Category: Culture

Is the iconic Parisian bistro dying?

It’s lunchtime at a busy neighbourhood bistro in Paris’ 11th arrondissement. A pair of young male servers are gliding through the restaurant, juggling plates groaning with roast chicken and frites, duck confit and beef tartare, and sliding them across the tables to their customers in swift but graceful movements.Sitting in the corner of the bar, a lone man has ordered a cheese plate, a green salad and a glass of red wine, and is consumed by his newspaper. It’s not long before a tall, middle-aged man enters the restaurant, calls out ‘Georges’, shakes his hand with a hearty one-two pump and takes the seat next to him. It’s immediately apparent that Georges’ friend is the kind of bar fixture who has the gift of banter.

The bistro bar is a place of exchange, of conversation, a way of life

“When are you going to take my order?” he teases the bartender in an accusatory tone.

“Huh la la la la,” she replies, her four “las” uttered in quick succession. “Always the same. You haven’t changed.”

She would know. Marie-Claude Lainey has been serving Serge Jovanovic his lunch for the last 15 years.

Jovanovic and Georges Cano have also been eating their lunches together over the last 15 years. In the same bistro. At the same time. Nearly every day.

Continue reading at BBC: BBC – Travel – Is the iconic Parisian bistro dying?

Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Thinker for Modern Times, An influential French thinker’s take on what women need to be truly free

The constraints that are stopping women from taking control of their lives

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher and writer whose work exploring what it is to be a woman shaped feminist thinking today. A pioneering intellectual, she used her existential ideas around freedom and responsibility to shape her life, literature and politics.


Rajan Datar discusses her life and work with writers Claudine Monteil and Lisa Appignanesi, and philosopher Tove Pettersen.

 

Continue at: BBC World Service – The Forum, Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Thinker for Modern Times, An influential French thinker’s take on what women need to be truly free

DVD/Blu-ray: Let the Sunshine In

Un beau soleil intérieur, the film’s French title, is part of a piece of advice given by a clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, in a surprise 15-minute cameo at the end of the movie). Try to find the beautiful sun within, he tells Isabelle (a glowing Juliette Binoche) and be “open” (he uses the English word). His huge, dented face seems to take up most of the screen. Isabelle, a lonely, recently divorced artist, who wants him to tell her which of her potential lovers is the best bet, laps his words up tearfully. Any port in a storm.

Whether you enjoy this film by revered director Claire Denis (Beau Travail, White Material; High Life, her first English-language movie, co-starring Binoche and Robert Pattinson, comes out later this year) depends on your tolerance for middle-aged Parisian bobos (bohemian-bourgeois) who flit from gallery to restaurant to loft, having hesitant, repetitive conversations that go nowhere. “What do you want me to say?” “I don’t know,” is a typical example. “It feels so good to stop all this talking,” says Isabelle as she falls into bed with an actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle). You have to agree.

It’s not quite a comedy, not quite a parody; perhaps it’s a meta romcom. The performances are impressive and there is, no doubt, immense skill in Denis’s elliptical, naturalistic, fragmentary direction. This non-linear approach must owe something to co-scriptwriter and collaborator Christine Angot, whose incantatory repetition in her plays and novels is her trademark style. But it’s just that – like life, perhaps – this plotlessness doesn’t result in anything very satisfying. Isabelle, volatile and seductive in stiletto-heeled thigh-high boots, goes from one unsuitable man to the next, swayed by the breeze, and we get to know none of them. As for her ten-year-old daughter, waiting in the car for her dad to finish arguing with Isabelle over his right to keep the keys to their apartment, we see her for about ten seconds [ . . . ]

Continue reading at THE ARTS DESK : DVD/Blu-ray: Let the Sunshine In