That's Good Reading: Fully Credited Links

• Let's hear it for francophilia! Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation noted the opening of the annual Salon du Livre (Paris Book Fair). The theme this year, Mark notes, is Chinese literature: according to the Salon's Web site, "Thirty-eight Chinese-language authors are in Paris to meet their Western readers." This theme was selected in coordination with the celebrations for the Année de la Chine (Year of China) in France, as reported here at Ionarts back on October 29 (the Festival d'Automne [Autumn Festival] also had a heavy Chinese focus: see post on September 27). Mark's comment about the Salon is wonderful:

  I was in Paris for the fair a few years ago. It was really extraordinary to wander through the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) past table after table of French authors out with their books. The crowds were so thick you could barely elbow through them. Was neither the first nor last time I contemplated moving there, but surely it was one of the strongest.

  As regular readers know, I am an impassioned admirer of French cultural attitudes. I have lived in France for some extended periods of time, and I am convinced that we have to do all we can to bring some of that passion for literature and the arts to the American mainstream. John Kerry should think seriously about acting on the Ionarts proposal: that we create a Department of Culture, on the model of the Ministries of Culture in European countries, by diverting a mere 1% of the U.S. military budget (see post on March 11).
• The indefatigable folks at The Literary Saloon have a nice, brief roundup of coverage of the Salon du Livre in French newspapers. To puncture the France-loving euphoria, they also posted some data on book-buying habits among the French. Take a look.
• ArtsJournal blogger Greg Sandow thinks that ugly CD cover art is a good way to encourage the "death of classical music," that famous bugbear of music critics. When you look at the example he gives, you know, he may have a point: yes, Winterreise can be grim and somber, but it's not that bad!
• Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ has opened in Germany, where its possible anti-Semitism, as you can imagine, will have different connotations. Heather Mathews, at Hem|mungen, translates an excerpt from the statement issued by a coalition of religious groups, warning of the film's "potential for use as antisemitic propaganda."
• One of the most important uses of the Internet will be the worldwide dissemination of important texts, especially those most rare examples of words and images found only in one or a few manuscripts. This has already proven to be important in my research and interests, and the momentum of the movement to digitalize continues to grow. From Mark Woods up in Perth, Canada, who blogs at wood s lot, I learned about (post on March 20) the online resources related to the Reichenauer Schulheft (Reichenau Primer), a ninth-century manuscript written at one of the Swiss monasteries, which contains notes on all sorts of subjects.
• A new blog for me, Veritas et Venustas, has a post by its founder, John Massengale ("Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", March 18), which is worth reading if you are interested in the question, "Whither modernism?" John approaches the question through architecture, as you can see in this excellent excerpt:

  Modernism was the cultural expression of a good deal of the second half of the 20th century, but we're in the 21st century now, and for most Americans Modernism is just a style—not a lifestyle or an ideology. It's normal today to work in a high-tech office and go home at night to a new Traditional Neighborhood. On the way home, one might have dinner at a chic new place with Minimal design, and the next night go to a new French bistro with hundred year old tiles imported from Paris, complete with Gauloise stains.

  What can be called "Modernism" is, indeed, just one style among many now, as has been discussed here in terms of both art and music, too. Interesting read. Thanks to Michael at 2blowhards for pointing it out to me.

English Mermaid Stranded in Washington

Sophie Daneman, a regular at Wigmore Hall in London or Weill Recital Hall in New York, a veteran English soprano who has worked with the "who's who" of period performance specialists such as William Christie, Christopher Hogwood, and Philip Herreweghe (see the Ionarts review of her performance with Les Arts Florissants on February 4), was to be marveled at in the West Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art this Sunday (2489th concert, on March 14, 2004). The recital—a form of concert that draws smaller crowds than other performances—promised Schumann, Wolf, and, alluringly, Francis Poulenc. The stage had been prepared with reflecting panels behind the piano, which is a rare (because futile?) attempt to rein in the difficult acoustics of this venue that is particularly unfit for recitals and solo piano performances. Although they were installed to keep the sound from bouncing around uncontrollably, I could not discern the exact effect these panels had. A welcome patch, perhaps, but probably no more.

