I was sick for several days in October, and took the occasion to binge watch one of the 2017 French series available on Netflix, La Forêt. It’s got a few things going for it: it’s in French. It has gorgeous footage of European forest. And did I mention it is in French? Unless you are bedridden and looking to work on your listening skills, or if you really, really like Broadchurch knock-offs, I wouldn’t recommend spending you time on watching the six hour-long episodes that are the entirety of this series.
The show is a modern-day polar set in a French village near the Belgian border, right at the edge of the Ardenne forest. Three teenage girls are up to something and get in trouble, one turns up murdered, the other two disappear. Naturally the mother of one of the girls is the second-in-command lieutenant of the village police force, which has just acquired a new chief. The lieutenant has lived in the village all her life, while the new chief arrived from Paris and the army. The investigation turns up one dark secret of village life after another, and also gives the director a chance to show off their arbitrary inclusivity (“This character is Black! That character is Jewish! This one is lesbian! Why? Er, no reason really …”) I don’t object to representation on the screen, but the writers make a big deal of these distinctions but then don’t do anything with them. They also don’t do much with various other plot elements: a phantom wolf in the forest; a hermit living in the forest; somebody slaughters game animals and is careless with a lot of blood. The school teacher who likes to wander naked through the woods.
One thing that is clear: the French don’t seem to think much of conflict of interest. The lieutenant is allowed to fly off the handle countless times as she lets her grief over her missing daughter drive her to violate procedure at every turn. The chief scolds her each time, but nothing comes of it. I don’t think there was ever a second season of this how, but it would actually be interesting to see her play a police officer in a case that does not involve her own family.
One of the weirdest facts about this series is that the station that aired it originally, France 3, partnered with an online gambling company Winamax to allow viewers to put real money bets on the identity of the murder. Winamax built a second-screen experience that would update the odds on each bet in real-time during the nights that the show aired, adjusting them as the plot played out. It was a successful marketing gimmick that attracted a lot of attention on both mainstream media and social media, and in turn a lot of viewers. The series was translated and marketed in Spanish, English, and German, though I don’t know if the betting campaign was Europe-wide or France only. I haven’t heard of any examples of this dynamic being recreated, so perhaps it was a one-time campaign. But it might explain why the writing was so poor …
Les charentaises are a particular style of slippers made in La Charente, a department of France some 80 miles north east of Bordeaux. I’ve driven past it, but never gone there. These slippers have been made in La Charente for over 350 years, first by hand and then by machine. They were originally intended for military and rural life, as a comfortable indoor shoe that you could keep on all day long while you donned and doffed your outdoor boots or wooden shoes. A number of charentaises-making factories opened there in the first years of the 20th century, and they started aggressively exporting the slippers globally in the 1950s. At its peak in the 1970s, this French industry was exporting over a million pairs of slippers each year. Together with a beret and a baguette, a pair of charentaises became part of the French caricature.
The global center of shoe manufacturing today is in Asia, as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia account for 75% of all output. While French production of slippers fell precipitously in the past 50 years, it’s having something of a resurgence, both in La Charente and in Brittany. The French government has been pursuing a “Made in France” industrial initiative for the past few years, and generally has a soft spot for saving culturally iconic production. My French teacher assigned me to watch a documentary about the re-opening of one of the original charentaise factories and write a response about the importance (or not) of preserving industries like this.
Here’s my rather rambling response, after applying corrections suggested by my teacher N.M. In other posts I include both my original draft and the final draft after editing in order to display my errors. But as this post is long enough already, I’m posting only the final draft.
Version rédigé avec N.M.
C’est quoi la forme de la vie? La pomme est ronde, un cristal de sel est cubique, la coquille d’un escargot est spirale. Quelle est la morphologie de la vie? Dans son livre La Maison de joie: Une histoire de la vie et de la mort, l’historienne Jill Lepore constate que de l’Antiquité à la Lumière les peuples de l’Ouest ont imaginé que la vie est comme un cercle. On est né, on reçoit la sagesse et les traditions du passé, on habite dans la maison de son père, on laboure les champs de son grand-père, et on mange les recettes de ses arrières grand-mères. Au cours des années, on grandit, on a des enfants, et on leur apprend à faire comme leurs parents. Finalement on vieillit, on sourit aux petits-enfants, on leur enseigne les comptines patrimoniales, et on meurt conforté par le fait que le cercle recommence.
