1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 24: (a) Les rendez-vous de Paris; (b) Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud

Both of these movies, released a week apart from one another in the USA, are about men and women who talk about love while keeping it at arm’s length. In Les rendez-vous de Paris, they do much of their talking out of doors, in and around parks, markets, graveyards, and cafés; in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, they talk in restaurants and apartments. All the locations are stereotypically Parisian. Together, the movies suggest: If you want romance, go to Paris; if you want true love, stay away.

The great and prolific director of Rendez-vous is Éric Rohmer. (I’ve already reviewed another of his movies, A Summer’s Tale.) Gene Hackman, playing a hard-boiled detective in Arthur Penn’s thriller, Night Moves (1975), says, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” This is correct. In Rendez-vous, the characters literally watch the paint dry in order to talk about it.

Roger Ebert says:

I think [Rohmer] believes that love is love and that flirtatious conversation is an entirely separate pleasure, not to be confused with anything else. … What the people in Rendezvous in Paris are really saying, underneath all of their words, is: “I am not available. You are not available. But let us play at being available because it is such a joy to use these words and tease with these possibilities, and so much fun to be actors playing lovers, since Paris provides the perfect set for our performance.” Rohmer splendidly illustrates the theory that Parisians possess two means of sexual intercourse, of which the primary one is the power of speech.

Ebert’s review is spot-on, and I have little to add to it. The same is true of his review of Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud:

What a delicate dance they perform. … It is a matter of great erotic fascination when two people are intrigued by the notion of becoming lovers, but are held back by the fear of rejection and the fear of involvement. Signals are transmitted that would require a cryptographer to decode. The difficulty is to send a message that can be read one way if the answer is yes, and the other way if the answer is no.

I’ll say nothing about the movies’ respective plots. (Rendez-vous alone contains three separate stories, and each is fairly complex.) I’ll just note this difference between the two movies. In Rendez-vous, the characters are still young, and their flirting is fraught with insecurity. Not so in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. Nelly may only be in her twenties, but, as played by Emmanuelle Béart, she’s an expert at wielding her beauty against men. And M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is a wily ex-judge and businessman who knows precisely what sort of allure he holds for one such as Nelly. Theirs is a dance, yes, but also a sparring match between two assured veterans. Compared to them, the lovers in Rendez-vous are amateurs.

Oh, and this: M. Arnaud and Nelly have money (or, at least, Nelly reasonably expects that she’ll end up with money because of her looks). For the students, scholars, and artists of Rendez-vous, life is more threadbare. This difference also matters.

Lost in the woods

At the end of this mild winter, a (near-)blizzard.

I took Samuel outside to empty out the mailbox. The wind blew some coupon sheets out my hand. I had to chase them across the snowy driveway, bending over several times, almost flipping Samuel upside-down.

It was a high point for him. He also enjoyed watching the Champions League (Real Madrid 1, Manchester City 2; red card to Sergio Ramos).

Most of the day, Samuel was extremely grouchy, but at night he turned on the charm, smiling broadly and lying back in his chair with his hands behind his head (how he learned to do that, I’m not sure).

Karin has been listening to this song from Frozen II. I can’t help but recall Michael W. Smith.

Samuel sings

In this video, Samuel:

• sings along with his mother’s breast pump;
• hiccups;
• pukes on his Notre Dame shirt;
• hiccups some more; and
• sucks his thumb.

Yesterday, we brought home a stroller and spun Samuel around the block – his first field trip entirely out of doors. He slept through all of it.

The significance of my Ph.D.

From A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (I have added the boldface):

The indiscriminate collation of degrees has justly taken away that respect which they originally claimed as stamps, by which the literary value of men so distinguished was authoritatively denoted. That academical honours, or any others should be conferred with exact proportion to merit, is more than human judgment or human integrity have given reason to expect. Perhaps degrees in universities cannot be better adjusted by any general rule than by the length of time passed in the public profession of learning. An English or Irish doctorate cannot be obtained by a very young man, and it is reasonable to suppose, what is likewise by experience commonly found true, that he who is by age qualified to be a doctor, has in so much time gained learning sufficient not to disgrace the title, or wit sufficient not to desire it.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Fatherhood

We’ve moved Samuel out of our room, from the cardboard box to his crib. Karin goes to him in the night. I miss having him nearby.

Samuel has become more aware of the kitties:

They brush him with their tails.

What have I been reading?

(1) Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm;

(2) Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland;

and

(3) Kathryn T. Long, God in the Rainforest.

Each, in its way, is excellent. I peruse them in bed or upon the toilet, since, on most other occasions, I watch over Samuel.

