My Clip Reel (Semi-NSFW)

A shimmering star in the cinema firmament:
Casting agents, I await your calls.

My acting career — currently dormant — has primarily concentrated on the stage, a starry résumé indeed of which, alas, there are few records. My work on film, however, is preserved in its entirety: one movie, Diana: Goddess, Queen. In this Upper West Side mish-mash of Italian neo-realism and surrealism, I play Guglielmo, the lover of Diana (played by Miss Fabulosa Linguine, played in turn by Mr. Anthony Bellov). Now, just in time for that post-Oscar afterglow, I’ve stumbled across the clip on YouTube, and I post it here, so that you may judge for yourself what Hollywood has (so far) missed out on.

A word of caution: since one of the film’s leading men is wearing a dress, and the other, nothing but Ray-Bans, Diana may not be appropriate viewing in your workplace. Once past that hurdle, however, you’ll find Diana scrupulously tasteful: Fabulosa’s stage shows (where the film was first screened) were sometimes attended by children, and we were conscious of that, and always careful not to push too many boundaries. Nevertheless — proceed at your own risk.

In this clip, Fabulosa herself introduces the film, so there’s really nothing for me to add. Enjoy!

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Tim Burton: A Rant

Burton “directing” Alice

Tim Burton’s latest movie, Alice in Wonderland, has just been released, and I have absolutely no interest in seeing it. The man is constantly remaking pictures that don’t need remaking, to which he brings nothing but an art director’s sensibility. In the good old days, under the Hollywood Studio System, art direction is what Tim Burton would do for a living. And nothing else. He hasn’t the vaguest clue what’s required to tell a story, and apart from hiring Johnny Depp, he has no idea what screen acting is about. His personal vision is purely visual; he has nothing else of interest to say — about anything.

Remind you of anybody? Depp as Ed Wood

I gave up on Burton after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the best visual bits are ripped off from the original Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; the rest is frankly ugly, and the picture does a poor job of telling the story. Like its predecessor, Charlie makes the mistake of casting an actor too young to play Wonka; encouraged by Burton to act like Michael Jackson in Neverland, Depp doesn’t manage Gene Wilder’s feat of succeeding on pure charisma (so that you quit caring whether he’s right for the role and just sit back to enjoy him). And in Burton’s film, all that crap about Wonka’s dentist-father was just a brainless recycling of the parent-child relationship of the Penguin (Danny De Vito) in Batman: “Dad didn’t love me, so I turned into a freak.”

Before long, it seemed as if everybody had told this story already. What was the point of this movie?

Never-Should-Have-Happened-Land:
Depp and Burton on the Charlie set

The rare times Burton’s pictures are any good, it’s because he’s stumbled (accidentally?) across material that works, regardless of what he does to it. His best film, Ed Wood, is also his least representative, because it features a strong script with vivid characters. Burton cast the picture well, especially in so far as Johnny Depp and Martin Landau are concerned: their relationship is the heart of the film, and the director stays out of their way. As for the rest of the picture, what did Burton bring to it that was necessary or even helped much? Was there anything onscreen that another director couldn’t have done as well or better?

Batman at least provided him with an opportunity to reimagine a universe, and his repositioning of the title character as a dark, ambiguous figure was enhanced by the art direction. (Much as the pop-art direction in the 1960s TV show positioned Batman as a campy satire of other superheroes.) The new interpretation stuck.

Since then, however, Burton has gotten lazier. His visual themes don’t reinterpret, they merely restate the original — and very often, they repeat the themes he’s used in all his other pictures. Instead of seeking out strong scripts, Burton prefers half-baked garbage — it’s easier than thinking — and he specializes in ripping off other artists’ work. The Planet of the Apes, anyone? Anyone? Sweeney Todd with a tone-deaf Mrs. Lovett? Anyone? Did Corpse Bride even have a script? Make it anyway! Cue the Danny Elfman chorus! (And never mind that it’s exactly the same song as it was in every picture since Edward Scissorhands.)

In his weird little way, Burton himself is a latter-day Ed Wood. Just as the earlier filmmaker was blind to his real talent — for friendship, not for film — so Burton doesn’t seem to realize that his only talent is as a designer. And audiences, many of whom I suspect are high, respond to his eccentric artwork. They come to see Burton’s movies, just for the visuals — and studios keep bankrolling them.