Joseph Haydn's "The Mermaid's Song" was the first to go, and it fit perfectly. Mme. Daneman's silver-blond hair waving behind her, large, deep eyes, and a beautiful, no-frills pale black dress that tightly clad her suggested the mermaid even before she sang of it. Her singing "follow, follow, follow me" would gladly have been headed to by at least half the audience, and not just on account of the quality of her voice. The assumption that the dress was a very light, fine leather did not hold up to closer scrutiny. And neither did the three Haydn songs that dittied along delightfully. That they were in English came as a bit of a surprise, but then so did the very existence of Haydn songs.

More enjoyment came with four Schumann songs from "Lieder-Abend für die Jugend" (Evening of songs for the youth). What an improvement that not some youth, but the mature Sophie Daneman (youthful though as she can be) sang these songs with much animation and absolutely astounding pronunciation. Not only did I understand her German better than her English, but even a song as full of such ridiculously difficult pronunciation hurdles as "Der Sandman" was mastered without much difficulty. If Placido Domingo were not as magnanimous as he is and had only he stopped by, he would (or should) have turned green with envy. "Kennst du das Land?" (Do you know the country where the lemons blossom?) was so ravishing that the venue's shortcomings became unimportant or forgotten altogether.

==>> Continue reading this review.

Music in Proust

The last post on my Proust reading was on January 27 (see list of Proust posts in the link bar to the right), and I am now almost finished with the fifth book, so it's clearly time to catch up on some thoughts. In spite of how common it is in the narrator's life, music has a vast power in À la recherche du temps perdu. For example, in the fourth book, Sodome et Gomorrhe (in English, Cities of the Plain), there is this very brief passage:

I went upstairs again to my room, but I was not alone there. I could hear some one softly playing Schumann. No doubt it happens at times that people, even those whom we love best, become saturated with the melancholy or irritation that emanates from us. There is nevertheless an inanimate object which is capable of a power of exasperation to which no human being will ever attain: to wit, a piano.

I have the fortune of being a pianist and living in a musical home. When was the last time you heard music played live in your home or a friend's home, or played it yourself? Sadly, television and other forms of entertainment have largely eroded that tradition of amateur playing that was so common in Proust's life. In the fifth book, La Prisonnière (in English, The Captive), it is the narrator himself who is shown at the piano:

Taking advantage of the fact that I still was not alone, and drawing the curtains together so that the sun should not prevent me from reading the notes, I sat down at the piano, turned over the pages of Vinteuil's sonata which happened to be lying there, and began to play. . . . I did not take pains to remark how the combinations of the voluptuous and anxious motives corresponded even more closely now to my love for Albertine, from which jealousy had been absent for so long that I had been able to confess to Swann my ignorance of that sentiment. No, taking the sonata from another point of view, regarding it in itself as the work of a great artist, I was carried back upon the tide of sound to the days at Combray—I do not mean at Montjouvain and along the Méséglise way, but to walks along the Guermantes way—when I had myself longed to become an artist. In definitely abandoning that ambition, had I forfeited something real? Could life console me for the loss of art, was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?

==>> Continue reading this post.

The Battle of Algiers

Actually, I saw The Battle of Algiers back in February and never got around to blogging about it (see post on February 7, The Return of the Art Movie). As you may know, the movie has come back to a wider audience's attention because of the message it seemed to offer to a nation fighting a war, not against a country, but against a nebulous network carrying out devastating terrorist attacks. It was David Ignatius, in an article (Think Strategy, Not Numbers, August 26, 2003) in the Washington Post, who first reported that American military officials had viewed a special screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 faux-documentary about the French army's brutal crackdown on an uprising in Algiers:

Pentagon sources report one hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq. The Pentagon's special operations chiefs have scheduled a showing tomorrow in the Army auditorium of "The Battle of Algiers," a classic film that examines how the French, despite overwhelming military superiority, were defeated by Algerian resistance fighters. A Pentagon flier announcing the film puts it in eerie perspective: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. . . . Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."

