Birkin and Gainsbourg

In a recent edition of Champs Elysées we had an interesting discussion on the Serge Gainsbourg-Jane Birkin song Je t'aime, Moi non plus, released exactly 30 years ago. I made the observation that though the song is remembered for its explicit sexuality (all that heavy breathing), in fact the message is far more subtle. After all, what does "Je t'aime, Moi non plus" exactly mean? I love you; Nor do I -- an apparent non sequitur. Was it, I speculated, a misogynistic comment on male sexuality -- the man scornfully admitting that the physical was all that counted. Or was it deeper -- the man hearing the woman's "I love you" as an empty phrase, which he echoes with an equally empty negative.

It seems I was close with the second guess. On the 30th anniversary of the song, I interviewed Jane Birkin and she said it was all to do with Gainsbourg's vulnerability. "I never quite knew what he meant (by the words). Was it because he was too shy to say 'So do I' because it was too banal, what everyone says when they are knocking each other off. Or maybe it was because he didn't believe it (the 'I love you'). He thought that was what girls always say. He was fairly 'désabusé' (had no illusions) about love. He had had several affairs that went wrong. Brigitte Bardot left him. So did I eventually. His belief in his own beauty was not very high. He loved the way other people looked. He wanted to look like (actor) Robert Taylor. With his big ears and his hooked nose -- he did not like his face."

So there you have it.

Bertrand du Guesclin

No-one reads Arthur Conan-Doyle's historical novels any more, which is a great pity because they are great yarns. Of course Conan-Doyle was an imperialist in the Churchillian vein, a man convinced of the manifest destiny inherent to the English experience. So take him with a pinch of salt. But then bask in the mastery of the story-telling. I have been enjoying his two books set in the Hundred Years War -- The White Company and Sir Nigel. Both start off in rustic southern England and end up amid the clash of armour in France. One passage from The White Company caught my eye, so I will quote it here in full. It captures the quintessence of the Conan-Doyle/Churchill view of the English and French nations. Here the good Sir Nigel finds himself at the castle of the French knight Bertrand du Guesclin. Nominally they are enemies, but of course they are brothers in chivalry so act like old friends. Guesclin's wife is a seer -- she has trances in which she foretells the future. After dinner she is asked what will be the outcome of the war between France and England:

"Both will conquer and each will hold its own," answered the Lady Tiphaine.
"Then we shall still hold Gascony and Guienne?" cried Sir Nigel.
The lady shook her head. "French land, French blood, French speech," she answered. "They are French, and France shall have them."
"But not Bordeaux?" cried Sir Nigel excitedly.
"Bordeaux also is for France."
"But Calais?"
"Calais too."
"Woe worth me then, and ill hail to these evil words! If Bordeaux and Calais be gone, then what is left for England?"
"It seems indeed that there are evil times coming upon your country," said Du Guesclin. "In our fondest hopes we never thought to hold Bordeaux. By Saint Ives! this news hath warmed the heart within me. Our dear country will then be very great in the future, Tiphaine?"
"Great, and rich, and beautiful," she cried. "Far down the course of time I can see her still leading the nations, a wayward queen among the peoples, great in war, but greater in peace, quick in thought, deft in action, with her people's will for her sole monarch, from the sands of Calais to the blue seas of the south."
"Ha!" cried Du Guesclin, with his eyes flashing in triumph, "you hear her, Sir Nigel?—and she never yet said word which was not sooth."
The English knight shook his head moodily. "What of my own poor country?" said he. "I fear, lady, that what you have said bodes but small good for her."
The lady sat with parted lips, and her breath came quick and fast. "My God!" she cried, "what is this that is shown me? Whence come they, these peoples, these lordly nations, these mighty countries which rise up before me? I look beyond, and others rise, and yet others, far and farther to the shores of the uttermost waters. They crowd! They swarm! The world is given to them, and it resounds with the clang of their hammers and the ringing of their church bells. They call them many names, and they rule them this way or that but they are all English, for I can hear the voices of the people. On I go, and onwards over seas where man hath never yet sailed, and I see a great land under new stars and a stranger sky, and still the land is England. Where have her children not gone? What have they not done? Her banner is planted on ice. Her banner is scorched in the sun. She lies athwart the lands, and her shadow is over the seas. Bertrand, Bertrand! we are undone for the buds of her bud are even as our choicest flower!" Her voice rose into a wild cry, and throwing up her arms she sank back white and nerveless into the deep oaken chair.
"It is over," said Du Guesclin moodily.

