I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
L’Invité de 8h20: Le Grand Entretien (FranceInter)
Pierre Rosanvallon : “Il y a un désir d’égalité, que chacun soit reconnu dans sa singularité”
Atiq Rahimi, écrivain et réalisateur, et Jean-Pierre Filiu, historien. Afghanistan : “Maintenant les islamistes, les djihadistes partout dans le monde, se disent que c’est possible”
“10 à 11% des enseignants pas vaccinés” affirme le ministre Jean-Michel Blanquer
Gérard Larcher, président du Sénat, sénateur LR des Yvelines, est l’invité du Grand entretien de France Inter.
Bruno Le Maire : “le pass sanitaire n’a ralenti ni la consommation, ni la croissance”
Le 7/9 par Nicolas Demorand , Léa Salamé (FranceInter)
I’m going to try doing some simple French exercises daily as a supplement to consuming organic language (reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos). Exercises were a big part of how I learned French in high school, but I haven’t done much with them in the past 10 years. Maybe the habit of a little each day will be helpful.
I randomly picked a source of exercises from my shelf: Grammaire progressive du français (niveau avancé). Long ago I had written in the answers to the first few exercises, so I’m starting with Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.
GPdF Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif
La Place de l’adjectif
Qualifiez chacun des éléments soulignés. Mettez cet adjectif à la place qui convient.
Ajoutez un adjectif de votre choix.
Faites pour chacune des phrases une paraphrase explicative comme dans l’exemple.
Trouvez des adjectifs et placez-les comme il convient pour terminer cette description.
GPdF Chapitre 3: Les Négations
Les Différentes négations
Donnez le contraire.
Répondez avec la négation qui convient.
Complétez ce texte avec les éléments donnés en utilisant des renforcements de la négation.
Faites des phrases négatives avec les éléments suivants comme dans l’exemple.
GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
Le Présent
Récrivez les phrases en utilisant la forme «être en train de» quand c’est possible.
Complétez le texte en choisissant le verbe qui convient.
Utilisez le présent à la place du futur pour rendre le texte plus vivant.
GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
Formation et caractéristiques
Récrivez selon le modèle.
Faites le portrait de l’homme ou la femme de votre vie en utilisant le subjonctif.
J’ai regardé …
C’est une autre histoire with French closed captions.
Much has been made of October 2021 as the 100th anniversary of the birth of one famous French Georges, the singer Brassens. But June 2021 was also the 100th anniversary of the death of another famous French Georges, the playwright Georges Feydeau. Feydeau is widely considered the master of French vaudeville, a theater genre we could call “farce” in English (note that this is different from the American “vaudeville show”, which is more a mix of variety acts and short slapstick sketches).
French vaudeville is full of licentious gentlemen, sexually harassed servants, unfaithful wives, and cuckold husbands. There are secret lovers stuffed in closets, hidden under beds or tucked behind drapes. The dialog is witty, double entendres abound, and mistaken meanings («quiproquos») lead to comedy gold. Most of all there is non-stop motion, a frenzy of perfectly timed entrances and exits («portes qui claquent»). The canonical line from a Feydeau vaudeville show is «Ciel, mon mari!», declared by an adulterous woman who has just discovered her husband is about enter the scene where she is entertaining a lover. English language works like “Charlie’s Aunt” or “Noises Off” are direct cultural descendants of vaudeville as elaborated by Feydeau. And of course Feydeau’s work owes much to Molière’s comedy and to commedia dell arte before that.
This framed poster from 1896 hangs in the Théâtre du Palais-Royale, where I photographed it in 2018.
Feydeau enjoyed great success in the Paris theaters for over 30 years. He started writing plays in 1882, debuting his first smash hit Tailleur pour dames in 1886. He continued delivering money-makers for decades, titles like Monsieur chasse!, Champignol malgré lui, Le Dindon, La Puce à l’oreille and Je ne trompe pas mon mari! Feydeau had penned over 40 plays when his final play, Hortense a dit : « Je m’en fous ! », was produced in 1916. Sometime afterward he contracted syphilis. Feydeau spent the last two years of his life in a sanatorium in Rueil-Malmaison, a suburban community west of Paris, where he routinely experienced megalomania, paranoia, and hallucinations according to reports. He was just 58 years old when he died in 1921.
It is this final period of Feydeau’s life that modern authors Thierry Barbeau and Pierre Berriau have taken as their focus for their play Feydeau, Chambre 21. We follow the ailing and addled Feydeau through his delirium and hallucinations as his experience of life plays out in a fantasia of clever banter and hat tips to his greatest works. All of this is superimposed on early 20th century mental hospital treatments, with a healthy dose of fourth-wall breaking to boot. In addition to airing the story of his sad demise, the play is an homage to Feydeau’s style of vaudeville with super witty dialogue and carefully choreographed traffic patterns.