Depp as the Mad Hatter: WTF?

Now he’s gone after Alice. I’ve yet to see a perfect Alice adaptation, but who needed another mediocre one? Burton has turned the story into some sort of fantasy video game. Suddenly the Mad Hatter is a love interest for Alice, and he’s going into battle with her? With swords and armor?

Honestly, when you’re straying so far from the original, and making such scant use of most of the familiar characters, while radically transfiguring the others, why not call it something else? “Belinda Battles the Very Bad Beast,” for example, or “Tim Burton’s Latest Nightmare Vision with Lots of Twisty-Scraggly Trees.” Alice appears to be a worse travesty than the execrable Sleepy Hollow (which recast Washington Irving’s tale as a Very Special Episode of The X Files).

As a great man of Hollywood — who would have known perfectly well what to do with Tim Burton — once said, “Include me out.”

Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way about Burton.
(Illustration from The Onion.)

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La Première Année de Cuisine, Part 3

In the original illustrations for La Première Année, Tante Victoire looks remarkably like the woman in Gericault’s portrait, The Madwoman.
No wonder Madeleine’s family humors her all the time!

MADELEINE’S JOURNAL

Third Entry

Dinner for fifteen people —
A slight misadventure befalls Madeleine

That day was Papa’s name-day and, as is the custom, we were to have a family dinner. Now, we have a big family; five at our house; Tante Victoire made six; the aunts, uncles and cousins, ten, twelve, fifteen people.

Fifteen people! That seemed to me to make the ordinary chores singularly complicated.

Since I’d never done housework, I admit that I had hardly thought about it. Maman, my dear Maman, took all the trouble herself and left us only the pleasure of sitting down at table before all sorts of good and well-prepared things.

Now that I was also a bit of a housewife, I felt the work of this dinner party weighing upon me.

However, the thought of preparing some good little surprise for my father, and also the self-respect of succeeding, gave me courage.

“Let’s get to it, Madeleine,” I said to myself, “think how you’re going to show off your little talents, and think that we’ll be tasting your cooking.” My cooking! Well, yes! It had been agreed with Maman that I would prepare two dishes all by myself. I had a choice.

Here is our menu: vegetable soup with Italian noodles [a.k.a. pasta]; — baked sole; — wild rabbit; — roast leg of lamb; — white beans; — lettuce salad; — œufs à la neige [a kind of meringue served with crème anglaise]; and fruit, which wouldn’t be difficult, since this was the month of July.

I wanted to prepare the vegetable soup and the œufs à la neige.

You’re going to say, “I see that Madeleine is a bit lazy, because she chose that which is the least difficult to make.” Don’t be mistaken. Besides my soup and my œufs à la neige, I fully intended to help Maman in the preparation of all the other dishes; but those two, the soup and the œufs à la neige, were mine alone. What’s more, I was too new to cooking to set out to make complicated sauces.

We had made pot-au-feu the evening before, and we had eaten that cursed broth that makes us grimace every time it appears on the table. Since we had the broth already, it didn’t take long to make the vegetable soup. Maman had taken the broth to the cellar to keep it cool; but beforehand we had poured it through a colander and carefully degreased it.

The grease was placed to one side, in the frying pot.

In this way, going to fetch the broth from the cellar the next day, I had the pleasure of finding it perfectly fresh and not at all bitter, thanks to these precautions.

My little sister Jeanne had come with us to the market that day, since we were really stocked up with provisions. You should have seen her trotting along before us, carrying the lettuce and the fruits. She was as proud as the butler in a palace and believed herself very important, I assure you.

When we got home, we examined all our purchases more closely. If you knew what we found! Two of our soles, out of six, weren’t fresh. They were grey on the underside instead of being rosy; the eyes were no longer shining. As for the rest, their odor betrayed them. However, the gills were red as if the soles were fresh.

“Ah!” cried out my mother, “those wicked merchants! If you’re in just a bit of a hurry, they fool you very easily. Here, look, Madeleine, see how the gills of these fish appear fresh. How misleading. They’re simply reddened with a bit of chicken blood. Let’s hope we have no other problems!”

No, there was nothing else. The eggs were fresh, the rabbit quite plump, the lamb weighed what it was supposed to, it was fresh and didn’t have any of those little clusters of white dots that one sees on meat that is a bit too old. These white dots are nothing but worms that are forming, according to what my mother taught me; but we had no reason to worry: there were none at all.