February’s poem

… is by Stephen Crane.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A learned man came to me once.
He said, “I know the way, – come.”
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.
Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet.
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried, “I am lost.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(From The Black Riders and Other Lines)

A far-right political party

Samuel has good and bad days. On Monday, we again tried to use cloth diapers on him. He cried every waking minute, except when held. Today he cheerfully spent hours playing with his toes. I was able to wash the dishes that had been stacking up since the weekend.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I viewed a couple of Oscar nominees that I missed when I was younger.

Elizabeth wasn’t great.

The Pianist, which I saw yesterday, was much better. It concludes with forty-five minutes of shattering quietness. As in Shine – another movie of music and Holocaust survival – a sort of love, or at least fellow-feeling, blesses the protagonist.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I also saw Elizabethtown for the first time in over a decade. I realized I’d overlooked that Claire, the Kirsten Dunst character, is, in fact, a spirit sent to coax the protagonist into choosing to live, like the angel Clarence of It’s a Wonderful Life. (I’m not the first to notice this: this guy already has. Not that I agree with him about all the particulars.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A northern-hemisphere-style, far-right party has formed in Ecuador. According to El Universo,

Más que por los postulados que defienden, se apasionan por lo que rechazan. Reivindican los valores cristianos, la familia, la vida, la corrección moral, el libre mercado, el porte de armas, la propiedad privada y la hispanidad. Y, con la misma o mayor vehemencia, rechazan cualquier atisbo de izquierda, feminismo, ambientalismo o, lo que llaman, “internacionalismo infantil”, refiriéndose a los Organismos de derechos humanos de la ONU o la OEA.

Which I translate:

They are stirred less by the principles they accept than by what they reject. They affirm Christian values, the family, the sanctity of life, moral fine-tuning, the free market, arms-bearing, private property, and Hispanism. And, with equal or greater vehemence, they reject any hint of the left, of feminism, of environmentalism, or of what they call “infantile internationalism,” referring to such human rights organizations as the United Nations or the Organization of American States.

Their flag is like those of Alabama and Florida in showing a red saltire on a white background. Specifically, it shows the Cross of Burgundy, a Hispanic symbol (Hispanic in the narrow sense of European Spain).

This is an odd development for Ecuador. I suppose one could explain it as an extreme reaction to the “pink” government of the last dozen years, though it strikes me as yet another foreign import totally out of step with the broader national culture (not unlike the extreme free-market emphasis of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where many of the pelucones and would-be pelucones study).

It’s odd, yes, but there’ve been similar and more alarming developments in, e.g., Brazil.

The Oscars

Karin cooked a fine supper, and then we settled down to watch TV all evening.

When we’d had our fill of Veronica Mars and Poirot, we turned on the Oscars. We saw the presentations of the last three awards – Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Picture.

I’d say, on the basis of the short movie clips featuring each nominee, that Renée Zellweger was the most deserving of her cohort.

I’d say, on the basis of his bloviation, that Joaquin Phoenix should have had his award taken away. His speech seemed twenty minutes long, yet he thanked no one.

Once again, this year, the best speech I heard was by Olivia Colman, who announced the Best Actor award winner. She told a lot of funny jokes. But the audience soon tired of them and stopped laughing – which was a pity.

Parasite won the award for Best Picture. It was the only movie I saw in a theater this year. (I also saw The Irishman, at home.)

R.I.P. Catherine Burns, nominated fifty years ago for one of the all-time great performances, in Last Summer.

Samuel’s favorite songs

Just a few:

Acker Bilk, “Stranger on the Shore”:

Percy Faith, “Ebb Tide”:

Also, this version by the New Hawaiian Band, with ukulele by Ohta San:

Ralph Vaughan Williams, “March Past of the Kitchen Utensils,” from The Wasps:

And of course Vaughan Williams’s “Lark Ascending”:

The Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive”:

And “Jive Talkin’”:

Röyksopp’s remix of “I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From” by Kings of Convenience:

“Glen Coe” by the Orb:

The theme of the Australian crime show, Murder Call:

And for nap-time, pretty much any of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports:

Chiefs 31, 49ers 20

Last night’s was an exceptional Super Bowl, what with the Chiefs scoring 21 points in the last 6 minutes to defeat the 49ers. It took the Chiefs fifty minutes to unlock the Niners’ defense, and then it was like, BLAM, BLAM, BLAM. Mahomes, who’d thrown poorly in the third quarter, marshaled the late raid and was the MVP.

Over the years, I’ve tended to root against the Chiefs, but I do like this version of the club. I was especially happy for the Chiefs’ coach, Andy Reid, who won his first Super Bowl after having led NFL teams for 21 years. Reid is about as affable a big-time coach as there is.

You can tell it from this article in The Atlantic, written in 2008 when Reid was coaching the Eagles. It describes him analyzing the historic 1958 NFL championship game. It’s a good read (no pun intended).