Many actors explicitly play two characters, a common device which the audience is ready to accept until Feydeau-the-character sees through it and calls it out. The other characters have no idea what Feydeau is talking about and treat this as another symptom of his madness. Feydeau nonetheless coaches them on how to be a better character in a Feydeau play, e.g. teaching them to use theatrical asides properly. Some characters are delighted that they can say whatever they like, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be heard, while others protest that they can hear the offending remarks loud and clear.
Here’s an example of the sort of self-awareness that suffuses the whole script:
Scène 5
Feydeau et Adélaïde (fille de Fouquart) sous les draps d'un lit. Des ébats amoureux.
Fouquart entre en trombe dans la chambre.
FOUQUART: Ma femme, Gabrielle, elle a disparu!
FEYDEAU: Quoi? Mais qu'est-ce ...
FOUQUART: Où est ma femme, Feydeau? Elle est là, n'est-ce pas?
FEYDEAU: Mais je ne sais pas.
FOUQUART: Mais si, elle est là, je la sens. (Montrant furieusement le lit dans lequel se trouve Adélaïde.) Ce lit! Il y a quelqu'un à l'intérieur.
FEYDEAU: Mais non, il n'y a personne.
FOUQUART: Enfin, Feydeau, vous n'allez pas voir vos pièces? Quand quelqu'un dit qu'il n'y a personne dans le lit, c'est qu'il y a quelqu'un.
FEYDEAU: Mais je vous assure que non. C'est un lit vide.
FOUQUART: Un lit vide? Depuis quand y a-t-il des lit vides dans les vaudevilles, ils ne sont jamais vides, croyez-moi, il y a toujours quelqu'un dedans. Et je vais vous le prouver.
FEYDEAU: Mais je vous interdis! Pour qui vous prenez-vous, Fouquart?
FOUQUART: Pour le cocu, monsieur, le cocu. Vous savez très bien ce que c'est un cocu, Feydeau, non? Il faut toujours un cocu dans l'histoire et aujourd'hui, le cocu, c'est moi. (En direction du lit.) Gabrielle, c'est toi mon bébé?
FEYDEAU: (s'interposant) Je suis chez moi! C'est ma chambre, c'est mon lit.
FOUQUART: Alors mon ami, d'un, le cocu est cocu mais il a des droits que les autres n'ont pas. Et de deux, (désignant le lit) je vous affirme qu'il ya quelqu'un ici.
FEYDEAU: Mais non, je vous dis «personne».
FOUQUART: Il y a quelqu'un. (Il va au lit, soulève les draps, il n'y a personne. La comédienne est passée par une trappe.) Ah non, personne.
FEYDEAU: Ah bon?
FOUQUART: J'aurais pourtant juré que ...
Scene 5
Feydeau and Adélaïde (Fouquart's daughter) are under the sheets of a bed, making love.Fouquart bursts into the room.FOUQUART: My wife, Gabrielle, she's disappeared!
FEYDEAU: What? But what ...FOUQUART: Where is my wife, Feydeau? She's there, isn't she?
FEYDEAU: Well, I don't know. FOUQUART: Oh yes, she's in there, I smell her. (Gesticulating furiously at the bed where Adélaïde is.) This bed! There's someone inside.
FEYDEAU: No, really, there's nobody.FOUQUART: Come on, Feydeau, don't you go to your own plays? When somebody says there's no one in the bed, there's someone in the bed.
FEYDEAU: But I swear to you, there's no one. It's an empty bed.FOUQUART: An empty bed? Since when are there empty beds in vaudeville? They are never empty, believe me, there's always somebody inside. And I'm going to prove it.
FEYDEAU: Wait, I forbid it! Just who do you think you are, Fouquart?FOUQUART: I'm the cheated husband, sir, the cuckold. You know full well what a "cuckold" is, don't you Feydeau? There's always got to be a cuckold in the story and today, that's me. "Mr. Cuckold." (Turning to the bed) Gabrielle, is that you baby?
FEYDEAU:(jumping between them) But we're at my place! This is my bedroom, that's my bed.FOUQUART: Well my friend, in the first place, Mr. Cuckold may be cuckold but he gets some rights that nobody else has. And in the second, (pointing at the bed) I'm telling you there's someone in there.
FEYDEAU: And I'm telling you "no one".FOUQUART: There is somebody! (He goes to the bed, lifts up the sheets, but it is empty. The actress has exited via trap door). Huh, nobody.
FEYDEAU: Oh, really?FOUQUART: But I could have sworn ...
Broad humor, no doubt.
A set design for Le Dindon, Act II, 1896.