Sole meunière

Two soles less! And we had bought just the amount we needed! Too bad for me, I said to myself, I won’t eat any, I’ll act as if I don’t want any, and I will warn my brother Jules, who will refuse it just as I do, for I do not want Maman to deprive herself for us, and certainly she would do it. In this way, each of our guests can have a better portion.

And, secretly, I told Jules what had happened. He agreed with me: we would deprive ourselves of sole.

Ah! that was a full day’s work, that day! However, I was happy, since I have much self-respect and I was convinced that I would succeed in making my vegetable soup and my œufs à la neige. For the soup, it will be very simple, I told myself; I will take care of it a few minutes before dinner, that will suffice. Let’s start instead with my dessert dish.

Here are the eggs, quite fresh. Here is the milk…. — it’s the best that I found, — and yet I perceived that it had a light blue tint that worried me. I know that it is by this that one recognizes milk that has been watered-down. However, I placed it on the fire, I sugared it, I flavored it with a bit of vanilla.

While it heated and up to the point when it was boiling, I had the time to break my eggs and to beat the whites. Six eggs for each liter of milk, and that will be very good. I beat the eggs in a salad bowl with a fork. They rose in no time. My milk is boiling, I throw in the whites by the heaping spoonful. They cook, they set; I remove them and I set them apart on a plate.

Now let’s make the cream, the sauce, as we say. I sugar the yolks with powdered sugar, I break them, I mix them with hot milk that I add bit by bit, then I pour this mixture into the saucepan where my milk is boiling and I slowly turn the cream without stopping, with a wooden spoon, as Tante Victoire wisely recommended…. I feel that the cream is thickening… quite a lot… Ah! mon Dieu! My cream is curdling! I cried out.

It was true, alas! my cream wasn’t turning out properly. Why? How? I don’t know. And I cried, yes, I cried, since I had counted on this dish to establish my reputation as a cook.

Tante Victoire arrived and found me in tears: “There, there, little one, don’t cry so hard now. This is one of those very small misfortunes to which you must accustom yourself when you are an apprentice cook. Let’s find the cause of the problem and then we’ll try to fix it, if that’s possible. Were your eggs quite fresh?”

“Yes, Tante Victoire, I candled them all [held them up to the light] before breaking them.”

“The saucepan, was it absolutely clean? You know that for milk dishes to turn out right, you must, as much as possible, always use the same saucepan, which should serve no other purpose than to cook milk.”

“Yes, aunt, the saucepan was very clean.”

“So it is the milk that is of poor quality… Eh! surely yes,” added Tante Victoire in examining it closely; “you see how your cream is pale, almost white, despite the quantity of eggs you have used. Don’t you have any uncooked milk left over, to show me?”

We found a bit at the bottom of the milk pail.

“That explains everything,” said Tante Victoire. “You see: the bluish tint of your milk indicates that they put water in it. And this sediment, at the bottom of your milk pail, that is rice starch that has been added to give the milk greater consistency. As your milk boiled, it thickened more than is reasonable and too quickly, without leaving the egg time to cook; also, the yolk curdled instead of mixing perfectly with the milk… There’s nothing to be done, all is lost.”

“But, Tante Victoire, how could I have seen all that?”

Closeup view of œufs à la neige

“By carefully examining the boiling milk before adding the eggs to it. You would have seen it too thick, you would have been surprised, and you would have asked your mother to explain to you why it was so. Your mother, who is a very good cook, would not have been misled, and only the milk would have been lost.”

“Meanwhile,” I added, quite saddened, “now I have wasted twelve eggs, some sugar, and some vanilla.”

“Now, now, console yourself,” said Tante Victoire. “You’ll make up for it with your vegetable soup, I’m sure of it. In the meantime, go ask Puss whether he wouldn’t be happy to taste the cream that went wrong.”

I couldn’t keep myself from smiling, and I hurried to call to Puss; but I saw that he had already granted himself this pleasure, without asking permission, and that he already had his nose in the saucepan which I had set aside.

I sighed: four sous’ worth of milk, twelve sous of eggs, six sous of sugar, a piece of vanilla, that makes twenty-two sous squandered, just to make Puss happy, that is truly too expensive! Ah! I will remember this lesson.

