Products

Go to the archives

The French Way

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Feb 12, 2014
Category: Beyond Classification

There was a State dinner for French President François Hollande, and all that American media found of interest was his inability to bring a date — hardly surprising, as Hollande recently bounced his live-in lover for an actress he’d been seeing. The caption of the Jon Stewart segment nailed the absurdity: “Homme Alone.”

There was a considerably larger absurdity at this dinner — the absence of someone who should have been there. That would be our ambassador to France. Why was he/she absent? Because we don’t have one. The last one left the post in November.  The White House picked his successor — Marc Lasry, a hedge fund manager and top Obama fundraiser — but he had to withdraw when his name was connected to an alleged poker ring run by the Russian mob. The post remains vacant. I guess ambassadors no longer matter. Or maybe France doesn’t.

France matters to me.  And not just as the world’s favorite vacation destination but as the home of Proust, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Colette, Victor Hugo, Degas, Rodin, Baudelaire, George Sand, Turgenev. It may not be as important to the White House as the care and feeding of bundlers, but let’s celebrate french culture here — from books, film and music to beauty and style.

MUSIC

Lou Doillon

She’s the daughter of Jane Birkin (yes, the inspiration for the Birkin bag.) Her half-sister is Charlotte Gainsbourg. She started acting at 5, and has appeared in 80 movies. Tall, stick thin, she is the face and muse of Givenchy. And, last year, at 30, she launched a music career with a CD called “Places,” which astonished its creator and the French audience alike when she was named best female performer of the year at Les Victoires de la Musique, the French equivalent of the Grammys.

FILM

L’Atalante

The story is so simple you may wonder how Vigo filled 87 minutes with it. Jean is the young captain of L’Atalante, a barge that goes up and down the Seine. He marries Juliette, a country girl who has never left her village. Now she’s on a boat making its slow way to Paris. And she’s the only woman — the crew is a colorful old salt named Pere Jules and his son. For someone as provincial as Juliette, married life and barge life are a double shock. When the barge reaches Paris, Jean and Juliette quarrel. She runs off. He can’t find her. They miss each other horribly. They’re reunited. End of movie.

Diva

The feature debut of Jean-Jacques Beineix, “Diva”— released in this country in 1982 — was unlike anything I’d ever seen. First, it was a reach back to the jaunty films of the French “New Wave.” At the same time, it was a rule-breaker, mixing opera with techno, Society with punk, chic with coarse, thriller with spectacle. And was it ever stylish! Every frame was drenched in color and attitude — almost singlehandedly, “Diva” launched a style of French filmmaking called “cinema du look.”

BEAUTY AND STYLE

Anthelios 50+ Fluide Extreme for Face with Mexoryl 

What’s so great about Anthelios with Mexoryl? Dr. Vincent DeLeo, Chairman, Department of Dermatology, Founding Director, Skin of Color Center, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt and Beth Israel: “It produces a product which gives us almost perfect protection against sunshine.” Dr. Darrell Rigel, clinical professor of dermatology at New York University: Mexoryl “is the No. 1 individual ingredient in terms of protection from Ultraviolet A radiation.”

Parisian Chic

At 230 pages, published in nicely bound soft cover, with whimsical illustrations and terrific photographs, Inès de la Fressange‘s book is the best guide to personal style — and to Paris — I’ve ever seen. If I were a woman and had any relationship to Paris, I’d memorize it.

BOOKS

Simple Passion

You wait for the phone to ring. That’s your life, waiting. You never know when he’ll call, so you leave your home as little as possible. Hair dryers and vacuum cleaners make noise that could drown out a ringing phone; you use them sparingly. And then, without warning, there’s the voice you crave — he can be free for a few hours without his wife getting curious.

Bonjour Tristesse 

Cécile, the narrator, is the 17-year-old daughter of a 40-year-old advertising executive. Her mother’s dead. Dad’s a womanizer. No one much cares that she’s failed her exams and is drifting. Her father has rented a large white villa on the Mediterranean for the summer. It’s the house you dream of: “remote and beautiful, standing on a headline jutting out over the sea, hidden from the road by pine woods. A goat path led down to a small, sunny cove where the sea lapped against rust-colored rocks.” The water? “Cool and transparent.” Ahhhhhh… Instantly, Cécile makes a conquest of Cyril, a 26-year-old who’s even more handsome than his small sailboat….

The Foreign Correspondent

In Alan Furst’s novel, Carlo Weisz has fled his native Trieste and is now a reporter for Reuters in Paris. He’s also on the editorial board of Liberazione, a Resistance newspaper edited in Paris and distributed in Italy. In the beginning of the book, the head of the paper is assassinated; Weisz is his logical successor. Weisz is of two minds about Resistance work. On one hand, he agrees with the general idea: “Resist in small ways, this can’t go on, the tables will turn.” On the other, he’s a born journalist, more interested in watching and writing than making history. But you know that can’t last. As 1938 becomes 1939, it’s increasingly difficult not to be drawn in.

Colette 

By l928, Colette needed no last name. She was a brand, and her product was sex. But here she asks a remarkable question: Who obsesses a woman most — her mother or her man? We’re trained by habit and media to think only of the man, the night, the perfume, the champagne. Problem: memoir or novel? The catalogue says fiction, but “Break of Day” doesn’t even seem like writing. Page after page, you feel you’re reading the diary of a season in Colette’s life.

Bel-Ami 

George — the kind of handsome guy from the country who, for lack of a better thing to do, joins the Army — finishes his military service without a prospect in the world. He moves to the big city, because that’s where opportunity lies. But he gets a lousy job and is totally frustrated. One evening he runs into Charles, an old Army buddy who’s now a newspaper editor. Charles has an idea: George should write up his wartime experiences, Charles will publish them, and then George will have some business and social credibility. One problem: George can’t write. No problem: Charles’s wife will help him.

An Hour from Paris

The most exciting travel guide I’ve read in years. Its author, Annabel Simms, is a Brit who moved to Paris and developed a deep knowledge of the fifth arrondissement. Business took her to the modern, soulless inner suburbs. Then an urge “to get into the countryside, any countryside” led her to discover France’s excellent network of commuter trains — and what she was looking for. The 21 day trips of this book, which has been revised and updated several times, are the happy result.

My Life in France

Julia Child’s first meal, in Rouen, started with oysters, served with a pale rye bread and unsalted butter. They were followed by sole meuniere, “perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley.” Mr. and Mrs. Child washed it down with a bottle of Pouilly-Fume. They moved on to a green salad and a baguette, fromage blanc and cafe filtre. “Absolute perfection,” Julia decided. “The most exciting meal of my life.”