One noteworthy element of the play, possibly standard in Feydeau’s vaudeville, is the foreigner who speaks French with a ridiculous accent (now that I’ve written that, the play “The Foreigner” comes to mind – another show that owes a debt to Feydeau). In this show it’s Le Général-Docteur Azacassasse, a medical quack from Latin America. This bit is far harder to translate, as the phonetic word play doesn’t work outside of French, but the joke is that Azacassasse says «sisse» when he wishes to say «si», which to him is an all purpose “yes”. But the word «sisse» also sounds like «six» (the number 6), while the word «aussi» (meaning “also”) becomes «aussisse», and the phrase “6 also” («six aussi») becomes «sisse aussisse» in the mangled accent, which with elision sounds like «six saucisses» = “six sausages”.
I’ve tried to translate it on the right, taking liberties to preserve some semblance of the wordplay, but it doesn’t really capture the naturalness of the original.
FEYDEAU: Quoi, quoi, «lé ké vou losse»? Ici, il faut parler français.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse?
FEYDEAU: Mais parfaitement. En France, on parle français. Sinon, on ne comprend rien du tout. Vous, c'est quoi votre langue?
AZACASSASSE: L'ouroulouguaille.
FEYDEAU: Ah! bon! eh bien, voilà, chacun sa langue chez soi.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, ma bien sisse!
FEYDEAU: Ceci dit, je ne suis même pas certain que vous compreniez tout ce que vous êtes en train de dire.
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Nosse, pa to.
FEYDEAU: Ah! vous voyez!
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, y'avousse.
FEYDEAU: Le plus étrange, tout de même, c'est que vous compreniez parfaitement le français que je vous parle.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, ma tresse bienne, tresse bienne.
FEYDEAU: Il y a quand même un petit problème, non?
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse, problème?
FEYDEAU: No, pas six problèmes, on vous dit qu'il y a un petit problème, un seul.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, yé dis sisse.
FEYDEAU: Oui, mais nous, on dit «un».
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, oune.
FEYDEAU: (comprenant) Ah! «sisse» ça veut dire «un» pour vous.
AZACASSASSE: Nosse, sisse é sisse.
FEYDEAU: Quoi, «sisse et sisse», six et six, douze.
FOUQUART: Bon, Feydeau, le général-docteur n'est pas là pour faire des additions.
FEYDEAU: (comprenant) Ah! «sisse», ça veut dire «oui».
AZACASSASSE: Sisse!
FEYDEAU: Mais comment dites-vous «six» alors? Le nombre six?
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Sisse aussisse.
FEYDEAU: Ah, vous dites «six saucisses»?
AZACASSASSE: Sisse. Sisse aussisse.
FEYDEAU: Comment voulez-vous qu'on s'y retrouve si vous dites aussi «sisse aussisse»
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, cé pas no kaille.
FEYDEAU: Ah, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire, c'est «pas no cailles» du tout.
GABRIELLE: Pour être honnête, c'est vrai qu'on ne comprend pas tout.
FEYDEAU: What's with, «lé ké vou losse»? You must speak french here.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse?
FEYDEAU: Why of course. In France, you speak French. Otherwise, no one will understand you at all. Say, what's your language?
AZACASSASSE: Ouroulouguaille.
FEYDEAU: Ah! Good! Well, there you are, when we're in your country, we can speak that.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, berry good, sisse!
FEYDEAU: You know, I'm not really sure you understand all the things you're saying.
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Nosse, not all.
FEYDEAU: Ah! there, you see!
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, I sees.
FEYDEAU: The weirdest thing, though, is that you understand perfectly when I speak to you in French.
AZACASSASSE: Ah, me berry well, berry well.
FEYDEAU: But we still have a small problem, right?
AZACASSASSE: Ah, sisse, problem?
FEYDEAU: No, not six problems. I said that there's a small problem, just one.
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, I's says sisse.
FEYDEAU: Right, but we, we say "one".
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, woon.
FEYDEAU: (understanding) Ah! «sisse» for you means "one" for us.
AZACASSASSE: Nosse, sisse eez sisse.
FEYDEAU: What, «sisse eez sisse», six and six is twelve.
FOUQUART: Look, Feydeau, the Doctor General is not here to do arithmetic.
FEYDEAU: (comprehension dawning) Ah! «sisse», that means "yes".
AZACASSASSE: Sisse!
FEYDEAU: But how do you say «six» then? The number six?
AZACASSASSE: Euh... Sisse too.
FEYDEAU: Ah, you say «six two»?
AZACASSASSE: Sisse. Sisse oh sisse.
FEYDEAU: What's a guy supposed to do if he has to say «cease see-sawing at seez oh seez"?
AZACASSASSE: Sisse, tha's nosse eezy.
FEYDEAU: You can say that again. Not easy-peasy in the least.
GABRIELLE: To tell you the truth, even I don't understand what he's saying.
