‘Costa Concordia’ Captain Says He Had No Choice but to Abandon Ship

ROME -- A profound sense of duty compelled Francesco Schettino to abandon his sinking cruise liner, the Costa Concordia, the ship’s captain told Italian authorities this morning, and his actions saved countless tiny, almost completely invisible lives.

Schettino has been criticized for allegedly fleeing the accident, last Friday, long before many passengers and other crew members. It is also alleged that he refused to return to the ship after being ordered to do so by the Italian coast guard; according to some sources, he either did not participate at all in the rescue effort or else hampered efforts by others.

“It was my duty as captain to oversee the evacuation and rescue of the most vulnerable passengers on board the Costa Concordia,” Schettino is said to have told investigators. “The Puffi are a tiny people who would have been crushed by others in the rush for the lifeboats. What is more, only I have the ability to see them. Had I abandoned them, they surely would have died, and casualties from this regrettable accident would have been much, much higher.”

Schettino “refuses to be the Gargamella in this case.”

Aboard the ship, the Puffi, tiny blue people who wear white stockings and caps, were mostly elderly (Grande Puffo), women (Puffetta), children (Puffo Bambino), or so incredibly brainy or handy that Schettino dared not leave them behind (Puffo Quattrocchi, Puffo Inventore). “Survivors of the wreck would need the Puffi skills these Puffi could provide,” Schettino reportedly said.

“You cannot imagine how difficult it was,” Schettino told Italian authorities, describing what he called a “Puffi’s Choice” as to “who would escape and who would stay to fight for their Puffi lives. But it was my duty as captain to act as I did.”

Among the disaster’s unreported casualties, Schettino said, were Puffo Goloso, Puffo Maldestro, and Puffo Brontolone, all of whom are missing and believed smurfed.

“I can understand that, since nobody else could see the lives I was saving, it may have appeared that I was a foolish coward, thinking only of myself. This is simply not the case.”

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One Woman’s Story

Pioneer Woman, Feminist Icon

In the late 1970s and much of the ’80s, I was a pink-collar worker and a hired gun, an office temp in Texas and New York. My bosses conducted important business, such as adjusting insurance claims, packaging and shipping underwear, and persuading Americans to manufacture more food in tubes, but ultimately those were just details that had no impact on my duties, which consisted of typing and filing as fast as I possibly could. In every office, my colleagues were, with only the rarest exceptions, women.* And on every desk and every cubicle wall, these women had posted Cathy cartoons.

That’s why I’ve always felt that Cathy Guisewite’s comic strip afforded me a meaningful glimpse into the day-to-day realities of American women in the workplace. Guisewite indulged in as many stereotypes as she shattered, and sometimes her observations were broadly generalized. I was more likely to learn about women’s concerns by going to lunch (or, better yet, for drinks after work) with the “girls” than by reading Cathy strips. But Guisewite clearly struck a chord with thousands of American women, and this week, as she announces her retirement after 34 years, her achievement commands our respectful acknowledgment.

It’s possible that Guisewite’s gently satirical humor overstayed its welcome. “The four basic guilt groups” (food, work, love, Mom) is a genius idea, but there are only four of them, and only so much one can say. I haven’t kept up with Cathy in recent years, but these days I hear more mockery than praise: it’s a bad sign when The Onion columnist Jean Teasdale cherishes your creation.

Yet it’s important to remember that, when Guisewite started out, she was a true revolutionary. In those days, our most prominent model of liberated womanhood on the funny pages was Lucy Van Pelt — a little girl. Lucy may have empowered women to be bossy and crabby, and her psychiatric practice may have been a thriving business, but the fantastical element of Peanuts (children who behave like anxious grownups) always intruded. And, of course, like most comic strips in those days, Peanuts was written by a man.**

I am woman, hear me “Aack”

By giving us any kind of woman’s perspective, Guisewite broke ground. Mostly Cathy shared with us the sorts of things that, give or take a piña colada, women say among themselves — when there’s a chance a man like me may overhear them. Thus readers see frustration, rather than rage. Loneliness rather than alienation. Small-scale hopes rather than world-conquering dreams. However, the concerns and anxieties that Guisewite did depict are universal enough that women were able to identify with them — and laugh.

Picking up the newspaper from time to time, I grew to feel a little frustrated, myself. It’s one thing to see Lucy pine for Schroeder for half a century, and another to see Cathy suffer Irving for even a few years: fantasy versus realism. Cathy’s reality is surprisingly gloomy, though Guisewite scrupulously kept us from falling into the dark abyss that lies just beyond the tidy squares of her strip: nevertheless, we see that men are not truly human, and a woman has a better chance of connecting on a spiritual level with her dog than with her boyfriend (to say nothing of her boss).