Great stuff

The Satin Slipper

What can one say about a play that is 11 hours long? I refer to Paul Claudel's "The Satin Slipper" which has just been staged in its entirety at the Theatre de l'Odeon. The play was first performed during the war, but since then it's only been put on two or three times -- for obvious reasons. Making a radio report about it, I watched the first hour and a half, and then the last hour and a half. If what I saw is representative, then all I can say is that anyone who sat through the whole thing has my fullest admiration. It makes one ponder on the vast difference that separates the French and the British cultural worlds. The idea of this being put on in a West End theatre is laughable. As far as I could make out, "The Satin Slipper" is a long, long, long series of philosophical and poetical discursions about love and God. Of plot, I could identify very little -- certainly no dramatic tension. To my view, it was the embodiment of tedium. And yet the theatre's 700 seats were all taken, and it has had a packed four week run. People I spoke to in the audience were ecstatic. I interviewed the director Olivier Py, who said the play had changed his life. And the actress Jeanne Balibar said that for her it was like an American TV mini-series like Lost or The West Wing -- full of hidden themes. But the answer to that is surely that in the Anglo tradition we write tight exciting stories which engage the attention, and then use them to evoke deeper themes. The French way seems to be to go straight to the deeper theme, and then talk about it - ad nauseam. Personally I find it effete and elitist.

Adjani

Why are so many French films such unremitting rubbish? Out of a sense of loyalty, I keep going to the cinema in the hope of being surprised -- but I so rarely am. Even the films one feels relatively positive about -- like "Welcome" (see recent post) -- aren't, if we are honest, particularly brilliant. Just ok. They pass muster. Most films that I see are simply bad. A couple of weeks ago, it was the new Daniele Thompson-- "Le Code a Changé". Everything that people complain of in French film was here concentrated in two hours of tedious, self-regarding bilge. Yet another film about relationships in the dinner-party land of the Paris in-crowd. No plot. Suddenly one couple is getting divorced, and another couple is getting it together. No explanation. No development of character. No acting even. The actors just recite the lines. How on earth does French cinema get away with it? A few days later, another disappointment. "La Journée de la Jupe" features in the next edition of Champs-Elysées, so I thought I would give it a look. The beautiful Isabelle Adjani plays a French literature teacher whose class of banlieue thugs is so out of control that one day she flies off the handle and takes them hostage. It's a nice premise for a film. Politically very incorrect, which is always a good thing. And at the start, there are a couple of good moments -- like when she holds a gun to the head of a particularly nasty individual and demands that he repeat Moliere's real name (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, since you ask). But once again, it all collapses. The plot goes nowhere. There is absolutely no suspense. And Isabelle Adjani is hopeless. She wanders about the room with her revolver, swinging vertigineously between the only two emotional registers she seems capable of: lost and silent, then angry and loud. My friend John Lichfield of the Independent backs me up on this. He saw Adjani in the theatre a couple of years ago -- one of those performances that the critics fawned over -- and his view was simple: she cannot act. "It's emperor's new clothes," he told me. "No-one dares to say what is staring them in the face." And here I think is the nub of it. The French cultural commentariat is complicit in the marginalisation of French culture. It is all back-scratching and aren't-we-great and friends together in Paris dinner-party land. No-one ever says anything is bad. Even when 'bad' doesn't begin to do justice.

The poster for "Welcome"

Talk of the town this week is the new film by Philippe Lioret called 'Welcome', which looks at the human drama unfolding at the northern port of Calais. That is where hundreds of migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere gather with the purpose of secretly crossing the Channel to England in the back of lorries. They are generally thwarted in their endeavours, because security is tight, but enough evidently do make it over to keep hopes alive. In the meantime the migrants live rough in makeshift camps on the outskirts of Calais, subsisting on hand-outs from charity and looked on with a certain resentment by many locals.

Periodically French government ministers feel compelled to promise more substantial shelter -- but this immediately triggers howls of protest from the right-wing press in Britain. Across the Channel, there is a paranoid fixation that France is going to create a new 'Sangatte' -- this being the name of the holding centre for migrants that became a kind of operational HQ for the people-smugglers. Sangatte was closed in 2002 by the then interior minister -- one Nicolas Sarkozy -- but the same humanitarian arguments that led to its creation in the first place (i.e. the crying disgrace of hundreds of men living under tarpaulin) continue to apply today.