In fact, in a more recent review ('65 classic 'Battle of Algiers' still electrifies and challenges, February 27) in the Boston Globe, Ty Burr claims that the August showing was only the latest example of an established practice: "For years the Pentagon has screened this film to military personnel headed for insurgent hotspots—it was shown there as recently as August. . . . 'Battle' is cauterizing in its evenhandedness, showing the vengeful madness and the passionate reason on both sides of the conflict."

==>> Continue reading this review.

Millennium Wagner Opera Company

Several months ago, I learned about the Millennium Wagner Opera Company and the hopes of its founder and director, Carol Berger, to perform the operas of Wagner here in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere (Wagner Festival in Washington?, August 19). What began as an innocent search for more information ended in the publication of a six-part interview with Ms. Berger in September. During the preparation of those posts, I met with Ms. Berger, learned a lot about her ideas and what she was trying to do, and even attended a rehearsal (see post on September 23). Since then, I have been following the company's fortunes, in the hope that they would be able to have the chance to perform as they want.

The company's last performance was a semi-staged "Scenes from Der Ring des Nibelungen," on January 31 at Ganz Hall in Chicago (an interesting venue on the campus of Roosevelt University, with quite an assortment of stained glass). Last night, three of the company's singers performed with an accompanist at a special concert at the Cosmos Club here in Washington. This organization (whose foundation funds, among other things, the concert series at the Phillips Collection) is based in a beautiful building on Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks west of Dupont Circle, with a spectacular Library for its members on the second floor, as well as a private garden. The concert took place in the Warne Lounge, a grand Rococo hall, also on the second floor. The decoration of this room would fit right in at Versailles: white walls with gold trim, ornate chandeliers, large mirrors facing large windows, and a host of putti, mythological creatures, and vines. A large circular painting dominates the room in a recessed part of the ceiling, executed by a painter who was an admirer of François Boucher and showing a party of water nymphs and gods on the ocean, with putti trying to form a ring in the clouds above.

==>> Continue reading this review.

What's the Beef with The Passion?

This Article was first published on AFF Brainwash

A film has managed to spark thought—or gut reactions, at any rate—among Americans of all ilks like few before. Everyone in the media and intelligentsia, movie reviewer or not, feels obliged to give us his or her impressions. And the impressions they got! Fascistic, sadist, virulently anti-Semitic, a sickening death-trip, pornographic, soul-deadening, relentless savagery, etc., are the labels attached. What sounds like the unholy lovechild of Jud Süß and The Silence of the Lambs is, of course, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

By now everyone is talking about this “religious splatter art film” (Richard Corliss, Time), “the Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade” (David Ansen, Newsweek), this “repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film” (Leon Wieseltier, New Republic). The attack comes from every imaginable angle, and by the time you get done reading all the reviews about it, you may even understand Mel Gibson's oddly paranoid behavior when talking about the film, seeing conspiracies everywhere. When I finally saw the film, after over a year of hoopla surrounding it, its director, and the director's father, I found it to be a wholly unremarkable film. It is a frank, albeit very graphic, depiction of the 14 Stations of the Cross and the seven last words of Christ on the cross. Why the outrage?

Anti-Semitism.

The Passion of the Christ, Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci et al. Dir.: Mel Brooks 20th Century Fox

The most obvious accusation leveled against The Passion is that of anti-Semitism. Christopher Hitchens finds The Passion to be anti-Semitic in intention and its director even anti-Semitic by nature! Leaving aside little details such as the difference between anti-Semitism (a rather modern concept twist on an old theme) and the “more traditional” anti-Judaism that has been the scourge burden of the Jewish people for millennia, this points to one of the biggest problems of The Passion, Mel Gibson. Characterized by Hitchens as a coward, bully, bigmouth, and queer-basher, Gibson is probably the cause of much of this ire. Had the same film been made by Bernardo Bertolucci (not to say that it's Bertolucci's style to make such films), the reaction might have been one of surprise and perhaps slight concern, but hardly this kind of vitriolic lashing out that started even before the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy article on Mel Gibson's highly controversial father a year ago.

