and French films

Je suis dans le ciel! That’s right. I Am In Heaven at The Alliance Française French Film Festival ... 

Tu Veux ou Tu Veux Pas 

Gloriously stylish romp com Tu Veux ou Tu Veux Pas / Sex, Love and Therapy. Great date movie!

Lambert (Patrick Bruel) is an ex-pilot and a recovering sex addict, attending group therapy in the back room of a Parisian launderette and channelling his recovery, resolutely and quietly, into his career as a couple’s therapist.

Judith has just been fired from her sales job in Singapore after attending to one too many of (most of her) clients’ needs, and has returned to France, via the Charles de Gaulle arrivals hall where she is swept away in a sea of naked men. Yes, Judith is a nymphomaniac.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtZB7gaKQ9s

And so ensues a very sexy and funny-as-heck tale of the hunter and the hunted. Bravo!!

It’s super quirky and so cleverly restrained – an inch or two more (yes, Lambert is asked to check a client’s penis size) and it could topple over into the English seaside, but director Tonie Marshall keeps it beautifully slick and chic (she co-wrote too).

The opening title graphics are just as slick and marvellous – all tongue-in-cheek cookie pop art eighties. For the life of me I can’t find out who created them (like all silent, faceless warriors of great cover art). No one mentions the opening title design. Ever. But they say so much when they’re done so well!! The mother of all moving typography. I geddit. Saul Bass would be proud.

And extra super stars for showing a woman in all of her fullest of glories, embracing her sexuality without shame or self-reproach. 

I’m not sure this could ever have been made in Hollywood but more importantly it would definitely pass the Bechdel test. Viva la difference!!!  

Bon rétablissement!

Bon rétablissement! / Get Well Soon!  A perfect rainy Sunday afternoon movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D8urn_2s_8

Pierre (Gérard Lanvin) is fished out of the Seine by a rent boy. From his hospital bed, we swiftly discover he is a widow and a retired rigger, with a still-remarkable physique (yeah we all noticed). He is also moving seamlessly into ‘grumpy old man’ territory.

We spend the rest of the film forgiving him his bed-bound cantankerousness, as he gradually opens up to the nurses, patients, friends and family who visit him. He finds compassion and empathy in his broken bones, despite Phillippe Rebbot’s hilarious brutality as le kinésithérapeute. Eventually Maëva (a rambunctious and sparkling 14-year-old from the next floor up) is allowed to use Pierre’s laptop to update Facebook, even though she’s been doing it surreptitiously for most of the movie, and in this smallest of gestures we see him starting to reconnect with his life in the most charming and endearing way. And yes, there is a cat.

La Chambre Bleue

It’s hard enough, even in the most crucial of moments, to remember what happened on any given day - nevermind the raw, accurate detail - so imagine the scale of that undertaking when the past is built around a winding labyrinth of endless and dark half-truths. Add to that rampant narcissism and a very healthy dash of male ego. How lost we would feel trying to pinpoint anything certain or real …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dla8N6vY93Q    

And so we meet Julien, played by Mathieu Amalric, whom you’ll recognise most readily as the baddie in Quantum of Solace. Ostensibly Julien has everything: successful career, beautiful wife, child, gorgeous home, a wonderful life in a beautiful French country town, holidays on the coast … oh, and Esther, the local pharmacist and his mistress (played by Amalric’s real-life partner and co-writer Stephanie Cléau).

Julien does not want for anything but we soon learn how little he really has. Every aspect of his life is manufactured, so much so that he can’t remember what’s real and what’s not. As he tries to reconstruct the truth of his life, in the most critical of times, particularly the facts of his affair and what it ultimately leads to, a fog beds in, and we don’t know which way is up.

Julien's bitten and bloodied lip, initially a symbol of passion, becomes increasingly stark, dark and poignant against the backdrop of Julien's flashbacks and the clinical persistence and hammering of a psychologist determined to piece together the truth.

We know Julien and Esther’s stories will be inextricably woven together forever, at least answering one of Esther’s earliest and most fateful questions with some sort of resolution, but aside from that we’re never really sure. La Chambre Bleu is the most compelling of psycho-thrillers because Amalric never lays out the answers for us, and there is never a tidy conclusion. Don't expect to drift off easily to supper afterwards or think about much else for a wee while. 

and swimming

I love swimming. You have to focus on breathing above all else, which is fabulous for the monkey mind. You start thinking too much about pay day, what’s for supper, your gnarly boss, the pile of books by your bed, that spinach curling in the fridge, the fifty million TV shows and podcasts you’ve downloaded, your kid, your cat, your car (you get the idea) and you drown. Hop the perch. Nix.