This is the backdrop to the film, which is about how a swimming instructor -- played by the very watchable Vincent Lindon -- befriends a young Kurd who wants to swim across to England to be with his girlfriend. Unlike so many French films, 'Welcome' is well-constructed and has enough dramatic tension to keep the viewer engaged. It also sheds much-needed light on the plight of so many stranded migrants, living in abject misery on one side of the Channel with the white cliffs of their eldorado visible just 20 miles away.

However I certainly do not consider it a great film -- not least because the moral message is so unsubtle. Lioret has openly compared the attitude of police and some locals towards the migrants with those of the French population towards Jews during World War II. Specifically his film targets a law, which is indeed on the statute books, that makes it a criminal offence to give aid to illegal immigrants. In the film, the Vincent Lindon character is prosecuted because he puts the Kurd up in his flat.

But I am not convinced. That law is obviously not intended to stop people making humanitarian gestures towards the migrants, but to stop the lucrative trade run by the so-called 'passeurs' -- the ones who organise the clandestine migrations. Though he claims to be portraying events which have indeed been documented, Lioret has not produced evidence that the law has been used against the compassion of ordinary citizens. One case is often evoked of a woman who was held for questioning after she re-charged the mobile phones of some migrants -- but surely this could have been part of a legitimate investigation into people-smuggling. There is an interesting discussion on this at the following blog at Le Monde. http://moreas.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/03/14/migrants-de-calais-delit-d’assistance/">http://moreas.blog.lemonde.fr/2009/03/14/migrants-de-calais-delit-d’assistance/

Alain Bashung

On Monday Liberation newspaper dedicated literally half of its edition to the death of a singer who no-one outside of France has heard of. I do not exaggerate. Banished was all mention of the economic crisis or indeed of any other news-worthy event. The first 18 pages were given over to the death, plus three more at the back. So who on earth -- you may ask -- is this Alain Bashung character, whose demise can merit such exhaustive coverage in the house journal of the bien-pensant left? The answer is that he was one of the most-respected French singers of the last thirty years -- a man who, according to Le Monde, proved you can be "un rocker francais sans ridicule". Such claims are often made by the French of their own musicians -- musicians who nonetheless provoke either laughter or agonised grimaces when exposed abroad. But in the case of Bashung, I suspect his fans may be right. Everyone I speak to has a good word about him -- the comparison is regularly made with Serge Gainsbourg, who definitely had the gift -- and if you check him out on Daily Motion you can begin to see why. John Lennon said that French rock put him in mind of English wine -- ie a cultural contradiction in terms. But come to thnk of it, they're making some half-decent reds in the Home Counties nowadays. Anyway poor old Bashung died of lung cancer at 61. He'd been a die-hard smoker. Only a few days before he'd been on television to receive a record 11th award at the annual Victoires de la Musique ceremony. Here's the linkhttp://www.dailymotion.com/search/bashung/video/x8j29t_alain-bashung-victoire-musique-09_music

Did anyone comment on the recent death of an emblematic Frenchman of the 20th century? I refer to Max Theret, who departed this life at the end of February aged 96.

Not exactly a household name, maybe, but when I say he was the man who set up the FNAC maybe you begin to grasp his significance. When I add that he was once Trotsky's bodyguard, you are further intrigued. And when I further note that at the age of 80 he was convicted of insider-dealing in a murky Mitterrandish political scandal, you get a full sense of his symbolic interest: from the revolutionary far-left to easeful plutocracy in the space of a lifetime.

Now is not the place to quibble over rights and wrongs. Let us just celebrate an extraordinary story. Born in 1913, Theret excelled at sports and in the late 20s was providing muscle at left-wing demos. A member of the Socialist SFIO, he got to know some of the Trotskyite "entryists" and in 1934 was hired to be one of the great leader's minders at his villa in Barbizon southwest of Paris. "For us he was the Pope," Theret later said.

Max Theret spent much of the 30s fighting in Spain, and in World War II had a job at the Paris telephone exchange where he spied for the Resistance. He was a keen photographer -- obits said he had a passion for what was known euphemistically as "photos de charme" -- and in 1951 he set up a first agency aimed at bringing together buyers and traders in cameras. He offered a regular market for the traders, and ensured handsome discounts for the buyers.