In the end, I’m not a big fan of this play. It has some hilarious, laugh-out-loud scenes, but the concept is not executed all that well. It mostly feels like someone wanted to show off how well they can write Feydeau-style farces, and was taken with the idea of what a manic, drugged out Feydeau must have been like. But I had a hard time getting past the bit about syphilis being a horrible way to die, and how being that disoriented would probably feel pretty scary. I expect it works better as a live spectacle than as a written text to be read. But I’m quite sure that in a live performance with lines delivered at full speed I would have been totally lost.
Feydeau, Chambre 21 was created for the 2021-2022 theater season. Rehearsal photos were taken at Théâtre de la Tour Eiffel, but I’m not sure they have a Paris production nailed down yet. The show poster is for some sort of filmed version maybe? Or a staged version in Nantes? I’m not clear. Either way, I think I’ll content myself with having read the script and move on.
Random French bits I picked up in the past week that don’t merit a post in and of themselves.
I watched the first one and a half episodes of the Netflix series Marseille. It’s more or less the French equivalent of House of Cards, but with Gérard Depardieu taking the role of Kevin Spacey. It’s unclear to me how explicitly Netflix meant it to be a direct adaptation of the concept, but others have noticed the obvious parallels as well. One can only hope that Netflix didn’t mean to have their leading actor plagued by sexual assault scandals, but Depardieu seems to have that in common with Spacey as well. So far I’m willing to separate the art from the man and haven’t given up on watching Depardieu films. I’ll see if this TV series is worth watching more of.
In this week’s French conversation lesson I found myself explaining how I met a French-teacher friend, and then I found myself explaining my mathematics graduate school career and why I left, and then I found myself explaining my advisor’s research, and next thing you know I’m explaining the five families of modern cryptography schemes and the corresponding hard math problem each one is based on. I was able to get across most of the ideas (and kudos to my teacher for sticking with me on this), but I lacked some of the technical terms in French for various mathematical objects. It’s times like these I wish I had reviewed Cryptographie sur les courbes elliptiques in advance of my lesson.
https://youtu.be/8WTesYp5H8o
Google News and YouTube keep feeding me various Georges Brassens materials, which are all the rage as we draw near the 100th anniversary of his birth in October 2021. This one is a particular gem. It’s an hour-long TV program from 1972 (Bienvenue à George Brassens) that has Brassens in a cozy setting surrounded by maybe 100 members of a television audience. The show interleaves performances with interviews, and many of Brassens collaborators are present and participate in the discussions. A large part of the charm of this particular video is the anonymous audience members in all their 1970’s glory. Look at the hair styles, what they are wearing, how and what they smoke, and their reactions to his sometimes ribald songs. I have some sense of what Americans in the 1970’s were like, as I lived through 90% of the seventies and watched plenty of movies and films from that time. But French styles in the 1970s were different, so this is a nifty look back through both time and space.
Brassens is also charming and disarming with his total lack of pretentiousness.
Rubens, 1 of N
I watched a couple more videos from Manon Bril’s channel C’est une autre histoire. I’m going through them chronologically just for the heck of it. She’s OK at the beginning but based on a few later ones I’ve seen she gets a good deal better as she goes. The one about Zeus, Sex, and Power was only OK. The one about Le jugement de Pâris was better.
I finally got around to watching the final two episodes of the Netflix series Lupin. They were OK, but the plot holes were large enough to drive une fourgonne through. It’s better if you just enjoy the scenes and the acting and don’t worry too much about how it all fits together. I’ve read one Lupin short story long ago, but ordered from my local bookstore one of the re-issues that the success of the Netflix series has spawned. It’s taking a while to arrive, but I’ll read it someday …
Someone recommended to me the RTL radio show L’Heure de crime, hosted by Jean-Alphonse Richard and available as a podcast. It airs four times per week and each hour-long episode explores some aspect of French crime, prosecution, or justice. I listened to one named L’étrange mort de Marie-France Pisier and learned about the unsavory death of a famous French actor in 2011 and a political pedophilia scandal that followed in 2021.
Marie-France Pisier
Olivier Duhamel
Camille Kouchner
Bernard Kouchner
Thierry Funck-Brentano
Évelyne Pisier-Kouchner
One morning in 2011, the wealthy Mme Pisier was found floating in the middle of her own swimming pool, fully clothed, and with her head lodged between the bars of an iron pool chair. A lengthy investigation proved inconclusive, with suicide, mild drug overdose, and murder all being possible explanations. Autopsy couldn’t even determine if she had drowned or was placed in the water after death. The case was filed away as unresolved and that was that.
Ten years later, her niece Camille Kouchner published dark family secrets in a book La Familia grande that effectively ended the career of Olivier Duhamel (European deputy, political scientist, public intellectual, powerbroker). Duhamel was the second husband of Évelyne Pisier-Kouchner, and was accused of sexual abuse towards multiple adolescents including his step son Antoine (a.k.a. «Victor») Kouchner (Camille’s twin). Marie-France Pisier learned of the abuse before her death and apparently threatened to go public with it if her sister wouldn’t. The non-public already knew of this behavior though: Duhamel’s entourage was aware of it for years and Duhamel himself confessed to his behavior shortly after the book’s publication. He suffered no criminal penalties, though, as Antoine refused to cooperate in filing charges in 2011 or before, and the statute of limitations had run out by 2021.