WHAT I MUST DO

(To copy and to keep)

1. I will examine with care the goods that I buy, to assure myself that they are fresh, especially when it concerns fish.

2. Once I have returned home, I will examine them again before using them.

3. I will be wary of milk that has a bluish tint and of that which leaves a sediment at the bottom of the milk pail or the saucepan, for these are two signs by which we recognize adulterated milk.

4. I will remember that, without paying attention, one can waste many good things and, as a consequence, waste the money that one spent to buy them.

Next time: Papa gets gastroenteritis … and guess who’s to blame?

Getting to know good food

8. The principal products that serve to feed us are: bread, meat, poultry, game, fish, vegetables, butter, milk, eggs, fruits.

9. We can tell good bread by its agreeable odor, its golden crust, its mie* fluffy and airy, that is not dense but presenting numerous tiny holes.

10. Good meat of beef and mutton is a beautiful dark red; it is at once firm and elastic to the touch; its fat is a yellowish white.

11. Meat of veal and pork has the same characteristics, only it must be pale pink. The fat is very white.

12. A good roasting chicken must be young, plump, and meaty.

We can tell that a chicken is young: First when the skin on its legs is fine; second when the claws are only slightly developed; third when the bone of the bréchet (in the chest) breaks easily when pinched.

13. A stewing hen of good quality must be very fat and meaty, which we can see when its bones are barely visible and its flesh is firm everywhere.

14. For game to be tender, it must not be eaten immediately after being killed. We let it sit three, four days or even more, according to the temperature. This is what we call “letting it season.” But it is necessary to eat it before the blood becomes completely black and before the eye takes on a greenish hue.

15. Good fish is firm, shining; it has bright eyes and bloody gills.

16. Sometimes merchants try to sell old fish as if it were fresh. To do this, they rub the gill of the fish with fresh blood. But if we know how to be on our guard, the odor and the color of the eye will not mislead us.

17. All fresh vegetables have a beautiful, vivid color: cauliflower is very white, artichokes very green; asparagus is firm; the husk of green peas is shining and juicy; the stems of celery are white and resistant; carrots, turnips, parsnips have a fine, bright, firm peel.

18. To tell whether eggs are fresh, we candle them, that is to say we hold them up to the light. The best ones are the most transparent, showing no empty spaces in the large end.

19. Good butter has a slight odor of hazelnuts, it is firm and pale yellow.

20. Old butter smells rancid or bitter. Its color is dull and dark yellow.

Also sold in markets, under the name margarine, is a product that resembles butter, and which is made of grease, prepared in a certain manner.

21. One can easily distinguish between butter and margarine by melting them separately. Butter from milk melts at 35 degrees; margarine melts at 70 degrees, that is to say half as rapidly as true butter.

22. We can tell good milk by its slightly yellowish white color. When we allow milk to sit, it covers with cream and leaves no deposit in the bottom of the container.

23. Milk that has been watered down or skimmed is bluish white.

Milk that has been adulterated with flour thickens while cooking and leaves a deposit at the bottom of the saucepan.

*NOTE: There is no English equivalent for the French word mie, which refers to the inside of the bread — the body or meat of the bread — that is, all that which is not crust.

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Field Guide: Dominique Blanc

So much for propriety!
An exuberant hypocrite, in Indochine

For much of her career, Dominique Blanc has brilliantly merged two important traditions: the classical French confidante, with whom the heroine shares her woes; and the wisecracking Hollywood sidekick. Even when she doesn’t make some tart remark about the protagonists’ business, you can see she’s thinking of one. Though she works constantly, with more than 60 films to her credit, and has taken leading roles from time to time, she’s really remarkable in character parts and supporting roles — which most modern actors have forgotten, or never knew, how to play.

With Deneuve, in Indochine

With her wide-set eyes and nasal voice, she’s an unlikely candidate for many glamorous star turns, but Blanc knows how to take even the smallest part and run with it, and she excels in playing the foil. She demonstrated this — to my astonishment — in two of the first pictures I saw her in, Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (1994) and Régis Warnier’s Indochine (1992), costume dramas in which she contrasted with, respectively, Isabelle Adjani and Catherine Deneuve. (They are, perhaps needless to say, two of the most glamorous actresses France has ever produced.) Blanc was nominated for the César for best supporting actress for both films, and won for Indochine.

