidoscope have fallen out that day.

***

I didn’t intentionally watch this movie in conjunction with Tallulah, but it’s been a fruitful pairing, because the contrast in the way that the two movies treat their main characters, both of whom are female drifters.

Tallulah wants you to like the title character, and although I did enjoy the movie, I think ultimately this desire warped it out of true. The movie softens many of Lu’s less appealing aspects (that glove compartment full of credit cards) and twists itself into a pretzel to ensure that you’re basically on Lu’s side when she kidnaps a baby. Showing that the baby’s mother is unfit isn’t enough: after the baby is kidnapped, no less than three characters step up to tell the mother so.

Vagabond doesn’t care if you like Mona. Indeed, in many ways it paints her in a quite unflattering light. She abandons one lover because he’s run out of weed; later on, she ditches another young man because she’s offered a ride as long as she’s traveling alone. She steals from people who try to help her. She uses people.

And yet you do come to like her - not perhaps in the sense that you’d want to sit down and have coffee with her (if for no other reason than that almost all the characters comment on how bad she smells) - but in the sense that you come to care a great deal what happens to her. There’s a plain honesty in her portrayal - both in the sense that she’s brutally honest and in the sense that the movie never flinches from showing us her uglier actions - that makes up for the lack of any more ordinary appeal.

And indeed, there’s something attractive about her very refusal to be appealing - her refusal to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that something is as simple as politely refraining from complaining about the truck’s broken radio. Why does Mona go on the road? Because she wants to. It’s as simple and as baffling as that.

I expected to enjoy Total Eclipse, as it was directed by Agnieszhka Holland (who directed The Secret Garden) and is about the dysfunctional romance between the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud.

But in fact I didn’t finish it. Leonardo DiCaprio was bizarrely wooden as Rimbaud: what makes this particularly odd is that when he’s playing Rimbaud pretending to be a dog or a goat, he’s actually quite convincing, but when he’s just delivering normal dialogue he’s flat. This may be intentional - although what it’s intending to show, I don’t know - but mostly the effect is “this is Leonardo DiCaprio pretending to be someone and doing a bad job of it.”

Also, I had not realized just how low my tolerance is for men behaving badly because they are GENIUSES. To be fair the movie doesn’t entirely agree with this point, but Verlaine and Rimbaud clearly believe that their GENIUS means that they can do whatever they want, even if that means setting his wife’s hair on fire (Verlaine) or stealing his host’s stuff if he feels like it (Rimbaud) or stabbing his lover’s hand in a weird demonstration of the principle that if you’re going to be brutal, it’s purer to do it while you’re sober and also insulting to apologize (Rimbaud again, chastising Verlaine for maundering on about how he drunkenly set his wife’s hair on fire).

The hand-stabbing really ought to be in my wheelhouse, but in combination with DiCaprio’s flat delivery it’s just kind of dull and unpleasant. There’s no sense of interiority to his character - no sense of why he’s doing any of this. And without that, what’s the point?

I just watched a beautiful French movie! I mean beautiful in the most literal of senses: Renoir is an exquisitely shot film of beautiful people in lovely countryside, as if the filmmakers tried to make the movie look as much like a Renoir painting as possible. It reminds me of Bright Star, which also seems infused with light; only the light in Renoir is more golden, more late afternoon, perhaps reflecting Renoir's advancing age.

I was briefly concerned that the film was going to tell the tale of the aged Renoir's seduction of his model, the nubile young Dedee. But in fact the romance is between Dedee and Renoir's son Jean, who is home on convalescent leave from the trenches. (Yes, Jean Renoir, whose 1937 The Grand Illusion is one of the classics of the French World War I film genre, is now a main character in a biopic set in France during World War I. It's kind of glorious.)

Jean and his crutches are as close as the film gets to the trenches. The golden glow of the late afternoon makes Renoir's bucolic estate seem ageless and timeless, but it slowly grows clear that the world has changed and will change more: Renoir and his garden are beautiful relicts.

It's a film about the end of an era, but not a tragedy, not least because of Renoir's earthy good humor. As his health slowly fails, he descends into occasional grouchiness but not despair. Renoir painted until the day he died - literally; he painted his final still life the morning of his death. It's a meditative film, a film about the fading of a life well-lived.

You can tell I’ve been studying French for too long, because I’ve started having ~feelings~ about the parts of speech. My favorite is nouns, because they tend to be like English, except pronounced with extra fervor and drama. Or - let's get the genealogy right here - English nouns tend to be like French, because they are the remains of our erstwhile Norman chains.