If she’s lucky, like Cathy’s mother, a woman will find a man who’s passive and ineffectual, who recedes into the background; yet even Cathy’s mother was so profoundly shaped by the male hegemony that her values drove her daughter to distraction. The world, like Mr. Pinkley’s office, is created by and for men, and a woman must do constant battle to make a place for herself there.

For the most part, Guisewite hinted at these things more than she spelled them out. As I say, I heard similar complaints from the working women I knew — who never forgot for a minute that I was a guy. Yet I never forgot that most other men weren’t even listening. If any of them happened to read Cathy in the morning, they probably learned a little something.

Thin, attractive, successful, empowered: Guisewite

Other women’s voices are heard on the funny pages now, and other artists have expanded the possibilities of the form far beyond anything that Guisewite achieved or attempted. That’s what it means to be a trailblazer. Sometimes, people forget that, before you came along, there never was a trail at all. But I hope Guisewite takes a moment to turn in the saddle, to look back and to see that, modest though it may seem to others now, the trail was well worth blazing.


*NOTE: My development as a Sensitive Guy of the Seventies wasn’t a matter of angling for dates, or copying Alan Alda: it was a professional necessity.

**Since Charles Schulz divorced the woman who served as inspiration for Lucy, we can detect and confirm a degree of authorial hostility toward her. She’s really not a hopeful model for anybody, and that’s a shame. Would that Schulz had retired before his strip descended into a years-long Hell of almost surreal pointlessness.

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Sfar’s ‘Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)’

Double-take: Elmosnino at work

Singer–songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (1928–91) remains one of the most sacrés of all the monstres in French culture. When a new film based on his life story was announced, I naturally presumed that it was meant primarily to capitalize on the success of the recent biopic of Edith Piaf, La Môme (known in the U.S. as La Vie en Rose) — to say nothing of American hits such as Ray and Walk the Line. Artistically, each of these films has wrestled with cliché, not always winning, and Gainsbourg’s hard-lived life promised many of the same elements. I feared the worst.

What I hadn’t counted on was the participation of Joann Sfar, a comic-book author–illustrator. Directing for the first time, he brings to Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque) an imaginative sensibility unlike any that I’ve seen in any movie about an artist, with the possible exception of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Sfar adapted the screenplay from his own graphic novel,* and while he respects the outlines of biography, he liberates a fantasy, too.

Moi non plus: Lucy Gordon, Eric Elmosnino, and friend.
(On the other side of the desk, the great director Claude Chabrol is having a helluva good time playing a record producer.)

It’s hard to live in France without at least a little awareness of Gainsbourg’s life and music. Born Lucien Ginsburg, he wrote cynical, deliberately provocative songs that, years later, haven’t lost their power to shock. Perhaps the most famous of these is the duet “Je t’aime, moi non plus” (I love you, me neither), a sexual congress in which the woman sings sweetly of love while apparently experiencing several orgasms; her partner is indifferent at best. Gainsbourg recorded this one a couple of times, with two different real-life lovers: Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin.

Musically, he delighted in playing with different styles. Several songs are based on melodies from Classical composers; others play with French music-hall conventions, others twit rock and disco, and his notorious “Reggae Marseillaise” nearly got him killed. He led a very public private life, carrying on affairs with women who were famous or beautiful or both, while embodying a Romantic persona: hard-drinking, rebellious, poetic, self-destructive.

Sfar on the set

That persona is, let’s face it, an enormous cliché, but in making his movie, Sfar eschews all the others of this genre: the clumsy introduction of famous friends and lovers, the ponderous exposition of background, the thudding scenes in which we’re meant to believe that artistic inspiration takes place in a flash and great songs are written easily, the clear-cut rise-and-fall trajectory, the newspaper headline or radio broadcast that announces the Big Historical Event. On the contrary, Sfar doesn’t underline, telegraph, or hammer anything at all.

And so, when Brigitte Bardot makes her entrance, it’s about as theatrical as one can get onscreen: striding in slow-motion down a long hallway, with a dog that looks much like her. The Parisian audience laughed, because they’re sufficiently familiar with Bardot to recognize the actress playing her, and surely they expected Bardot to turn up at some point in any movie about Gainsbourg. Yet never does anybody onscreen say, “Oh, look, it’s Brigitte Bardot,” or “Serge, I want you to meet Brigitte Bardot.” Indeed, nobody says her name at all until several minutes have passed and her scenes are nearly over.