Meanwhile, the whole family is full of French luminaries. Évelyne’s first husband (and father of one of the abused minors) was Bernard Kouchner (former French foreign minister, minster of health, etc.), while Marie-France Pisier’s husband at the time of her death was Thierry Funck-Brentano, CEO of the 4 billion euro publishing group Lagardère (parent company of Hachette). Given all the wealth and power involved, the never proven suspicion is that foul play caused the death of Marie-France Pisier. Regardless, the accusations, the downfall of Duhamel and the nature of his acknowledged crimes was a major news item for several days this year.
Not a great podcast, but now I know about this important episode in modern French culture.
One last day of vacation, one last lesson with Sofia to close out the series. The focus of our final session was code-names – not the award-winning word game by Vlaada Chvàtil, but the actual French legal code and the actual geographic names of places. We also did some grammar and some writing.
The grammar section touched on the timeline of indicatif verb tenses and how they can indicate the relationship between the action being described and the present moment (or more precisely, the moment where the narration is situating itself). So the plus que parfait comes before the passé composé. The passé récent, présent, and futur proche are all considered as “present-ish” moments. And the futur comes further along in time, with the futur antérieur sneaking in between the present and the future when one needs to talk about sequenced future events.
Mille bornes ou temps borné?
There’s one more commonly used indicative tense I haven’t listed, which is the imparfait. I’ve heard the distinction between the imparfait and the passé composé described in many ways: the passé composé is for one-time actions, while the imparfait is for habitual past actions; the imparfait is for descriptions while the passé composé is for events; the imparfait is for continuous action in the past; the imparfait is for background scenery while the passé composé is for the focus of a narration, the plot. But Sofia gave me a new one that I find helpful: the passé composé is a bounded tense (un temps borné), while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (non borné). If you don’t know (or don’t wish to indicate) when an action finished, use the imparfait. Note that the present is implicitly an unbounded tense, while both plus que parfait and futur antérieur are bounded tenses, as they are only used when you need to indicate an event that has finished before some other event you wish to mention (either past or future relative to now). I don’t know why borné is a more helpful concept to me than “continuous”, but it does give me a new lens for the imparfait / passé composé distinction.
Coding on a Sunday
After the grammar, we watched another montage of “man on the street” interviews (a «micro-trottoir») asking how people felt about working on Sunday. Traditionally most everything is closed on Sunday in France. Originally this was to reserve it for religious observances, but with la laïcité this historical basis has been de-emphasized. The opinions featured in the clip varied, and I expected to be asked to write several paragraphs about my views. But this day’s lesson had a twist on the timed writing exercise: instead of having 25 minutes to write at length in response to a prompt, I had 25 minutes to read a complicated document and then summarize it in under 80 words.
I have a fair amount of experience reading French fiction, and I’ve also read and listened to a decent amount of French news articles, but I haven’t done much with reading more official French documents. Digesting the opening 20 paragraphs of this government-issued review of the laws and regulations surrounding Sunday hours for salaried workers was a comparatively experience. I’ve done something similar when I opened a bank account in France eight years ago and again when I investigated traveling there this summer amid Covid, but that’s about it.
Here’s an example of the text, beginning with an excerpt from the actual Code itself:
Un salarié ne peut travailler plus de 6 jours par semaine : au moins un jour de repos (24 heures auxquelles s’ajoute un repos quotidien minimum de 11 heures) doit lui être accordé chaque semaine et, en principe, le dimanche (repos dominical). Toutefois, le principe du repos dominical connaît plusieurs types de dérogations qui peuvent, selon le cas, être permanentes ou temporaires, soumises ou non à autorisation, applicables à l’ensemble du territoire ou à certaines zones précisément délimitées, etc.
Le fait de méconnaître les dispositions du Code du travail relatives au repos hebdomadaire et au repos dominical est puni de l’amende prévue pour les contraventions de la 5e classe. Les contraventions donnent lieu à autant d’amendes qu’il y a de salariés illégalement employés. Les peines sont aggravées en cas de récidive dans le délai d’un an.
The text is not fundamentally difficult but it is definitely a different register of language than news reporting. Most of the work is in untangling the nuances that are built into the law, though there is also some specialized vocabulary whose meaning I had to deduce on the fly from context. I imagine the comparable English section of Massachusetts state law would have the same feel.
Summarizing 20 paragraphs in 80 words does not leave a lot of room for fancy constructions or even many modifiers. I ended up writing 110 or so naturally and then trimmed it back to reach the limit. We did a quick joint editing afterwards. Here are the two drafts.