Four years later the principle was expanded at the new Federation nationale d'achat des cadres (FNAC), which he set up with another Trotskyist Andre Essel. The aim was left-wing in spirit. If the goal of Socialist movements was to raise the salaries of workers, they reasoned, then one action that could have the same ultimate effect would be to bring down the price of traded goods. And that was what FNAC did -- negotiating hefty discounts from the big producers of cameras, record-players, records, books and so on, and offering them in return an ever-growing clientele.

Nowadays FNAC belongs to the global conglomerate PPR, but the founding egalitarian inspiration has still not entirely disappeared. (Critics might say it is evident in the surly manner of too many of the staff).

In any case, Theret became very rich. He sold his stake in FNAC in 1977 and was for many years a generous funder of Mitterrand's Socialists. But ignominy awaited. In 1988 he bought a load of shares in a French packaging company just before its takeover by Pechiney. He made a mint, but was immediately accused of insider-trading. Worse, there were signs he had the cooperation of one of Mitterrand's close advisers. It ended in 1993 with a suspended prison term and a large fine.

Asked for his reaction, he said it was "chiant" but he'd known worse -- a reference to the two bullets in his leg he got while fighting in Spain.

A rich life, then, if one also reeking of the hypocrisies of his age.

Michael Schofield

I have never watched the American series "Prison Break", being more of a "Lost" man myself. However I do know that the lead character of PB goes by the name of Michael Schofield, and for this I am eternally grateful. A full 12 years I have spent in this country, and never once has a person acknowledged my surname as being anything other than a god-awful unpronounceable Anglo-Saxon atrocity. It's been misread, misspelt, and flung back in my face. But now -- thanks to Michael -- all has changed. Suddenly it is: "Ah, oui!!! Schofield, comme Michael!!!" Judging by the frequency of this reaction, the number of people in France who watch "Prison Break" must be absolutely enormous. So thank you, the devisers of PB. Next - can someone at "Lost" create a character called Hugh, please.

It's all over the papers in France this morning, and it'll be all over the papers around the world tomorrow, so let me get my oar in quick. Sarkozy's new bint is the flute-voiced, feline ex-model Carla Bruni. The pair were spotted by paparazzi at Disneyland on Saturday. What is interesting is the pictures are not of the furtive, long-range variety, but clearly taken with the couple's knowledge -- and one can only assume, approval. Christophe Barbier, the well-informed editor of l'Express magazine , says that the president has been looking for a way to make the relationship public. Subscribers to Champs-Elysees will be familiar with the 38 year-old Carla Bruni, who we have written about in the past. After some years as a top model, she took to singing and her first album Quelqu'un m'a dit was a massive hit. He second album, which came out in 2007, consisted of bits of English poetry set to music. It was execrable and bombed. So what kind of a gal is la Bruni? She is from an extremely wealthy Italian family, her sister is the actress Valerie Tadeschi-Bruni. She is definitely a "pipol" to use the ghastly neologism. She had a relationship recently with the son-in-law of tele-philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, which says something of the circles she moves in. The default position of Latin Quarter chic chicks is normally stuck on the left. It is interesting that Sarkozy -- for one of them at least -- is no longer beyond the pale.

The BNF's new show is x-rated

A fulfilling morning at the Bibliotheque Nationale reading porn and (unusually) not feeling guilty. Here you can while away the hours looking at pictures of tumescent aristos and lusty nuns and pretend it is all in a good cause. The excuse is the National Library's "Enfer" exhibition, featuring the collection of banned erotica that it has built up since royal times. The collection, of about 2,000 books, was dubbed "Hell" in the 1830s in a rare moment of humour by the library's censors. No-one was allowed access until the late 60s, when the walls came down here as elsewhere. This is the first time the erotica/ pornography has been brought together for public display, and pretty strong stuff it is too. I particularly enjoyed (because I have read a lot about it recently ) the libellous material concocted against Marie-Antoinette. You can see why she grew to hate the Paris mob. Filthy. There are almanachs giving the names, specialities and addresses of early 19th century whores; boxes of eye-popping photographs; an extraordinary 1921 porn-flic which leaves nothing to the imagination; and lurid engravings from the 18th century novel "Therese philosophe" about the sexual awakening of a young woman. Plus the Marquis de Sade of course. All in all, enough to bring out the rude in any prude. Adults only.