March 2011

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Life is a slightly odd American police series, a little off-the-wall, as they say. It's the sort of thing you can watch without troubling to follow the plot. On the other hand, it makes for a modest but useful listening exercise.

We haven't had a Comment c'est fait for a while, and they are always good value. This one one is on how you make two sorts of mustard, Dijon and ordinary yellow mustard..

The musical Cabaret dubbed into French.  Well, we couldn't miss out on that, could we ?

Now, this I liked a lot.  A very stylish film, futurist science-fiction, and a seriously pretty actress. And we get to practise our French listening while watching it. Really, what more do you want ?

To balance all the cheerful popular television that we're seeing here, it's good occasionally to go return to the heights of French culture.  It doesn't get any higher than this.  Arte did a programme Quand l'Europe parlait français, which featured some exquisitely cultured voices.  I loved the philosopher who speaks of Voltaire with a vocabulary and in an accent that you don't often hear on Le juste prix.  But it was a good programme, and reminded us of the beauty of the language and the richness of the culture. But after this, back to the France of today...

There have been a lot of documentaries about Serge Gainsbourg this month to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. I particularly liked this little film composed entirely of the home movies shot by Jane Birkin.  Although my French friends shake their heads dolefully over her grammar, she is the only Brit ever to make the French language her own.  Her voice is immensely attractive, I think.  And this was a very sweet little film.

It turns out that Fabrice Luchini is France's favourite theatre actor. He is certainly mine... we have lost the great breed of great eccentric thespians in England, but they still exist in France.

Un Dos Tres is a Spanish TV series dubbed into French.  Quite surprising, really, that we don't see more shows from Spain on French TV.  This one takes us into the intimacy of the lives of young dancers at a stage school. Not original, but not badly done either.

The 1978 film of Superman catches the spirit of the American comic book - as does the unfortunate Christopher Reeve who played the hero. So we forgive the pretentious moralising of Marlon Brando as Jor-El. That's how they saw things in the 1950's.

A nice documentary here from France 5 Femmes au volant on the difficulties French women experienced in taking their rightful place behind the wheel of the family car.

NRJ12 (pronounced énergie) is one of the channels that can be relied upon to provide a pleasant moment of vulgarity.  Such was Ils mènent une double vie  in the series Tellement vrai.  So here we have a nice young man, a policeman, who in the evening is a male stripper.  I told a French friend (also a policeman) about this because I wanted to know if this was common in the French police, and he pointed out that the guy was a policier municipal, and not a real policeman in his eyes.  Hmmm....

We have a lot of light-hearted stuff on this site, so it is good to be serious once in a while. Last month I posted a clip of Gisèle Halimi, the lawyer who defended in the case of Marie-Claire, which paved the way for Simone Weil's law on abortion.  France 5 has now produced a complete documentary of the case Le procès de Bobigny, with long interviews with Marie-Claire herself.  I have to warn you that this is strong stuff... she describes the appalling suffering that was the lot of these unfortunate women in detail.  It started for her when she was raped (rape was not at the time a crime), and she was arrested after her rapist reported her abortion to the police. 

Des racines et des ailes produces some good documentaries.  This one offered some free advertising to a couple offering a week's holiday on their working boat on the canals of North France

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