Category: Culture

French electronic duo Her find immortality in their music

“We choose the way we’ll be remembered.” The first song Simon Carpentier and Victor Solf wrote as French electronic duo Her opens their self-titled debut album with those words. Both of them were afraid of the future at the time and needed to make a song about how they should be the ones to decide how they are remembered. No one else could decide.

“We Choose” was released after Carpentier’s death from cancer, aged 27, in August 2017. He and Solf had met over a decade ago at their school in the medieval town of Rennes, north France, forming Her in 2015 after their first band, electro-pop band The Popopopops, split two years earlier.

Knowing their time was limited, they mapped out how they wanted their debut album to sound, and how the entire project would be presented to the world. You’d be hard-pushed to find a record or another band to compare it to, and it’s not what you might expect from a French electronic act.

“Making this album was a very intense part of our life,” Solf says. He’s sat, in an orange roll-neck sweater and black trousers – handsome in a particularly French way, with a strong jaw and dark, close-cropped hair – at a venue in Paris where the first part of a documentary about Her will be shown, along with a live performance by him and his band members.

 

“It was really important for us to be able to produce our songs, to be really focused on the whole project,” he continues. “But it was also important to trust people and bring them in; we’d been working with our sound engineer for five years, even before Her, and he really helped us a lot on the production and the mixing.

“Sometimes you can’t see anymore what’s wrong with a song, so someone a little bit outside can help. It was the same with the musicians, Simon could play the guitar and the bass and I could play the keyboard and some drums, so we could have recorded it ourselves if we’d really wanted, but it’s not how we think about music. We started to work with three other musicians – without computers – in the studio, and it was really nice to have different opinions.” Continue reading “French electronic duo Her find immortality in their music” →

Is Paris still Paris? A writer looks at the evolution of the beloved city 

In ‘A Walk Through Paris,’ Eric Hazan connects the modern city with its revolutionary past

Eugene Brennan is a writer and academic based in Paris.

Eric Hazan’s “A Walk Through Paris” is about, simply, a walk through Paris. But Paris being Paris, a walk through its streets is anything but simple — or ordinary. Here Hazan, who has spent his entire life in the City of Light, offers a perspective — “a radical exploration” — that is both personal and historical, drawing on his experiences as a student, surgeon, social critic and publisher of leftist books.

Hazan sets out from Ivry, in the southeast of the city, to Saint-Denis in the north. As he travels, memories rise “to the surface street by street, even very distant fragments of the past on the border of forgetfulness.” His journey sparks questions: For example, he wonders, why choose one route over another? At other moments, personal preferences lead him on more convoluted detours. Traversing the Ile de la Cité, he avoids the principal routes, as one would pass by the prefecture de police, “a sorry perspective,” and the other would proceed through the rue d’Arcole, lined with tourist shops full of “I Love Paris” T-shirts — a scene that’s “hardly more attractive.”

Still, what emerges from this book is a profound affection for the city, often expressed in endearingly idiosyncratic terms. On the rue Hautefeuille, where Charles Baudelaire was born, Hazan observes a hanging turret on the corner of a small cul-de-sac. Dating from the 16th century, this conical trunk is made of a knot-work series in decreasing diameter, “each ring bearing a different decoration — a masterpiece of masonry.” Hazan lists several other locations in the city where these turrets can be found, referring to the architectural structures as “friends of mine”; sometimes, he writes, he even makes a detour just for a chance to greet them [ . . . ]

Read full review: Is Paris still Paris? A writer looks at the evolution of the beloved city – The Washington Post

Mathieu Amalric, the vibrant goblin of the French cinema

Actor and director performs Barbara, a biopic on the fascinating French singer starring his wife, Jeanne Balibar

 

The window of Parisian hotel resists. In person Mathieu Amalric ( Neuilly-on-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, 1965) possesses same playful spirit that many of its characters on screen, goblins who take refuge behind its big eyes and its enormous smile of joker. And with those weapons he has involved journalist in attempt to open a window so that actor and director can smoke. There is a padlock in between and an alarm that jumps somewhere in reception. Amalric doesn’t stop laughing with little girl. “We can’t even kill ourselves here!” Until a conical waiter appears. Impossible. Amalric looks at him and in 30 seconds he coaxes with his chatter. Result: The filmmaker smokes in room thanks to a cup reconverted into an ashtray. Continue reading “Mathieu Amalric, the vibrant goblin of the French cinema” →