Casta as B.B., with Elmosnino

The many such instances in which Sfar resists the facile are commendable, but that’s only part of his achievement. Consider the sequence when, after a drunken night in Montmartre, Gainsbourg goes home with his mentor, Boris Vian (played by Philippe Katerine). “The Frères Jacques are staying at my place,” Vian says casually.

Cut to Vian’s apartment, and voilà, the Frères Jacques, in full costume, are curled up like Disney elves in any available nook — in a bookcase, over the fireplace — and snoring away. The next morning, they make breakfast, still in costume, singing and sometimes speaking in harmony, and turning the meal into one of their comedy routines.

What’s for breakfast?
Le Quatuor as Les Frères Jacques, with Elmosnino

The catch here is that, if you don’t know who Boris Vian and the Frères Jacques were, Sfar doesn’t offer much help. For that reason, I’m a bit doubtful about the overseas potential of Gainsbourg.

The real-life Gainsbourg was trained as an artist and wanted to pursue a career as a painter. Sfar himself provides the artwork here, and his pictorial sense informs the composition of images. The ordering of scenes and many of the fantastical elements reflect Sfar’s work in graphic fiction, particularly the Petit Vampire series of comic books for children, about the friendship between an orphaned Jewish boy and a family of monsters, and their adventures.

Michel, Fantomate the flying dog, and Petit Vampire

There is something decidedly vampiric about the single most distinctive (and arguably most effective) element of Gainsbourg. “Every poet has a double,” we’re told early in the film, and the young Lucien Ginsburg finds his during the Occupation, shortly after obtaining his yellow Star of David.**

At first, the double is a roly-poly playmate, albeit a monster, his appearance based on an image from an anti-Semitic poster Lucien has seen. As Lucien grows older and becomes Serge, the double becomes a lean, diabolical creature (beautifully mimed by Doug Jones, who was the Faun in Pan’s Labyrinth), with a puppet head, glowing eyes, and a nose and ears even more exaggerated than Gainsbourg’s own.

Gueule d’atmosphère: Jones

Also called La Gueule,*** the double pops up constantly in order to urge Gainsbourg to do what is best for his music — though that’s seldom good for his character. It’s he who spurs Gainsbourg to abandon first his painting, then his children; to sell his songs to Juliette Gréco by seducing her; to betray the trust of naïve France Gall; and so on. He’s like all the Hoffmann villains in one body.

The movie has so much going on that it doesn’t need to fracture the timeline, as Olivier Dahan did in La Môme. Vie héroïque plays out chronologically — and more quickly than La Môme, despite the fact that Gainsbourg lived longer than Piaf did. To maintain this swift pacing, Sfar weighs songs and scenes judiciously. Two early marriages are pretty much glossed over, for example, and I was left unsure how many children Gainsbourg had, yet I didn’t feel I was missing much. (Except possibly some clichés about the tortured private lives of great artists.)

Mouglalis as Gréco, with Elmosnino

Some of the celebrity lookalikes in Gainsbourg are uncanny, not least because they’re played by celebrities: Yolande Moreau (as Fréhel), Anna Mouglalis (as Gréco), and Sara Forestier (as Gall) register strongly, and in a cameo, Sfar himself is spot-on as Georges Brassens. The supermodel Laetitia Casta is taller and leaner than Bardot, and (in previous movies) not much of an actress, yet she’s a revelation here: she locates the real woman behind the sex kitten, and in a dance sequence perfectly mimics Bardot’s trademark physicality.

Young Lucy Gordon, another stunningly beautiful fashion model, delivers a sly, sensitive portrayal of Birkin — no mean feat, since the real Birkin is still around for comparison, constantly on French movie and TV screens. Gordon more than measures up to the reality and to the dramatic requirements of the film, and her performances in Gainsbourg and in Les Poupées russes make one regret all the more that she committed suicide shortly after filming ended, just before her 19th birthday.

Gordon as Birkin

A few lesser-known actors turn in outstanding performances, too. Young Kacey Mottet Klein, as Lucien, is a precocious bundle of audacity, chainsmoking, trying to pick up women, and sassing Vichy bureaucrats. As his father, a frustrated pianist, Razvan Vasilescu warms gradually from stern taskmaster to proud papa, especially excited to meet Bardot. (In some scenes, Vasilescu looks uncannily like Stanley Tucci in Julie and Julia.)

Playing an artist’s model, Ophélia Kolb embodies the promise of pleasure; she plays a similar character, an earthy tavern wench, in L’autre Dumas. I like her work, but I hope she gets to do something different in her next picture.