Version originale
En général, la loi de travail dit que le dimanche soit un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissement qui s’occupent des besoins de public ou qui bénéficent de travail en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Autres entreprises définies peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés à volontés. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 en n’importe quelle mesure.
Version corrigée
En général, le code du travail dit que le dimanche doit être un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissements qui s’occupent des besoins du public ou qui produisent en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Les autres entreprises évoquées peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés volontaires. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 de quelque façon que ce soit.
Name That Rue
Speaking of Sunday, you might know that it is named for a prominent celestial body, as is Monday. Other days are named for the Norse gods Tyr, Wotan, Thor, or Freya. But who decided these things? Do these names represent the diversity of who we are as a society today? And what if the actions of these Norse gods are no longer acceptable to our modern mores – shouldn’t we stop honoring that one weekly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlVhJsgTuqs
These questions seem a bit academic in thinking about days (nobody is about to mount a serious campaign to rebrand Saturday as Parvatiday), but they are very much in play in France when it comes to street names. French streets are old, and many are named after people who did very bad things – ruthlessly slaughtered people in Africa, traded in slaves, mistreated poor workers, abused women etc. And behavior aside, the vast majority of honorees are old European white men. So there is a French movement to rename some of the streets that currently glorify some pretty bad people and a parallel movement to name newly constructed streets for people who belong to underrepresented groups. For example, among French streets named for people only 10% or so are named for women. I imagine it’s not much different in the US.
I’d say it was all Greek to me, but that’s not expression. When something is incomprehensible they describe it with «c’est de l’hébreu» or else «C’est du chinois». Maybe the French already decided that honoring the Greeks in this way was problematic …
Oh, no! Vacation is over and I have to go back to work tomorrow morning. That means if I don’t write up the last two days of my summer lessons now, they’ll likely get buried in the onslaught of quotidien concerns that no doubt are currently overflowing my corporate Inbox (I’m afraid to look …).
Thursday’s course with Léo was a bit non-standard – quite literally. French teachers, dictionaries, and linguistic theorists pay a fair amount of attention to the idea of linguistic register. Some subsets of a language are only “appropriate” to use in certain situations which are typically characterized by their degree of formality. There are dozens of recognized subsets (see the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO/TR 20694:2018(en) A typology of language registers if you’re a real glutton for punishment), but the main three that figure in French are soutenu, standard, and familier:
Soutenu is the language of high literary texts, academic scholarship, and legal documents. It has a rich vocabulary, flowery figures of speech, and complex grammatical constructions.
Standard is the language of business documents, office conversation, banking, government publications, newspapers, non-fiction books, traditional classrooms. It uses clear wording, simpler grammar, and unimaginative language.
Familier is the language used with friends and family. It is rich with popular idioms, truncated words, incomplete sentences, slang, and sarcasm.
Thursday we left standard behind and focused on the other two.
Soutenu (mais Insupportable!)
To illustrate soutenu, Léonard had me read an ironic blog post by Samuel Gontier about the resignation of Nicolas Hulot. The piece comments on a rather tangled situation, with which by some unlikely coincidence I was already very familiar. Nicolas Hulot is a writer, journalist, and politician who is very well known in France as one of the foremost advocates of environmental and ecological issues. When Emmanuel Macron was elected president in 2017, Hulot agreed to serve as his “Minister for Ecological Transition and Solidarity”. This was intended as a signal that Macron was serious about addressing environmental issues, and the French Greens had high hopes that such a high profile appointment would translate into real progress.
It so happens that I was in France in August 2018, fifteen months later, when I tuned into France Inter’s regular morning radio news broadcast. As I got ready for my day, I heard Nicolas Hulot appear as the guest in the daily interview slot with hosts Nicolas Demorand and Léa Salamé. After complaining about the Macron government’s foot-dragging or even retrograde progress on the environment, Nicolas Hulot said he was not satisfied and felt like he was being used as a fig leaf. At that point Mme Salamé asked “Will you stay?”, and the minister replied by announcing his resignation on the spot, on live radio. Apparently neither the hosts nor the French President knew that this action was coming, and both were taken as much by surprise as the listening public.
But not me – I wasn’t all that surprised. Not that I had an inside track on anything, I just had no preconceptions. Maybe French Ministers resign live on air all the time? Maybe the whole thing was planned in advance and the hosts were in on it? Maybe the writing was on the wall and any knowledgable follower of French politics knew this was coming (just as nobody could have been surprised when scandal plagued Andrew Cuomo resigned as New York Governor last week – though Hulot’s case did not involve any scandals). What did I know?
But it turns out that this was a big deal. My French host had also heard the broadcast and thought it remarkable. So did other news outlets, and the story was all over the news for several days. “Environmental champion resigns, preserves his integrity, blasts Macron” was the basic headline. Next, however, France Inter started patting itself on the back mightily for being the messenger in this drama. Léa Salamé rehashed the moment in the next morning’s show (I heard that one, too), and later sat for an interview (which I also heard) with another member of the station who did an “On the Media” style introspection on how the moment came to be, what it meant for live radio journalism, what special rapport the three participants shared in the making of history.