Harlan Jacobson Reviews ‘Back to Burgundy’

When you think of France, sure you think of cheese and berets, baguettes and love–or at least adultery–and what else? Wine. You think of the Bordeaux you can’t afford, snapped up by those pesky Russian oligarchs and Chinese financiers. Or the Rhones that are earthy, or the Rosés that, while not fine wines are runaway must-have now on the American Left and Right Coasts to augment their Mediterranean diets. A special spot in the heart of France is reserved for Burgundy, Southeast of Paris, where the French relate with a fanaticism to the Grand Cru Montrachets, Mersaults, and Chambertins the way we do to fantasy baseball. Where we might head to Spring Training in Tucson, French director Cedric Klapisch’s father made a bi-annual visit to his Burgundy connection to smell the earth, pinch the grapes, shmoos—they do that in French Yiddish, too—with the domain owner and, of course line up the cases they’d lay in to make sure the good times rouler, that’s French for roll.

I almost said roulot. That’s because French actor Jean-Marc Roulot is also a vintner of Burgundy, and while Klapisch didn’t cast Roulot in his first film in the early 90s, he became a client for his burgundy. That’s until Klapisch decided that instead of making another film about the slightly cracked but earnest young urban sophisticates of When the Cat’s Away, Family Resemblances, Paris, My Piece of the Pie and The Spanish Apartment. He was ready to make a film in Burgundy about winemakers. And so, he arranged to film a story with an early writing partner Santiago Amigorena at actor-vintner Jean-Marc Rolout’s vineyard and cast him in the film. Big win for Roulot, who plays Marcel, the hired master winemaker on a family vineyard, and who infused the script with a level of detail about the life and production cycles of wine that’s perhaps seen nowhere else except in a documentary about winemaking, Natural Resistance, by Jonathan Nossiter and produced by the writer here, Amigorena.

Back to Burgundy is fiction and concerns three sibling Millennials, two brothers and a sister, and how they grapple with saving the family vineyard after the death of their father. It’s somewhere between a basic text for future sommeliers and wine connoisseurs and a porn flic about the process by which an actress’ pretty feet trod the terroir and then stamps the succulent grapes in the vats, as you hear each grape pop and sigh, Oh, mon Dieu, I die for you!

Okay, back to reality here, or at least the film. It helps that the three siblings are the prettiest 30-somethings in France right now—Pio Marmai as the older Jean, who returns to the farm after a 10 year self-exile that ended in Australia on a vineyard with a wife and son, Francois Civil as the baby brother, Jeremie, the dutiful but less talented son and young family man who has married into a more prominent wine family, and Ana Girardot as Juliette, the middle sister, whose taste buds and instincts–shown in the story all the way back to childhood–make her the natural master winemaker, heralding a timely nod to feminism come to France.

Now listen up: In this clip, first we’ll hear Pio Marmai as Jean explain–in French, of course– to a beautiful African grape harvester that he’s travelled the world but now he’s come home. That’s followed by Ana Girardot as Juliette addressing the entire crew that this is a special year, the first harvest without their father. And then it ends in La Paulée, the party that celebrates the end of the harvest, and is the only party outside of the one Stanley Kubrick filmed in Eyes Wide Shut that I’m truly sorry I missed.

In all this filmed beauty by the 56-year-old Klapisch—who worked as a waiter in a French restaurant while he studied film at NYU in the mid 80s—there’s a small gap. The story’s central problem—how to pay the inheritance tax—is sort of spat out like a rogue grape skin. I guess that’s forgivable, because Back to Burgundy is a fantasy set in the four seasons of beautiful wine country, with pretty people fighting to save the vision of Old France and the French standards that make France France. The original French title is “Ce qui nous lie.” What Binds Us. That’s not only a topic that has been on the minds of French filmmakers for the last two decades, in such masterpiece films as Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours of 2009—but the French electorate itself. How you come out on such issues that are the sharp notes just below the surface of the enjoyable Back to Burgundy can drive you to drink.

A glass of Gevry Chambertin, s’il vous plait.

Listen to audio review: Harlan Jacobson Reviews ‘Back to Burgundy’ | WBGO