In the following post,
itself repeatedly updated, as though with post-it notes,
with each fresh whiff of scandal out of France, we apologized to the French
President for having called him “a
crowd-courting doofus; a lackwit
wazzock”, and other things still more unkind. Here, now, is
the latest:
Anthony Lane, reviewing the new Tavernier film “Quai d'Orsay”
(the title which Wiki gives it in English as well, though apparently it has
recently been dumbed down for American audiences as “The French Minister”,
rather the way the first Harry Potter book, “The Philosopher’s Stone”, had to
become “The Sorcerer’s Stone” to cross the Atlantic), highlights the femme
fatale character:
She is played by Julie Gayet, who
was in the news recently as the woman to whom the real French President, François
Hollande, was paying regular visits
on his little scooter. And
her character is called Valérie, which is the name of the partner whom Hollande
was allegedly spurning for Mme. Gayet.
This is not life imitating art.
This is art going to bed with life
and staying there for the afternoon.
-- The New Yorker, 31 March
2014
A nice touch, that, by the way -- “his little scooter”. This is artful of Mr Lane, suggesting
that what the dumpling Hollande has down there between his legs is pretty small, and goes
putt-putt.
*
Si cela vous parle,
savourez la série noire
en argot authentique
d’Amérique :
For further instances in which French sex and French
politics intertwine like the rose
and the briar, try these:
~
An after-reflection upon
Mr. Lane, the Art of Criticism,
and the Meaning of Life
Well, no, precisely not, though that is just the
temptation: It’s just a mo-vie.
I enjoy Lane’s reviews the way I enjoy P.G. Wodehouse -- reliably; and sometimes there is rather more than that. Yet in Googling his name, there
in the very top returns were some absolutely scathing, venomous denunciations. Bringing it home that, not only can you
not count on pleasing all of the people all of the time (I think Abraham
Lincoln said that): if you so much
as delight some people some of the time, there will be
others who downright despise you.
One of these counter-critics, writing in some New-York-based
webzine, poured scorn upon Lane as a mere spewer of witticisms, with almost no
knowledge of cinema; and in
particular (in reference to the movie under review, one of those vaporous
martial-arts-cum-mysticism films) for having insufficiently spent his life
delving into the splendors and subtleties of kung fu movies, or whatever it
was. His final, crushing
verdict: Anthony Lane’s reviews
are so bad that they read like something out of a webzine. (Oh, wait …)
Now, inside this animadversion lie perdu two traits for
which I specially value Mr Lane.
One, that he is no prisoner of the self-referential Cahiers-du-Cinéma-style
film-crit hall of mirrors, but has windows on the world: the review referenced above is informed
with a sense of biography and of current politics. Further, Mr.
Lane knows his audience.
Probably few regular readers of The
New Yorker (and I have been following that venerable weekly, though in
part pre-natally, since its
inception in 1925) could by any possibility care less about puffed-up Oriental
kick-‘em flix, however balletic the cinematography. Mr Lane is not writing for the sort of pimpled
basement-dwelling masturbators who batten on kung fu flix. He reviews them, along with all
the rest, simply because he is paid to do so, that is his job, whatever washes
up on his plate that week.
As for the charge of wittiness, no doubt Mr Lane would own
the soft impeachment. He indeed is
consistently witty, but also at least intermittently keenly perceptive, and
occasionally (as here) capable of genuine moral seriousness.
[Note: I had
long suspected, based simply upon the archness of his writing (& yes yes,
well aware, pot/kettle/black), that he might share with his countryman Oscar Wilde more than the charm and English
drollery (something that his ‘jacket photo’ on the New Yorker site does nothing to dispel). But no, turns out the man is a
paterfamilias. Some years
ago, I experienced an exactly
parallel realization regarding the
arch and icecream-suited Tom Wolfe.]
[Update 27 III 14] The blushing vestal to get big buck$ in compensation:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-eco/2014/03/27/97002-20140327FILWWW00183--closer-devra-payer-15000-euros-a-julie-gayet.php#xtor=EPR-31-[-closer-devra-payer-15000-euros-a-julie-gayet]-20140327-[titre]
[Afternote:
As for the Meaning-of-Life stuff, sorry, that lies above your
service-level. For that, you’ll
have to upgrade to World of Dr Justice Prime
®.]
[Update 27 III 14] The blushing vestal to get big buck$ in compensation:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-eco/2014/03/27/97002-20140327FILWWW00183--closer-devra-payer-15000-euros-a-julie-gayet.php#xtor=EPR-31-[-closer-devra-payer-15000-euros-a-julie-gayet]-20140327-[titre]
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