Gordon and Elmosnino

Eric Elmosnino plays the grownup Gainsbourg, and the physical resemblance between actor and subject is so pronounced that the poor fellow must have trouble finding other work. Yet that resemblance means that he can’t rely on makeup, as Marion Cotillard did for so much of La Môme, and left to his own artistry, he’s superb. Even in the latter portion of the movie, when Gainsbourg is never sober, Elmosnino finds subtle gradations of drunkenness — and also of feeling. And his interaction with the double helps us sympathize with a hero whose actions are not always admirable. As Elmosnino/Gainsbourg’s eyes widen with timidity and doubt, or narrow with resistance to amoral designs, so do ours.

Indeed, I’m not ultimately persuaded that Gainsbourg’s was a heroic life. But I am persuaded that Sfar believes it, and that may be what counts most. His film, unlike most other musical biopics, is a personal vision; certainly I’ll be a long time forgetting this remarkable portrait, a tribute from one artist to another.



*NOTE: Sfar’s graphic novel on Gainsbourg is the size of a family Bible, with gorgeous color illustrations, an even more fantastical narrative, and a prohibitive price tag. I’ve admired it in the bookstore, much the way I admire a painting in a museum.

**Gainsbourg called the Jewish patch “a sheriff’s badge,” and wrote a song about it. “I was born under a lucky star,” he said, “a yellow one.”

***“Gueule” is a slang word for “face,” equivalent to the English “mug.”

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The Model Sheets of Jacques Martin

One of my lasting regrets is my failure, many years ago, to purchase an autographed model sheet for Jacques Martin’s Alix, the hero of a series of comic books set in the age of Julius Caesar. Recto, Alix, a blond Gaulish teenager, and verso, his sidekick, Enak, an Egyptian prince, struck several poses. Nude. The damned thing was priced at a mere 500 Francs (less than $100 at the time), but I was in graduate school and couldn’t afford it. When, having borrowed money from friends, I returned to the shop, the model sheet was gone. I never saw it again.

Shortly thereafter, Jacques Martin quit drawing the Alix books, due to failing eyesight, and this morning, he passed away, at the age of 88. That model sheet must cost a fortune now, and I hereby renounce any further ambition to own it. However, if anybody feels like giving it to me, I will not refuse.


There was nothing inappropriate about the nudity. In almost every one of their adventures, Alix and Enak find themselves in a hot climate, in cultures where clothing was scant and nudity unexceptional — and Martin researched his work meticulously. As he observed, it would be ludicrous to depict Alix and Enak covering up their privates in a Roman bath (though some editors have tinkered with the drawings to just that purpose).

So it’s only reasonable that Alix and Enak’s host, frequently a kindly older gentleman such as Julius Caesar (Alix’s mentor), will say, “Boys, you must be tired after your long journey; why not slip out of those revealing tunics and take a bath with me?”

A very clean young man,
Alix bathes often.

As Martin’s research revealed, only Judeo-Christian cultures frowned on certain close relationships between men. And torture was the primary tool of governance in every ancient state, most often administered by burly men in leather.

So, naturally, nobody in the books minds that Alix and Enak are such inseparable companions, and it’s only reasonable that they so often find themselves tied up and flogged.

Alix and Enak, just hanging out.

But no matter how reasonable and accurate, these elements of the books, when combined with the fierce devotion the young men felt for each other, gave rise to the widespread belief that Alix and Enak aren’t merely the Jonny Quest and Hadji of the ancient world (who just happen to share a tent, and all that), but archetypal gay lovers.

Married with children, Martin repeatedly either ducked the question or announced, diplomatically, that his readers were free to bring to the stories their own interpretations — and their own fantasies, straight or gay. For his part, he never wrote or drew a love scene for Alix and Enak. (He sometimes did throw in a scantily clad slave girl or princess, whom Alix inevitably and heroically resisted.)

Martin’s achievements as a spinner of great yarns, as a founder of historical graphic fiction, and as one of the greats of the “Ligne Claire” school of drawing are beyond dispute, and they’re likely to be discussed at length in the tributes to him that will appear throughout Europe in the coming days. Others may even confirm what I will tell you: that, no matter his demurrals or his real intention, Jacques Martin gave substance and dignity to the dreams of lonely boys for more than half a century.

Gayer than we were happy, we yearned to find a companion in our own adventures, another handsome youth with a noble heart. A fearless rescuer who would share our passions. A hero and friend. We looked in every kind of book for a model, a representation of the couple we wanted to be. Too often, we came up short; too often, we still do.

Jacques Martin provided us with the models we sought.

Straight people are permitted to admire them, too.

