French Addressing
To my French friends and my fellow Francophiles:
My failure to acquire any real fluency speaking French (beyond limited conversation with waiters and shopkeepers) is perhaps one of the single greatest regrets of my life. That's overly dramatic but not necessarily inaccurate, as I don't regard my failure to get seriously rich as any terrible omission, given the total comfort and moderate degree of luxury I have enjoyed nearly all my life (my two years in the US Army the prime exception to that.) My inability to speak French beyond the level of a fairly dull six-year old child is sadly true despite many years of American school French classes.
This would presumably not be a major problem were it not for my being a devoted Francophile my entire adult life--ever since I first set foot in Paris slightly more than sixty years ago. I adore French food, French history, French style and French literature --in translation malheureusement. (I had to use Google to check that spelling!) Unlike many Americans, I even like most French people that I have met over the years--including numerous lengthy vacations in La Belle France and the three lovely years I spent working for a French company, which happily required frequent extended stays in Paris. This affection even survives once I get past their ill-concealed disappointment when I force them to speak English. (I am far too wise to make any French person of even the most modest English fluency suffer hearing me mangle their beautiful language.)
My Francophilia has been greatly enhanced by my corresponding love for the cinema, especially French films. This has been a part of me since my mother took me to the local "art house" in Indianapolis at age eleven to see "The Sheep Has Five legs" with the great Fernandel. My taste in French films has, over the years, become somewhat more sophisticated. When I recently had occasion to list my personal All-Time Favorite Films, I was not surprised to find that so many of them were French--"La Grande Illusion," "The Earrings of Mme. de," "Jules and Jim," "Les Enfants du Paradis," "Marius," "Elevator to the Gallows," "Le Boucher," "Mon Oncle," "Le Jour Se Leve" "L'Atalante," "Contempt," and "Napoleon"--both the versions by Abel Gance and that by Sasha Guitry are among the classics. In addition, I have numerous somewhat more idiosyncratic personal favorites such as "Cinge en Hiver," Louis Malle's "The Lovers," "Leon Morin, Pretre," "The Army of Shadows" "Capitaine Conan" and Alain Resnais' "Stavisky."
Just today, I went through my stack of DVD's and found Marcel Carne's sublime "Hotel du Nord" and watching it again confirmed my love for the "poetic realism" period of French film. It presents ordinary people in extraordinary situations that illuminate the human condition in ways that American films rarely do. This brief snatch of dialogue, as translated in the subtitles, supports that view. A French couple of the petit-bourgeois variety are emerging from the shabby hotel of the title, she with a black eye courtesy of her brusque boyfriend. They have this delicious conversation: She: "Don't you like our life?" He: "I have to. I got used to it." She: "Despite my black eye, you're a good fella." He: "We may quarrel, but we get along fine when we hit the sheets." This is the sort of casual sophistication that American films, other than those by Ernst Lubitsch, rarely achieve.
I will spare you a recitation of my love for French food, except to say that I had the sublime experience of being personally conducted on a tour of three-star temples of gastronomy in the 1980s by none other than Henri Gault and Christian Millau, authors of the OTHER highly-respected guide to restaurants in France. I suspect I should be embarrassed to say that I can recount course-by-course great meals they took me to--but I'm not.
What began in my mind as a simple email to my French friends and a few fellow Francophiles has emerged as something more elaborate which I will be posting to this podcast.
And to all of you A' Bientot.
"Monsieur" Roger Smith
P.S. I'm told the new Juliette Binoche film "The Taste Of Things" is quite "bon" and this year's French entry for Oscar consideration. My podcast moderator Bill McCuddy has seen it and says it's a shoo-in for the Foreign Film win. We shall see.
