| Sunday, September 20, 2020

Dear Friend, 

« Deauville! Que de m’as-tu vu!” exclaimed Clementine, as Michel piloted the Thunderbird along the river Touques. Deauville sits along the south back of the river, and its sister seaside colony, Trouville, a quieter, more sedate station balneaire, is on the other. 
 
M’as-tu vu means “have you seen me?” Deauville has a reputation for being showy.
 
But…where else to watch an American movie? And as an aside, why else drive a 1966 Thunderbird convertible painted silver mink?
 
It was the week of the Festival du Cinéma Américain, and Michel was determined to see Woody Allen’s latest oeuvre and anything else on the program. Michel relishes a certain idea of America, intimately connected to his movie-going youth in the late 1960s. Besides the T-Bird, he owns a Harley hog and likes to wear a Texas Firearms Freedom belt buckle and cowboy boots. He also has a long grey ponytail and a plenitude of silver Goth rings on his fingers. Occasionally, his forehead is decorated with a red bindi, usually worn by married Hindu woman. Cultural appropriation, Michel says, is the sincerest form of flattery.
 
Michel is a French intellectual. His mind is like an opinionated, argumentative, interactive encyclopedia. For years, he has published bilingual editions of the Classical canon, from Plato to Pseudo-Plato, as well as works ranging from the only contemporary (medieval) biography of Charlemagne, Nissam Taleb’s Black Swan, and modern Japanese novels. He’s an amateur of model trains, Star Wars memorabilia, the opera, colonial-era Algerian politics, Korean movies, and Bollywood. He has written an unpublished history of the United States. Although since he hates to fly, his view of America remains imaginary.
 
Pandémie ou pas, as indomitable as Michel’s faith in the virility of the American dream, the 46th annual Festival du Cinéma Américain started last Friday and finished up on Monday, September 14.  The festival was dedicated to Kirk Douglas, who died this year at 103, his life spanning almost the entire history of the movies. But Douglas was not the only absent star; few of the usual American producers, directors and actors were able to travel to Normandy this year.

The Deauville festival began in 1975 and is as electric as Michel himself. Partly that reflects the peculiarities of cultural exchange. The French laugh about things Americans take seriously and vice versa. Filles de Joie, “girls of joy,” the French euphemism for the oldest professionals, is about three joyless prostitutes of 2019. Working Girls, the English title, just doesn't introduce the same thematic possibilities. 
 
At Deauville in 1975, you could see Woody Allen’s Love and Death, the weeper Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Roy Hills’ now-forgotten aviator drama The Great Waldo Pepper, and the creepy (but not tasteless!) end-of-the-world scenario A Boy and his Dog. Also Caged Heat, an early Jonathan Demme B-movie about hot babes in prison, and Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. The latter two were then regarded as pertinent social commentary by French critics. Meyer was “le Walt Disney du porno,” according to Cahiers de cinema, the founding revue of the French New Wave.
 
“Et pourquoi pas?” said Michel, sharply, raising his eyebrows in rebuke at my naïve American astonishment. “Why not?” 
 
I didn’t have an answer for that, not having seen them. So I kept quiet while he bought us tickets for Peninsula. It is the third in a post-apocalyptic zombie series made by a South Korean director. It was selected for the Cannes Festival, which was cancelled this May; instead, Deauville showcased the nine international selections.
 
As Jean-Luc Godard, auteur extraordinaire of the French New Wave, put it when interviewed at New York’s Film Festival back in 1965,
 
“There are three types of bad pictures: one, [those] which don’t affect me at all; two, [those] which exasperate me; and, three, like many French films that depress me so much I don’t feel like making films anymore…It is like such a bad picture that one wonders if it is not good.”
 
Michel thought it was very good.
 
After that we enjoyed some fine old American movies like Total Recall and Three Days of the Condor. Also, Spartacus and Lonely Are the Braves…the latter two part of the weeklong tribute to Kirk Douglas.
 
Deauville has a long association with the movies, going back to its glory days as a playground for the rich, famous, and royal in the ‘teens and 1920s. Film came into its own in those days, as roving photographers captured splashing children, bathing beauties, foreign potentates, and the stars of vaudeville and the silent pictures.

Famous French movies were shot in Deauville, including Lelouch’s 1966 A Man and A Woman. And two films, in 1984 and 2008, immortalized the 1978 heist of the Deauville casino. As the glamorous robber Mesrine, then still on the lam, told an admiring interviewer for Paris Match,
 

De toute façon, attaquer un casino, c'est attaquer l'empire du vice. Le seul moyen de gagner un banco, c'est d'y aller avec un calibre. On s'est pointé et on a volé 13 millions et non pas 7 et demi comme il a été dit. Ce n'est pas beaucoup, mais c'est mieux que de travailler chez Renault ou pour le Smic de M. Barre…Après, on est rentré dans une ferme. On a braqué les gens et on est reparti vers la Normandie…J'ai beaucoup d'amis là-bas.

“Anyway, attacking a casino, that’s attacking the empire of vice. The only way to win big is to go with a gun. We headed there and stole 13 million francs, not 7 and a half like they said. It’s not a lot, but it’s better than working at Renault or for the minimum wage…Afterwards, we hit up a farm. We robbed the folks and then we left for Normandy…I have a lot of friends there.”

 
Despite all his friends in Normandy, things did not end well for Mesrine. Kirk Douglas could have warned him.

 “You work as hard on a failure as you do on a success,” he told his son Michael, who was at Deauville to remember his father’s long life in the movies.
 
“Ah, yes, Mesrine,” said Michel. “He tried to base his life on a movie. Of course, you've seen Breathless?”

 
More in sorrow than in surprise at our uneducated movie sensibilities, he mailed us an old-school DVD of Godard’s 1960 film sensation, which has just arrived. In the movie, the careless, casual, charismatic and dashing young criminal looks out the window as he drives to Paris in a stolen Thunderbird. He smiles at the viewer:
 

“Ah! La campagne est belle ! J’aime la France ! Si vous n’aimez pas la mer, si vous n’aimez pas la montagne, si vous n’aimez pas la ville…Allez-vous faire foûtre ! »
 
« Ah, the countryside is lovely! I love France! If you don’t like the seaside, if you don’t like the mountains, if you don’t like town…Go [untranslatable]!” 

M’as-tu vu indeed! And mais oui! France is a beautiful country, especially in the month of September.
 
                           A très bientôt, breathlessly yours,