Fashion Plate: In La Reine Margot

As those movies suggest (and as her latest release, L’autre Dumas corroborates), Blanc looks terrific in period dress — almost any period, really, except our own, when fashion is created for taller, thinner girls. Her work in costume dramas may account partly for my notion of her as a confidante, that character whose primary purpose is to prevent the heroine from talking to herself. The confidante crops up all over Racine and Corneille, usually an attendant or noblewoman of lower rank than the heroine; her literary heirs are seen in opera, Lucia’s Alisa and Trovatore’s Ines being prime examples.

At her best, Dominique Blanc provides the necessary emotional support associated with the classical confidante, and yet, like a French Eve Arden, she’s always standing off to one side, commenting on the principal action even when she says nothing aloud, and eager for adventures of her own.

As Céleste, with Benoît Poelvoorde as Maquet

L’autre Dumas features a scene in which Blanc’s character, Céleste Scriwaneck, realizes that Auguste Maquet isn’t the man she thought he was. She’s devastated — but she won’t give the younger, prettier Charlotte Desrives (Mélanie Thierry) the satisfaction of knowing why. Blind to almost every truth (including that of Maquet’s real identity) but seeing the tears in Céleste’s eyes, Charlotte asks what’s wrong. “It’s nothing,” Céleste replies simply; “I just lost someone very dear to me.”

What she means, of course, is that her idea of Maquet has been lost; it’s a beautiful moment. Very little else in the picture rises to this level of artistry, it must be said.

Glenn Close has nothing on her:
Blanc in L’autre

An actress of Blanc’s range can’t be expected to linger too long outside the spotlight, and her latest star vehicle was L’autre (The Other Woman, 2008). Because of my travel schedule, I missed the picture, a contemporary urban drama in which Blanc plays a vengeful ex-mistress; for her efforts, she was awarded Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. She’s been nominated for nine Césars, winning four (one best actress, three supporting), and in 2008 won the Molière for her stage performance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Clearly, she’s a talent to look out for — and chances are, she’ll turn up again somewhere, very soon.

With Malik Zidi, in Les amitiés maléfiques:
In this tale of youthful ambition, Blanc isn’t quite a French version of the Texas Cheerleader Mom, but she’ll do nicely, thank you.

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Le Salon de l’Agriculture

A few years ago, I attended the annual Salon International de l’Agriculture, here in Paris, spurred on not only by my interest in and support of the industry that makes possible the food and drink I enjoy so much — but also by fond memories of the Texas State Fair, and the carloads of free stuff my brother and I used to get there. As schoolkids, we would run all over Fair Park, grabbing samples, brochures, gifts, anything that was offered to us (and quite a lot that wasn’t). Surely a celebration of all the best that France has to offer would far exceed my wildest hopes.

Six sous? Ces six saucissons-ci sont si chers!

I was wrong about that — which is why I’m not attending this year. The admission fee is, like so many things in France, more expensive than it ought to be, and there’s almost nothing given away, once you get inside. If you want to sample tasty treats, from sausages to seafood to Sauternes, from raclette to rack of lamb to Rocamadour, you have to pay again. And again. And again.

“France is western Europe’s largest agricultural producer
and a leading exporter of farm products.”

[World Book Encyclopedia]

Also, there is no midway; the nearest you will get to a rollercoaster is the Métro outside. However, as a display of the astonishing variety of domesticated flora and fauna in this country, and the myriad products that are fashioned out of them so ingeniously, the Salon de l’Agriculture functions beautifully. I’m glad I went — and one year or another, I’ll probably go again.

“France produces butter and about 400 kinds of cheeses,
including Brie, Camembert, and Roquefort.”

[World Book Encyclopedia]

French farmers don’t have an easy lot, for all the protections the government allows them. Like farmers everywhere, the French are at the mercy of the elements, and this week — after a long winter of killing frosts and freak snowstorms — came windy rain and flooding in the Vendée and Charentes. Thus on the television news we’ve been buffeted between cheery reports on the Salon (Look! A bunny!) and heartbreaking scenes from the southwest. Fields poisoned by saltwater left behind when the flood receded. Great piles of dead livestock, including sheep and goats born only a few weeks ago. Damaged equipment tossed around. Barns brought down. It seems almost hypocritical to celebrate the richness of French agriculture at such a time.