I am also fond of verbs, also they tend to be cognate with Spanish rather than English, which makes things trickier. HOWEVER, conjugation, which bedeviled my soul in Spanish, is basically a non-issue here because this is a readings class, and therefore I only need to be able to recognize conjugations, not produce them, which makes it one hundred times easier. Except when you have words that conjugate into things that look nothing like their original selves, but there aren’t very many of those.

Not a big fan of prepositions. Because it turns out that, at least in Indo-European languages, there are a lot of prepositions that are attached to verbs, which seems perfectly reasonable in one’s own language but becomes absolutely maddening when you start to learn other languages, because there is no logic behind it.

But my least favorite part of speech EVER? Conjunctions. I hate conjunctions with a fiery burning passion because they are completely impossible to memorize. And moreover, the French looooove conjunctions. It is like they think that no sentence is complete unless it is festooned with a “nevertheless” and an “in order that” and also a couple of particles that don’t, as far as I can tell, actually mean anything, but are only there to sound pretty.

Which, let's be real, they totally do. It is a lot easier to study languages when you aren't expected to be able to produce or pronounce anything - but it also means that I can't pronounce anything, and I totally want to. Everything just sounds so much more dramatic and exciting in French!

First week of French class: successfully completed! Here, let me share with you a poem we translated in class. (Yes, we are already translating poems. No wasting time here!)

Chanson d'automne
Paul Verlaine (1866)

The long sobs
of the violins
of the autumn
wound my heart
with a dull
lethargy.

All suffocating
and pale, when
the hour sounds
I remember
the old days
and I weep.

And I depart
on the ill wind
which carries me
hither, thither
like a
dead leaf.

Ah, nineteenth century poetry, how I love you and your wallowing in emotion. I want to name a story after this poem now. Technically it is too late for a Les Mis story, but eh, minor difficulties.

It occurs to me that, though moderns tend to criticize people of the 19th century (although perhaps not so much the 19th century French) for being repressed - the main criticism of this sort of Romantic poem is that it's too much, too over-the-top, too unrestrained.

***

We've also started reading excerpts from Le Comte de Monte Cristo. I think they must be simplified, but I'm not sure...Does Monte Cristo have ridiculously short chapters?

And what is it with nineteenth century French authors and prisons, you guys? Is there any other literary tradition quite this obsessed with prisons?

***

Have not progressed on Les Mis since we last spoke. However, I do come bearing a pair of Eponine & Cosette stories (which might also be read as Eponine/Cosette, although I kind of think they're tagged that way because pairing stories get more readers. Certainly if I can possibly tag a story as a pairing story, I always do.)

( Recs recs )

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

I haven't opened my RL presents (my brother hasn't woken up. Do you think it's time to invade his room with a fife and drum corps?) but, after all, I can't share those with you, whereas I can totally share my Yuletide fic, which is delicious. I got a story for the film Amelie!

(Surely you have all seen Amelie? It's a French film about an imaginative, quirky, lonely young woman, Amelie, and her madcap schemes, and her budding relationship with a young man who she has never met, and the movie is funny and a little sad and the cinematography is gorgeous, and Audrey Tatou, who plays Amelie, gives the character so much heart and so much strangeness. I love it!)

I have some reservations about the film's ending, though, which is one of the reasons why I like this fic so much: it shows how Amelie deals with having an actual relationship rather than an extended series of madcap schemes.

Also, it includes beautiful lines like She likes to think it wasn't, that Nino tells his secrets to someone, even if it isn't her. And that his world also has corners which other people can't peer around. And descriptions of food! FRENCH FOOD!!!

So, without further ado: Le mondain futur d'Amelie Poulain.

Tonight, I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas and made raspberry tarts.

Nightmare was cute but sappy, which surprised me (true story: this movie came out when I was about six. I saw the ads on TV and was completely petrified). I liked the idea of the different holiday worlds, but I thought Jack was a bit full of himself. What is it with Jacks and egomania?

Also, it reminds me very vaguely of a live-action Disney TV movie called Halloween Town, or something like that. Does anyone know this movie? I want to know the title just so it will stop poking at me.

The raspberry tarts were incredible.

***

Yesterday, I watched Molière. It’s historical fiction based on the life of the famous French playwright, like Shakespeare in Love except totally awesome. It’s HILARIOUS, and the characters are wonderful. My favorite was Molière’s lover, Elmire, who is smart and fierce and duty-driven and loves her daughter (we will ignore the fact that she looks approximately the same age as said daughter) and sometimes bad-tempered and just brilliant.

Also, the costumes and sets are pretty. And did I mention the movie is hilarious?

( Some minor spoilers )

But other than that, it’s wonderful! Go see it!