Pourtant depuis la Lumière, cette notion d’une vie cyclique a été remplacée par la vie linéaire. On utilise la raison pour améliorer les techniques. On progresse. On grimpe vers le sommet, on se hisse à l’échelle. L’arrivée de l’industrialisation et des idées de Darwin au XIXe siècle a accéléré cette réorientation de la conception de la vie. On doit construire, accumuler, foncer plus loin ou plus vite. Regardez les milliardaires de nos jours, messieurs Bezos et Branson, qui se hâtent de se lancer dans l’espace. Ruons-nous vers l’avenir!
Mais faites attention! Parce qu’on ne peut pas être au four et au moulin. En se dépêchant sur la longueur du chemin de progrès, il faut qu’on lâche maintes coutumes du passé. On ne peut pas dire «Rien à jeter» en surchargeant les malles de notre culture actuelle. Nos boulevards sont ou pour les chevaux, ou pour les automobiles, mais pas les deux. Un stationnement au centre ville est ou une écurie ou un parking. Et un travailleur doit choisir un métier, soit fermier, soit ouvrier, soit enseignant, soit avocat. Quel choix fera-t-il?
D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?
Ça me rappelle des questions du peintre Paul Gauguin, dont une œuvre est sous-titrée «D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?». Parce que la question de «que garder, de quoi se débarrasser» est à son cœur une question d’identité. Pour les circulaires, répondre à ces trois questions est facile. Nous venons d’un chemin déjà arpenté par nos parents; nous sommes des gens qui entournent cette orbite familiale sans aucun souci; nous repasserons les mêmes chemins à nos tours. Mais chez les linéaires, chez les dévots du progrès, les questions d’identité sont plus difficiles. Il faut changer pour s’améliorer, et un changement de mode de vie exige un changement d’identité. Choisir d’abandonner nos pratiques habituelles, de bouleverser nos affaires, c’est choisir de nous laisser mourir un peu pour permettre de faire naître le prochain «nous». Sommes-nous prêts à mourir?
Enfin, au bout de cette route sinueuse, j’arrive au sujet des charentaises. Cette pantoufle particulière est née il y a trois cent cinquante ans. En 1907, Théophile Rondinaud (parmi les autres) à lancé une usine à Rivière en Charente. Dès les années 1950, son fils James Rondinaud exportait ce produit dans le monde entier. Pendant les années 1970, l’usine Rondinaud employait 1300 travailleurs. La Charente était renommée pour ces jolies pantoufles douces. Mais cinquante ans plus tard, c’est la faillite. Les fabricants asiatiques ont surpassé ceux de la Charente, les chiffres d’affaires ont chuté. Même avec une consolidation de quatre fabricants sous le nom «la Manufacture Charentaise» (LMC), et avec la protection inédite du titre d’Indication géographique «charentaise de Charente-Périgord», cette société a dû mettre la clé sous la porte en 2019.
Est-ce qu’il faut être en deuil pour cette industrie française? Il y a deux ans qu’Emmanuel Macron a annoncé son initiative de relocaliser certaines chaînes de valeur pour les produits critiques. La crise sanitaire du Covid-19 a démontré la sagesse de fabriquer les molécules pharmaceutiques intra-pays. Une usine pour faire les semi-conducteurs en France c’est stratégique pour ne pas être dépendant de la Chine pour nos ordinateurs et nos portables incontournables. Mais les pantoufles? Forcément un manque imprévu de chausseurs duveteux ne serait pas une crise nationale. Les orteils patriotiques de la France survivraient.
Ici ce n’est pas une question de nécessité mais d’identité. Si un membre de la famille Rondinaud, comme l’arrière petit-fils Olivier Rondinaud, veut continuer l’entreprise, qu’il y aille. Mais si la rentabilité est insuffisante, on doit poser la question: d’où viendra la subvention? À mon avis, ceux qui s’identifient aux charentaises doivent subventionner eux-mêmes leur fabrication en France. Si c’est Olivier Rondinaud seul, je souhaite qu’il ait une grande fortune personnelle. Si ce sont les travailleurs de l’usine, peut-être qu’ils voudront travailler à des salaires réduits. Enfin, si les habitants du département ou du pays s’identifient profondément avec les charentaises, une subvention nationale serait dans ce cas-là la plus correcte. Pas de problème pour moi.
