Some Good French Films

It’s been a weird weekend. And it’s only Saturday. Hopefully grocery shopping is uneventful tomorrow.  One minute you’re sitting on the train and the next you’re disembarking and for some reason your right hip isn’t letting you walk?
Weird stuff.
Pretty sure I’m too young for hip replacement.

SO I was talking to some friends yesterday and said I would send along a list of recommended French films. And SO I figured I would post it since it’s a list.

That said, full disclosure: I haven’t seen every French film ever so this is a superbly and spectacularly incomplete list.

Let’s Start with animated:

• Ernest and Celestine: Bears and mice and based on a lovely children’s book series that I want to buy for my potential offspring.
• Nocturna: Amazing world building. So much imagination. Cats.
• The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart: I walked in on dad playing music from this. He’s never seen it.
• A Monster in Paris: There’s a giant bug and it’s a beautiful heartwarming story. Also beautiful music.

Also kid-focused but not animated:

• Le Petit Nicolas: This is what being a child is like. But kind of more so.

I’ struggling with categorizing all the rest so I’m just going to throw them at you in one big lump:

• Belle de Jour: Catherine Deneuve is bored and fantasizes about BDSM so she decides to be a prostitute. Also her name is Severine, which is an excellent name.
• La Vie en Rose: Marion Cotillard is Edith Piaf and it’s as amazing as it sounds.
• Les Trois Couleurs: Three movies which you can kind of trace from the Nouvelle Vague style. Loosely connected, all individually perfect as stand-alones. I think Blue was my favorite.
• La Double Vie de Veronique: For some reason this hangs out with Les Trois Couleurs in my mind. Some lovely music.
• Huit Femmes: A Christmas musical murder mystery with a who’s who cast of great French actresses.
• Les Choristes: A teacher positively affects students lives through music. But it’s actually a good film.
• Bonjour, Tristesse: The book is better but this is nice and light and summery. Still not a huge Jean Seberg fan.
• The Intouchables: I always confuse this with The Untouchables, a film about taking down Al Capone. This is great too.
• Elle: Isabelle Huppert is bae and this Oscar nominee (did it win? I don’t remember) from last year is fantastic.
• Tous Les Matins du Monde: Music again. But also period drama stuff and sex.
• La Pianiste: Isabelle Huppert being sexy again. But this time even more mentally off-kilter.
• La Piscine: Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin and Alain Delon are all fabulously attractive people.  And the film is suitably sexy.
• Les Enfants du Paradis: A long film that flew by. It’s actually a work of art and quite possibly one of the best films I watched last year. It is inspiring me to fall in love with a mime.
• Eyes Without a Face: French New Wave does Hitchcock. I am obviously a fan.
• Diabolique: More Hitchcockian stuff. A wife and mistress conspire to kill the guy. Then come strange events.

Weird stuff that I’m not sure I can recommend:

• Last Year at Marienbad: I will never forget the word ‘couloir’.
• Triplets of Belleville: What…?

Role Models: Literary Villainesses

You may have noticed that I took the weekend off from posting, which was nice because I didn’t have anything I very much wanted to get out.

But today I’d like to talk about some of the women in literature I find to be very inspiring- the women who are pretty much the devil incarnate.

Putting aside issues of women’s representation in literature and other arts, and how it may or may not be more connected to men’s imagination than female actuality… some of my favorite characters are strong, selfish, and mean people.

I’m not sure why this is, especially because I’d like to think that I personally am nothing like that.  But it’s also not difficult to see why their drive, anger, and uncompromising attitudes are appealing.  After all, the world is a scary place and women are frequently expected to be easy victims of it.