Flooded farmland in southwestern France, this week

And yet — what more eloquent defense of farming can there be than this? It is the quality and variety of France’s food, perhaps more than anything else, that has made this country the envy of the world. At the Salon, again and again, you see why. According to one news report, judges in the tasting categories must sample some 4,000 products before declaring winners. Naturally, my interest is drawn more to the food products than to the raw ingredients, no matter how exotic some of the prize-winning livestock may be. From this stems my disappointment that I, who am not a judge, get to sample a total of zero products at the Salon; honestly, I’m happier at the market, where prices are lower and I’m less tantalized and less disappointed.

Nevertheless, as one looks out across the rows upon rows of pens of livestock, each animal more gorgeously groomed than the last, one can glimpse the care and pride that go into raising the least and the ugliest of them.

The French seem especially keen on birds and animals with extra plumage and fur, especially if it’s ruffled: it’s sort of a combination of animal husbandry and haute couture. I have seen more ruffled chickens and rabbits than you can imagine, but it must be said that they don’t look any happier than regular critters do. Most of the livestock, in fact, appears to want very much to be somewhere other than the Salon.

Il est très é-meuh:
Chirac makes a new friend.

By far the best way to attend the Salon is to be Jacques Chirac, the former president — and, long ago, agricultural minister, as well. Scheduled to attend this year’s Salon this morning, Chirac is considered a great champion of French farmers. They will ply him with free food and drink even now that he is out of office; they will even let him pet the animals. A real ham, even by political standards, Chirac enjoys himself thoroughly at these affairs, and just watching him on the evening news can bring a smile to your face, even if you dislike the man. He’s having such fun — he can’t help himself! It’s all so noisy and colorful — so tasty and so smelly! The farmers love him!* And look! There’s another bunny! His enthusiasm for the Salon is contagious.

Dan Rather used to advise me, whenever we visited a country that was new to me, to visit its places of worship. That, he said, was a terrific way to understand the people. He didn’t take into account the markets and fairs of a country, and yet in France these are, in their way, among the holiest places around. The French have invested a tremendous amount of time and thought to the question of what to eat, and how: for them, food and drink are not merely a matter of survival but a definition of character. Even if you think you understand this about the French, it helps to see it all laid out before you at the Salon.

En plus, c’est vachement amusant par ici!

*NOTE: The farmers despise Nicolas Sarkozy, who insults them, which makes their love even sweeter to Chirac. Sarkozy put off his visit to the Salon until the absolute last minute, this year, which in itself has insulted the farmers more than usual.

[With the exceptions of the pictures of the flooding and of Monsieur Chirac, all photos come from press pages at the website of the Salon International de l’Agriculture. This year’s Salon continues through the weekend.]

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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Just good friends? Cary Grant and Randolph Scott

Answering the question “Where did I come from” is fundamental to answering the question “Who am I,” and the impulse to trace one’s roots is as natural and as ancient as all those innumerable myths in which the young boy seeks and finds the lost sword of his dead father. (Usually under or in a rock.) Once he’s got it, he becomes a man, and he can rise to his heroic destiny. No wonder Freud found these stories so exciting.

Among minority groups, the impulse is especially strong: we have been denied so much of our heritage, we hunger to take it up. Yet we can’t, as others can, simply refer to a single chart in a library to identify our ancestors. We have to engage in the kind of passionate detective work exemplified by Alex Haley’s search for Kunta Kinte, before we can answer the question of our origins.

For homosexuals, the quest is complicated by the limited role of biology in our ancestry: for our people are not necessarily our families. Indeed, one reason gays of my generation and older seek out this alternative genealogy is that so many of us have been excluded, one way or another, by our families. We create our own communities, families of affinity and not of blood, and the forebears we seek are seldom our relatives.

From Berlin’s Schwules Museum

We can’t be guided by family resemblance: James Baldwin looked nothing like me, yet we’re both Frenchified American gay writers. We can’t refer to records, because the documents were coded, hidden or destroyed, or bequeathed to straight people who didn’t understand their worth. Much of our genealogical study therefore takes the form of gossip and guesswork, reading between lines.

These thoughts come to mind because a Charles Trenet appreciation society on Facebook posted a video clip of Trenet in old age, singing a nostalgic number in tribute to Johnny Hess.