Mais il se trouvera, peut-être, que les consommateurs de la France préfèrent acheter les pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préfèrent renouveler les autoroutes, et que Mais peut-être qu’il se trouve que les consommateurs français préfèreraient acheter des pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préféreraient renouveler les autoroutes, et que les électeurs préféreraient revaloriser les salaires des soignants. Évidemment, il y a des limites budgétaires. Donc, qui sont les Français? Un peuple qui donne priorité à ses pieds? Ou un peuple en marche vers l’avenir sur des chemins modernes, avec des soignants correctement payés, mais avec les pieds à la chinoise?
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 …
I grew up here in Massachusetts and studied French in middle and high school during the 1980s. Years later I discovered the French Cultural Center when preparing for a six-month job rotation to Paris. I’ve been a member and continuing student ever since.
Back in the 1980s I didn’t have much access to French video. Today what’s available in the US is staggering: TV series, YouTube shorts, long films, news, you name it. Though the pandemic has closed off many French learning options, there’s no shortage of videos to stream. They offer visual clues that help infer the meaning of speech, which then helps resolve what the words must have been. Many videos have French closed captions which help build listening skills as well. They cover a wide range of vocabulary and speaking styles, often using a more colloquial register than I find in books, newspapers, or even podcasts.
Here are some of my recent favorites. They vary in length, subject matter, and difficulty, but if you have a B1 or better level of oral comprehension there should be something here for you.
Mr Nouar
Mr. Nouar is a YouTube channel of short sketches about life in modern France by comedian Mohamed Nouar. They contain funny, sharp social commentaries on issues of discrimination, unemployment, race, family, dating, incompetence, love, les relations hommes-femmes. He’s been posting videos since 2014. Born in 1988 of Algerian parents in southwest France, Nouar’s work is full of multicultural twenty-somethings who talk fast, chat ironically, use slang, and revel in verbal jousting.
Miraculous: les aventures de Ladybug et Chat Noir is a TV series for kids drawn in the Japanese anime style and broadcast from 2015 to 2019. Set in Paris, two young teen superheroes together battle the villain of the week. Meanwhile, their alter-egos conduct an awkward middle school flirtation, unaware of the other’s superhero life. The series has wholesome characters, non-stop dialogue, and simple stories whose predictability helps clue the meaning. Each 21-minute episode includes scenes from daily teen life (school, home, babysitting, subway, market, movie theater, etc.) as well as superhero battles. Though the intended audience is French kids ages 8-12, older students of French can benefit a lot from the series.
Chiffroscope is a collection of 48 mini-documentaries (2-3 minutes each) that look at big questions of the day using statistics and irreverent animations. It’s an eclectic series, with topics like cannabis legalization, freedom of the press, money and happiness, overfishing, global chocolate consumption and danger from asteroids. The narrator’s delivery is clean but fairly fast, and there are many complicated numbers spoken aloud (e.g. 143,000) – good listening practice. Otherwise, the language is very accessible, as almost everything is in the present tense and the drawings reinforce the words.
Au Service de la France is a television series that paints an absurd picture of a French spy agency in the 1960s. Though set in the past, the show debuted in 2015 and is a vehicle for rather acerbic criticisms of French society today. It mocks French attitudes towards Algeria, the rest of Africa, the Cold War, women, and class. Fair warning: the series is hilarious, but intentionally shocking. Many characters say and do awful things designed to illustrate how far French society still has to go. Though cringe-inducing, it’s also a goldmine for studying French language and culture. Lots of things are said on screen that won’t be heard in more sanitized media. The language is challenging, but the French closed captions are quite faithful to the spoken French if you want an assist.
Dix Pour Cent is another television series that offers a chance to expand your knowledge of modern French language and culture at the same time. Set in a present day Parisian talent agency, it follows four agents as they deal with landing projects for their touchy stable of stars. But there’s a gimmick: each episode features a guest star who plays themself. Famous French film names like Cecile de France and Michel Drucker are written into the scripts and get to poke fun at themselves or play off their established stereotypes. There are also long running plot arcs around the careers, love affairs, and family troubles of the four agents and their assistants. There’s plenty of familiar and colloquial language in the dialogue, including cursing, drinking, and talk of sex, but nothing discomfiting.