When I need the tonic of wildness and a bit of a snuggle with dear old Mother Nature I head to the sea. I live in Auckland where 99.9% of the population spends 99.9% of their time in or on or by the sea. It takes five minutes on my very sky blue bike from door to shore. I am blessed. Grateful. Sea in my blood.

Most people in my neighbourhood (the sea is a kilometre either side of me) wear very little but their smiles. It seems unique to this particular area but one piece of clothing is generally routine – more than that and you’ll likely get a funny look. At times there may be a towel around the neck but mostly not. You get used to it.

The look of serenity on all the near-nekkid folk: that’s what happens when you are kissed by the sun and the sea and the air in one intoxicating squeeze so close to home. Within mooching distance.

The ocean makes me feel small but entirely present. Something changes. Maybe letting go of the daily grind, the roles we assume and all the hats we choose to wear, along with all the bad-hair and responsibilities that sit under them, it’s all temporarily a lifetime away and we get to feel like a child again. We’re held by the water and that weird Achilles tendonitis is No Big Deal. That extra rump of humanness around our middle, that puku that jiggles when we run, becomes something of a flotation device. We move so freely and all of the aches and pains and obligations become nothing, and we jump waves and giggle like a babe. Adieu psychic baggage!! (a recently discovered Oprah-ism I won't use again), hello calm, joy and mindfulness, and being in the beautiful, present moment. We are lulled and settled.

We are all pure, salty sea and goodness.

Sometimes, though, you need the rush of blood pumping mixed with the wholesome nourishment that comes from being in water. Most of us mere mortals are about 40% muscle, right, and so at some point, all those 700ish little bits of us need stretching. (And slaying. If you really want to go that far. Personally I enjoy feeling physically exhausted on purpose. As a race we don’t tend to opt for that so much, so when we REALLY do, holy mackerel!)

If I leave it too long between ‘exercise’ I get leg jiggles – faster-than-light wiggling of the foot/leg. It is a family trait, commonly used by matriarchs of the clan when exhibiting disapproval, but mostly it’s energy balled up and ready to go. My drug of choice is swimming or running (or body attack or pump if I feel like being all a bit shouty and tribal, and happen, on that day, to want to be told what to do.)

If I need to swim hard I go to my local pool. It’s a little one. 33.3 metres.

For a very long time I was embarrassed I could only breathe on one side in front crawl. Now I don't give a shit. Which happens when you get a bit older.  It’s a beautiful thing. 

Suddenly it’s okay to wear a dressing gown to the pool and only breathe on one side.

In the latest pool challenge, we are ‘swimming the length of New Zealand’, which apparently is 2257 kilometres. On the premise agreed – that 30 pool lengths equals 30 ocean kilometres – the challenge will be swimming 75 laps a day for 30 days. So. I better get used to it.

There are things I do to make this all easier. I BUT ALWAYS have a couple of cozzies and towels, clean knicks and a padlock or two in the back of the car. To go! Ideally I prefer to don an old dress or dressing gown en route – folk seem to opt for their own repeat pool outfits (unlike my local sea run). I know someone who rocks up to her pool every morning in her jam jams. 

Comfort and ease are key.

A swimming lane is such a glorious microcosm. It can function so beautifully. Fellow laners don’t need to speak. But mostly we do. We all hope everyone will sync, keep left, and get to the other end without kicking anyone in the face. One can do a peremptory scope of lane appropriateness, while casually fiddling with goggles (if you still care what anyone else thinks), with a quick, provisional glance. There’s serious (caps on) and not so (caps off), then the people who bob at each end. I'm caps off. I don't like my head all condomised like that. But I swim when I’m in. I don't bob.

People who walk the fast lane backwards to stretch the calves, at anytime, well, woe betide you. There’s a fun lane for that. Neptune’s trident in your back.

The rites and wrongs of the changing room are legendary and forever surprising. There can be episodic locker rage – identify an empty locker and secure it, I dare you. Will the shower scald you today? Pot luck. Press the button and see … Have you seen the lady plucking an errant pube from her inner thigh whilst processing the hair on her head through a full dye cycle? I have. And it's something you can’t ever unsee. And sometimes there is public duty: 'I'm sorry [unforgivably English] but someone appears to have had a number two on the seat in the ladies.’

God forbid you forget your bra.

Oh, but then, those prune fingers and the lush, lingering sleepy hunger of the post-swim. And quiet admiration. That New Zealand is chocka full of people who can so nonchalantly navigate wet floors in wet jandals.