When both men were in their teens, they made their debut as a duo, singing close harmony to piano accompaniment. This was the dominant style in France in 1936, though in only a few years, and largely as a result of Trenet’s and Hess’ solo acts, swing would overtake the popular imagination. The team of “Charles et Johnny” met with success, however, and the act broke up only because Trenet was called up for national service.

Such nice boys! Charles and Johnny

Both because of their photos (Johnny’s lips alone are incitement to debauchery) and their harmonizing duets (sweet, almost unbearably fey), there is a widespread tendency to believe that Charles and Johnny were lovers. We know that they lived together; we know, too, that Trenet was gay. During the Occupation, fear of reprisals for his sexuality led Trenet not to collaborate but to cooperate in ways to which more heroic or more hetero performers would not have submitted; in the 1960s, he was jailed on morals charges.

But Trenet was never a standard-bearer for gay rights. His solo career as a young man is marked by an exuberant baritone voice, and the objects of his love songs are always women. (Including his mother, to whom he was especially devoted.) While there was an element of androgyny in his presentation, it was naïve, youthful, and poetic, but not deviant. As a contemporary observed of him, he was like the classroom cut-up in Sunday school, a basically good boy with a sometimes-naughty sense of fun.

France’s favorite funny uncle:
Trenet in late career

By the time he wrote “Tu me manques, Johnny” (I miss you, Johnny), Trenet was fully invested in the public persona of a kindly old uncle, quirkily out of step with the times but still pretty good company. Most of his late-period songs are nostalgic catalogues of the world of his youth (and that of the majority of his audience). Though homosexuality was increasingly accepted, and no longer illegal in France, there was no question of Trenet’s coming out publicly.

He rarely performed “Tu me manques, Johnny” in public, and I can understand why: it’s not very good, and he must have known that. On the one hand, he felt compelled to write about his friend, who died in 1983; on the other, he was too repressed to speak honestly. How, in front of an audience of blue-haired ladies, could he expect simultaneously to expose and to conceal his feelings? Could he take the gamble that alienating a segment of his straight audience might bring him an even larger audience of gay admirers? He chokes, saying only that which anybody might say about anybody else.

The lyric that stuck out for me, as Trenet addressed Johnny, was, “You got married.” It’s the only truly biographical detail in the song. Why did he feel the need to include it? Did it change something? Trenet doesn’t elaborate.

This CD cover takes Johnny’s picture from the double portrait with Charles, seen above, whereas Trenet’s picture is a publicity shot from his movie career — as a solo artist.

Was he protecting himself or his audience — or Hess’ family — from embarrassment? “I’m going to sing a tender song about a boy I knew,” Trenet seems to say, “but it’s okay, don’t worry, because he was straight: he got married, just like you. And as for my own feelings, I’m really not going to say much at all.”

The whole thing, musically as well as textually, is guarded, cramped, generic and bland. The younger, bolder Trenet — “The Singing Madman,” as he was known — would have found some way to insinuate the truth into the song.

Unless, of course, that was the truth: bland and straight. Maybe the boys lived together because they were young and poor, and that arrangement would have been convenient for professional reasons, too — for rehearsals and making sure they weren’t late for a gig. Maybe Johnny married because — you know — he was in love with the woman. And wanted to sleep with her, not with Trenet.

Is it possible that Trenet holds back not because he fears the (gay) truth, but on the contrary, because he fears we’ll read into his words a kind of partnership that didn’t exist with Johnny?

Biographers have puzzled over this relationship for a long time, just as they torture these publicity photos of Cary Grant and his roommate, Randolph Scott; and the extravagantly affectionate correspondence between Abraham Lincoln and his roommate, Joshua Fry Speed. And so on.

It would be flattering in the extreme to draw a connection between myself and these guys: I’d like to point to them as my ancestors. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know definitively what went on between them. Maybe we shouldn’t know; it’s none of our business, really. Yet we keep trying — I keep trying — turning over those rocks and looking for that magic sword, firmly believing that it points the way to my own identity, and my destiny.

Swiss-born, Johnny Hess was a leader of the Zazous, a counter-cultural, nonviolent resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. The Zazous (a term Hess coined) used jazz music and flamboyant dress to signal their opposition to the regime. Some Zazous, though Gentile, went so far as to wear Star of David patches on their clothing. (You can imagine that this didn’t go over well with Vichy or Berlin.) Hess’ solo career never came anywhere near the success that Trenet enjoyed.

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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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