Happy Independence Day to one and all! No celebrations here, but I will partake in the French festivities 10 days from now.
I woke up to a wonderful email offering me a volunteer post at the Festival Avignon ! I’ll be helping out as a box-office assistant for one of the shows of the Festival OFF (think “fringe festival”). It’s the usual kind of box-office thing: selling tickets at the door, distributing Will Call tickets to folks who purchased in advance, answering basic information questions. I’ll be working for 60 or 90 minutes before each show, 6 days a week. It’s a very small job, and it’s unofficial, but I’m delighted to have the experience. I’ve already started practicing saying «Je vous souhaite un bon spectacle, Madame.»
The job came about through a combination of being in the right place at the right time and being relentlessly outgoing. Last year in Avignon I hatched the crazy idea of trying to bring a French play to perform in Boston. At the time I spoke with a number of companies, an agent, one or two playwrights. After I got home I did a bunch more legwork to develop the idea, created an LLC for the venture, threw together a basic website (www.frenchtheaterproject.com), spoke to a bunch of relevant French and American cultural players, and tried to make something happen. So the only concrete thing that has come out of it is the theater club at the French Library, but I’ve decided these things take time to build.
One of the companies that pursued this idea with the farthest is named La Ruche Musicale, producers of the show Contretemps. I saw the show twice, had breakfast with a production assistant and the company’s president, swapped several emails, and even developed a proposal with them. In the end, things didn’t come together (yet?) for a Boston engagement, but we stayed in contact. A couple days ago I sent an email reminding them of my plans to be in Avignon again this month and proposing we get together (they are reprising Contretemps this summer at Avignon). As an aside, I offered that if by any chance they could use an extra hand to help out with the show, I’d be happy to volunteer in any capacity they liked. And sure enough, today came the response that indeed they find themselves unexpectedly short-handed, and if I was willing to work the box office on the schedule outlined above, they’d be grateful for the extra staff. Absolutely made my day.
So I expect to have interesting insights this year from the other side of the desk, and perhaps will get to do some socializing with one or more members of their company. We will see. Last time I worked a retail counter was 1990 at Holy Cross College bookstore: it was a temp job I was able to do because they started a week or two before Harvard did, so I was available for their start-of-year rush.
Starting from that high-point, the rest of the day here was OK. After usual breakfast and conversation qua instruction, we headed out to the cinéma in Carcassonne to see a morning screening of a recently released film. Éliane selected something likely to have a lot of slang or familiar language, which is something I identified to her as an area I struggle with. We saw Sexygénaires, starring Thierry Lhermitte and Patrick Timsit, in a sleek but totally empty theater (11am on a Tuesday not being peak movie hours). The film was a mix of a broad comedy and a reflection on life in one’s sixties. Michel (Thierry Lhermitte), age 65, is a struggling hotel owner, grandfather, and widower in Bandol, 50 km southeast of Marseille. With the hotel on the brink of insolvency, he goes to Paris to ask his friend Denis (Patrick Timsit), also in his 60s, to buy out his share of their jointly owned Paris restaurant.
It turns out that Denis has been keeping Michel in the dark, but the restaurant didn’t survive Covid. This could happen under any management, one imagines, but it is completely believable that it happened to Denis, who is an unsympathetic and coarse clown, a low-class parasite of the first order. Harder to believe is that Denis now makes ends meet by working as … a model in television and print advertising ? Somehow the industry keeps hiring him even though he is an obnoxious schlump of a character. Michel accompanies Denis to one of his photo-shoots where an agent spots Michel and discovers his fine figure and handsome visage. Apparently 60 is the new sexy for advertising luxury goods like watches or tuxedos.
Michel stays in Paris for a few weeks while his windfall modeling career flourishes, Denis’s tanks, and the hotel limps along under the interim management of Jean-Claude, another sixty-year-old of their childhood friends. Michel has a couple of romantic interests – a thirty-something in Paris and a sixty-something long-time friend, recently divorced, in Bandol. Finally something happens to make Michel realize what’s important in life. He quits modeling, returns to Bandol, sells the hotel, pays off his debts, invests in a small ice-cream store, and pursues a relationship with the age-peer divorcée. Ah, to be sixty and sexy.
A pretty formulaic, mediocre film, one that can’t be rescued simply by the fact of being French. I’m not sure it was all that effective as a language-learning tool, either. I understood enough of the dialogue to follow the story with minimal difficulty, but at the same time I was missing easily 20% of the lines. There were no captions (in any language) and so if I heard a word or expression I didn’t understand, I had nothing to help me remember it later so I could ask Éliane. We couldn’t pause the film, of course, and even in a theater all to ourselves I didn’t find it attractive to pose questions for each mumbled line or slang expression that I missed. But a good reminder of how far I have to go in oral comprehension, and how big a difference there is between French audio books, read with professional diction, and French film or television, delivered in a more realistic manner.
We came back to the house and I read stories to Éliane’s daughter while her parents prepared lunch. The 18-month-old walks confidently, but doesn’t yet speak a word. So interacting with her is more of a one-way conversation than I was anticipating. Still, I think she’s taken a liking to me and I’m hearing in passing words that are particular to young childhood. I read her a version of Le Chat botté (originally written by Charles Perrault) and also a modern adaptation of La Poule aux œufs d’or (originally by LaFontaine). She smiled and giggled throughout as she sat next to me in her stroller, but was pretty much in her own world and not paying attention to the story. But I enjoyed myself.
After lunch I took a break to write and read, and then at 5pm we went to a nearby winery for a private wine tasting. I’ve done several wine tastings in France and in the US, and this one was fairly ordinary, both in terms of wine and in terms of narration / conversation. The winery is named Château de Pennautier and is part of a large group named Lorgeril. They’ve been operating since 1620 and currently produce over 3 million bottles of wine each year. I’m not particularly knowledgeable or discerning in wine, but it turns out I can distinguish between wines made at this scale and wines from small producers. Or maybe they simply served me unremarkable wines.
I went into the village after the wine tasting and picked up a few things at the grocery and the bakery (open today at 6:45p in the afternoon). Dinner was on my own, leftover pizza, some new fruit and some new cheese. I think I’ll post this, go have my chocolate croissant for dessert, and call it a night.