All of this was a bit too precious for media critic Samuel Gontier. He skewered all this self-congratulatory pretentiousness with a faux-serious piece of his own. It was so full of soutenu constructions that my teacher Léo could use it as atlas of literary figures of speech. Many of them have names that come directly from Greek, and so are cognate with the comparable terms in English rhetoric. The devices we discussed were myriad: la gradation, l’hyperbole, l’euphémisme, la litote, l’anaphore, l’énumération, le parallélisme, la répétition, l’allégorie, la comparaison, la métaphore, la personnifcation, la métonymie, la périphrase, la synecdoque, l’antithèse, le chiasme, l’oxymore, l’ellipse, l’épiphonème. I don’t know that it was all that valuable to remind myself of the names of each technique, but it was fun to locate examples of many in the text. Not sure how much fun it would have been had I not known all the context deeply.
Familier (… or Hiéfamil ? )
After all that high dudgeon it was time for something more casual. A lot more casual. We looked at two aspects of the familier register: verlan (neologisms made by inverting syllables within a word) and colorful idioms.
I was already fairly familiar with verlan as a concept, but I learned several things about its history from the video. There was also an example of the French rail company trying and utterly failing to use verlan in an ad-campaign, rewriting «C’est possible» as «C’est blessipo». This did not go over well: turns out corporations making neologisms is not cool. It reminds me of a failed attempt by Google to introduce the availability of “stickers” in its messaging app by sending users a text saying that “Stickers are lit”. I had no idea what “lit” meant, but it turns out that’s what the cool kids were saying at the time. Since Google was far from being a cool kid at that point, the campaign fell totally flat. I’m pretty sure my hiéfamil is equally clunky.
Finally, we looked at a standard article about Grant Wood’s famous painting and then a familier comedy video parodying same. The figures come to life and give each other grief for their expressions (the literal once on their face, not the idiomatic ones in their mouths). Even if you can’t understand the French, it’s fun to watch how well the actors recreated the poses of the painting. Give it a play!
In addition to taking lessons this week, I’ve been watching a bunch of French movies. The latest of these isJ’ai perdu mon corps, another from the list of films that Léo introduced me to on Tuesday. Released in 2019, it is an unusual and imaginative 80 minute animated feature voiced by a collection of actors unfamiliar to me. There is some dialogue, but also long uninterrupted stretches of music backing the animation. There are three principal characters: a young man, perhaps 20, born in Morocco but living in France; a young woman of the same age who works at a library and helps her ailing uncle; and a severed hand that has become active and escaped from a hospital lab freezer. Oh yeah, now might be a good time to translate the movie’s title: “I Lost My Body”. It’s based on a novel Happy Hand, published 2006.
The hand never interacts overtly with the other two characters, but spends a fair amount of time skittering around on five fingers, traversing floors, stairs, escalators, metro rails, building gutters, and a blind-man’s piano. The hand doesn’t speak, which partially explains the long scenes without dialogue. Other wordless scenes are reminiscences of better days: the young man was orphaned at age 10 and thinks of his parents often. The hand recalls when it ran through the sand, played the cello, or felt a snail. The story that plays out with all these scenes is not a happy one. How could it be when one character witnessed his parents death in a car crash, and the other witnessed its originating industrial accident, uh, first hand. But seeing all this tragedy playing out before me and learning eventually how the stories connect was unexpectedly heavy.
J’ai perdu mon corps won a slew of awards when it was released, including the 2019 Cannes Festival Grand Prize and 2020 César Prizes for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score. The critics loved it, but it seems to have been a financial flop. It grossed just $1 million, while costing $5 million to make. Netflix picked it up and re-dubbed it with English audio (easy to do with animated features, I understand), which again makes me wonder about modern movie economics. There were no French closed-captions available, so I watched it on Netflix with French audio and no subtitles. The language was pretty easy to follow, and what I missed was not critical.
You’ve likely heard of Omar Sy as the star of the Netflix series Lupin, and I just wrote a post about a recent submarine film he appears in, Le Chant du loup. But the film that really jump-started Sy’s career was Intouchables (2011), a blockbuster odd-couple story about Philippe (played by François Cluzet), a wheelchair-bound invalid , and Driss (played by Omar Sy), the home health-aid he hires for round-the-clock care and companionship. The two men come from different worlds. Philippe is an enormously wealthy, cultured, white, fifty-year-old Parisian who lost the use of all four limbs in a paragliding accident and then lost his wife to illness. Driss is a twenty-something jewel thief recently released from prison, Black, broke and living in the housing projects of the banlieue. He has no qualifications to be an aid, but shows up to interview for the post in order to satisfy some requirement to qualify for unemployment benefits. Philippe refuses to sign the relevant form (noting ironically his paralysis) but instead hires Driss for the job.