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Le Petit Nicolas

To celebrate the fiftieth birthday of France’s most popular schoolboy, Paris’ Hôtel de Ville is sponsoring an exhibition of texts, drawings, and memorabilia, Le Petit Nicolas, now through May 7. My initial attempts to see the show met with failure: long lines of people waiting in the rain led me to conclude that they were being paid to stand there, and they prevented my breezing on in. Yesterday, I succeeded, and discovered four rooms with plenty of interest. It’s safe to say I’ve never laughed so hard at an exhibition.

The brainchild of writer René Goscinny and artist Jean-Jacques Sempé, “Little Nicholas” appeared as a weekly feature in the newspaper Sud-Ouest Dimanche; after a brief interval, the stories would be published in Pilote, the hugely influential comic magazine founded in part by Goscinny, and home base for his most famous creation, Astérix the Gaul. Reflecting an idealized (indeed, almost completely imaginary) childhood and a curiously timeless nostalgia, Le Petit Nicolas became a series of five books of gently humorous anecdotes, recounted in a child’s voice and identifiable to anyone who has ever been seven years old. They were among the first books I read as I resumed the business of reading in French, and they’re wonderfully funny. Attending the exhibition was a kind of pilgrimage, an act of devotion, but also a reunion with an old friend.

Goscinny and Sempé met when each arrived in Paris, almost simultaneously. Sempé had been living in Bordeaux, where he was born, and come to the big city in search of his fortune. Goscinny, born in Argentina, had been living in New York City and working at MAD Magazine, where he drew inspiration that informed Pilote (and most especially his collaborations with the artist Gotlib, which are perfect MAD features but for the French texts). The two men became each other’s first friends in Paris, Sempé recalls, and as they talked about their background, they identified common threads among their very different boyhood experiences. Petit Nicolas was born.

Goscinny was a master scenarist, with a phenomenal capacity to pick up simple, yet satisfying plots and solid gags. His achievement in Le Petit Nicolas is the narrative voice, perfectly childlike and yet not quite like any kid you ever met. Nicolas has a repertory of slang phrases (C’est chouette! C’était terrible! Sans blagues!) and a passion for les cow-boys; he gets into scrapes with his teacher, his parents, and above all the assistant principal, Le Bouillon, but he’s fundamentally a good kid. As are his friends, each of whom bears an antiquated first name and a signature personality trait: Agnan, the teacher’s pet; Alceste, the fat kid and Nicolas’ best friend; Clotaire, the slowest kid in the class; Eudes, who likes to punch people; Geoffroy, the rich kid.

Sempé almost always depicts Nicolas in his school uniform, short pants and necktie. His quick, seemingly nervous lines are in reality rigorously controlled, and one of the impressive things about the exhibition was to see the immaculate state of the drawings, with no trace of pencil and only rarely any Wite-Out corrections. His use of white space is stunning, and his work is all the more impressive for its tininess: I’d always assumed that the drawings were fairly large, then shrunk for publication, but the originals are indeed the size we see on the printed page, often no bigger than a postage stamp. “Sud-Ouest Dimanche didn’t give me much space,” he remembers in a caption accompanying one of the exhibits. Sans blagues. My favorite pictures in any Petit Nicolas story show the little boys running around and yelling: tiny glimpses of the exuberance of childhood. You look at them and think, “Yeah, I used to do that, too.”

The series ran five years at the outset, and that seemed enough: a certain repetition had begun to set in, and the publication in recent years of thick volumes of unpublished stories is at once welcome and tedious, because they show Goscinny going over the same ground, with only slight variations, and relying excessively on catch-phrases. He was a genius, yes, but a journeyman, too.

Though Sempé is alive and well, and contributed some new drawings for the exhibition, Goscinny died in 1977, when his daughter was a very little girl. As an adult, she’s begun to mine her father’s desk for all kinds of unpublished material, and released them to the world, building on his several franchises while feeding on the cult of personality surrounding the old boy. (It’s commonly accepted as fact that, had Goscinny lived, he would have been the first comic-book writer admitted to the Académie Française.) In her exploitation of her father’s work, she’s shown more restraint that other authors’ heirs: Dr. Seuss’ widow, by endorsing all kinds of substandard knockoffs by other hands, has tarnished her late husband’s reputation almost beyond recognition. Yet one can’t help wishing that a few of Goscinny’s treasures had remained hidden: he really did have a sense of what his best material was, and most of it he published within his lifetime.

Several of his creations have enjoyed all kinds of after-lives: Astérix, Lucky Luke, and Iznogoud continued their adventures, not only in comic books written by the artists who collaborated with Goscinny but also in movies (both live-action and animated) and television cartoons. Now it’s Nicolas’ turn: part of the exhibition is dedicated to clips from a forthcoming live-action film (to star Valérie Lemercier and Sandrine Kiberlaine) and animated TV show. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m cautiously optimistic for the results.

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