Available on Netflix under the name “Call My Agent!” Four seasons (2015-2020) of six episodes 50 minutes each. Select the original French audio, and either no subtitles or the French closed-captions.
Watching French video can be a great way to improve your French, but don’t be surprised if it takes more energy and focus than watching TV in English. Also, don’t be afraid to watch the same segment more than once, or to watch an entire episode with captions on and then again with captions off. If you add 15 minutes a day of French video watching to your routine, you’ll be sure to notice a big jump in your mastery in no time.
A friend recently introduced me to the TV series “Au Service de la France“, an absurd parody of a French spy agency in the 1960s (“A Very Secret Service” in English). The show debuted in 2015 and has two seasons totalling 26 episodes so far, with a third season in production. It was the first French series picked up by Netflix and marketed as “a Netflix original”, though it was originally developed by Canal (who abandoned it) and then by the network Arte. I’ve watched 3 episodes so far with the original French audio, both with and without French closed captions. It’s available with English subtitles as well.
I’m conflicted about the series. On the one hand, it is hilarious. The writers mock French attitudes at the time about Africa and Africains, Germany, women, bureaucracy, and more. The deadpan humor is well delivered and the skewering of 1960 French Gaullist culture is brutal. By myself I’m not expert enough on French culture to confirm that it lands for a French audience, but the critical reviews in France are positive as well. I am familiar enough with French culture to get the most of the jokes, I think, and they are pretty funny.
On the other hand, in order to mock these bad attitudes, the show puts them on full display. Yes, the characters showing these behaviors are loathsome and stupid. Yes, the show is self-acknowledgedly politically incorrect and generally irreverent. But while the typical French viewer may have seen the thing being mocked enough times that a little more won’t hurt, I’m not in that situation. I feel I am actively picking up 1960s French prejudices (and perhaps modern ones?) from watching the show. I’ve never viewed the American series “Mad Men”, but I gather its treatment of 1960’s American office culture has the same problem of amplifying sexism and misogyny while nominally criticizing it.
The attitudes towards Africa, with the backdrop of empire and decolonization, are really awful. An African delegation that comes to demand independence is first ignored, then laughed at derisively, then handed off to the intern who surprises everyone by producing a full-fledged constitution and administrative transition plan. Can’t have that, it seems, so the higher ups first try to corrupt the delegation with wine and women, then when that doesn’t work arrange for delegation members to be killed one at a time in innocent accidents. They offer heartfelt condolences to the remaining delegates each time, until the final surviving member accepts a much watered down governmental program, grieving and bewildered. The whole thing is horrid, both despite and because of the thick layer of buffoonery that pervades it all.
I had to snapshot these from Netflix. No official promo images for the series bother to include the African characters…
“C’mon, it’s a parody!”, the devil on my left shoulder says. Yes, but I am too suggestible. For example, I have a teenager in the process of learning to drive. For their benefit, I often narrate aloud what I’m thinking while I’m driving. Yesterday at an intersection I said to them: “Even though we have a green light here, pedestrians in the crosswalk always have right of way,” and then stopped myself before I could say “Well, except Algerians”. Yikes! I would never, ever have thought to introduce that topic gratuitously were it not for the constant stream of insulting and dehumanizing mentions of Algeria and Algerians in the show. Now I have to avoid imitating these horrible examples.
Some of the scenes mock safer targets, while making me feel extra good because I know enough to be in on the joke. For example, an interrogation of a captured East German spy includes a beaurocrat reading aloud a multiple choice questionnaire with items like:
Germany's territory is:
a) big
b) small
c) too small
The Third Reich should have lasted:
a) 1 month
b) 10 days
c) 1000 years
I guess this doesn’t strike me as being as hurtful as the insults lobbed at Africa because of my sense that Germany is now prospering, while Africa is still suffering from its experience with France. But what do I know? Maybe raising these tropes of the expansionist and imperialist German serves to fuel ongoing dissension between France and Germany. I’d have to ask French and German viewers.
Unsurprisingly, humor is hard, and rough humor especially so. For now, I’m going to continue watching, as for me the show is a good source of French culture, especially latent attitudes that are no longer allowed to come to the surface much in modern French media. But I’m not so sure I’ll make it to the end of the series before I change my mind on the balance of benefits and harm.