Philippe obviously likes Driss’s bluster, broad smile, and joie-de-vivre, but he later explains to a concerned brother that the main reason he hired Driss is that there was no pity in his gaze when he looks at Philippe. Driss doesn’t treat him like a fragile thing, a freak, or a benefactor to be indulged. Tending Philippe is just a gig that eventually becomes hanging out with a friend and pushing that friend back into the world. Philippe in turn has a chance to educate Driss and introduce him to music, art and literature. I can imagine a story like this falling flat, but this instance manages to avoid obvious tropes, is well paced, has funny dialog, and evolves multiple times to remain fresh.
Still, the film only succeeds because of Omar Sy’s exuberant performance of Driss. And succeed it has: it was the top film at the French box office for 10 weeks in a row in 2011, had an international release in 50 countries, and eventually grossed $440 million in theaters (annoyingly, there are no French closed-captions available in the Netflix version, and you can’t de-activate the English sub-titles. I had to block the bottom third of my screen to avoid being distracted). Its production budget was only $10 million, so it was a financial home run. Maybe that’s how the movie industry operates: they can’t differentiate in advance a film that will barely break even like Le Chant du loup from a film that will pay for itself dozens of time over like Intouchables. Funny business.
One last note about the title, «Intouchables». The word has two surface meanings, but I think there is a third irony hiding just beneath. The literal meaning of the adjective is “that which should not be touched.” You could imagine this applying to something fragile, possibly Philippe, or to something dangerous or odious, like Driss. The second meaning is “someone who is out of the reach of the law, who cannot be sanctioned.” This meaning is apparent in the opening scene of the film: Driss is driving a fancy sports car at night through the streets of Paris, speeding and ignoring traffic signs, while Philippe is in the passenger seat grinning madly with the thrill. When the cops eventually stop him, Driss asserts that his patient is having a seizure and needs to get to the hospital urgently. The cops are unconvinced, but between Philippe’s acting and the wheel chair in the trunk, they agree to escort them to the hospital. Uncomfortable, the police drive off once they’ve arrived, at which point our heroes laugh and drive off themselves. With a handicap like this (and a billion dollars in the bank), you can get away with anything!
But the third meaning is (only slightly) subtler. Driss only showed up and applied for the job because he needed to go through the motions in order to collect unemployment. The French phrase for this is «toucher des indemnités chômage», as «toucher» can mean “to collect”, “to draw” (e.g. a salary), or “to receive” (e.g. a stipend). So by hiring Driss instead of validating his form, Philippe prevented him from collecting unemployment funds, thus rendering them «intouchable». The first two meanings come across in the English title (“The Intouchables”), but the financial meaning likely does not.
See? Totally worth studying a foreign language to pick up on small details like that.
I had a chance to watch one of the films that Léo introduced me to on Tuesday: Le Chant du loup a 2019 submarine movie starring François Civil, Reda Kateb, and Mathieu Kassovitz. Omar Sy and polymath Alexis Michalik also appear in supporting roles. I recognized Civil, as he plays Hippolyte Barneville in the series Dix Pour Cent. Le Chant du loup didn’t make much of a splash in France, and box office receipts only covered 60% of production costs despite being in theaters for 21 weeks. It didn’t have theatrical releases outside of France, though that might have been fallout from Covid. I watched it on Netflix; I wonder how much of the revenue for movies like this comes from post-theatrical streaming services.
I have an odd relationship with submarine fiction. On the one hand, I feel like I know the tropes by heart: close quarters, limited communications, critical sonar and radio operators, torn or tyrannical captains, mystery sounds, incomplete information about the ocean and its natural or man-made inhabitants. I must have seen this story a million times. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve seen enough submarine movies to exhaust the fingers on said hand. There’s Hunt for Red October, U-571, … uh, maybe that’s it? Maybe I’ve read a ton of submarine fiction? Patrick Robinson’s Nimitz Class, some scenes in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, … uh, the novel of Red October…
No, It’s not that I’ve seen or read lots of these. Just to be sure, I consulted Wikipedia’s list of 150 submarine movies, and indeed I’ve seen just the two. So why does Le Chant du loup seem so familiar? I think it must be that Hunt for Red October is so iconic that the other works can’t help but echo it with slight variations.
In any event, Le Chant du loup is OK, but extremely predictable to anyone who has seen or read Tom Clancy’s masterpiece. At first I tried watching the film with audio only, but found I was missing too many of the particulars and just relying on my guesses of how the story must be going. After 30 minutes of this I turned on the French closed-captions and restarted from the beginning. Smooth sailing from there, as the language is not difficult when read; some combination of the speed, the informal delivery, and the loud music/sound effects made it hard with no closed captions.