As a German atheist, I find the idea of salvation by the cross to be one of the most pervasive lies and/or misunderstandings in the history of modern man. To anti-Semitism and Holocaust deniers I react no less sensitively than Abe Foxman. But what has Mel Gibson's disturbing father got do with The Passion? Or, for that matter, must we see this film through the mind of Mel Gibson's rather orthodox Catholicism that includes the rejection of Vatican II, one of the few things that I find positive about the Catholic Church?

I came away with a very different picture of The Passion than Hitchens, Krauthammer, Sullivan, and Co. The depiction of the Passion has some inherent difficulties, Gibson or not, and even the Gospel itself can be a divisive issue. But is this really what springs to mind when seeing the film? I find it hard to believe that people would leave the theater any more anti-Semitic than they had or had not been before seeing this film. As Christopher Hitchens points out in his article ("Schlock, Yes; Awe, No; Fascism, Probably,” in Slate), an inscription of the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver that read “Jews Killed the Lord Jesus” was posted before the movie even opened. Such despicable attitudes are present in the murky waters of some unfortunate people's brains, but The Passion does not cause them. And if the film were to elicit such a public show of disgrace, the reaction of the public should rein it in. We need not attribute the word fascism to the film to that end.

The polarizing figure of Gibson aside, the fact that Gibson would not allow critics to see the film ahead of its opening provoked the ire of many journalists, who were consequently hurt in their professional egos (The Nation's Stuart Klawans all but admits so much). Beyond that, is the actual film anti-Semitic? I don't think it is. While it would be disingenuous and stupid to claim that the film can't be anti-Semitic because Jesus and his followers were Jews themselves, the film does not visibly go out of its way to portray Jews per se as particularly malevolent. There are characters who are portrayed with all of Hollywood's skills available as evil and vengeful and many of them happen to be Jews, but that alone does not make this picture anti-Semitic.

In “Mel Gibson's blood libel” (in the Washington Post) Charles Krauthammer is right to point out the history of interpretation of the Passion, that it is one including utmost horror and thus cannot be considered in splendid isolation. For many Christians and non-Christians, Vatican II is the “disclaimer” of sorts for the story of the Passion. Mel Gibson's rejection of Vatican II, for whatever reason (there might be other ones involved than his desire to attribute the death of Jesus to the Jews for all eternity) is unfortunate in this light, but The Passion itself does not come with a disclaimer one way or the other. The context we give the Passion is that which we provide ourselves. That is the reason why it is important to know history and the Bible well when seeing this movie. Everyone who doesn't will fail to understand the film altogether.

Gibson's “singular act of interreligious aggression” can't be whitewashed with the “Leni Riefenstahl defense” (all Krauthammer) of having had other intensions? Oh, boy… the crux is that Krauthammer thinks it is impossible to have an artistic vision and not impose one's personal interpretation at the same time. This is a problem that many, Christian and non-Christian, viewers or non-viewers alike have mentioned to me: “We don't want Mel Gibson's version of the Passion stuck in our head.” To the degree that the four Gospels, told as one, lend themselves to interpretation, one of the single most positive surprises to me was the fact that in telling the story Gibson succeeds remarkably in making it a very matter-of-fact account of the 14 stations. Why ten minutes of sadistic flogging and not “zero, as in Luke?” I suppose that's the focus on the suffering, more of which later. But it is hardly to drill home the point about what bastards the Jews were—or the Romans, who do all the flogging.

Retelling or Propaganda?

When I mentioned that I found the film rather unremarkable, I meant mostly that the story of the Passion is not particularly new to me, as a European. From Johann Sebastian Bach's Passions to Grünewald's altarpiece (see ionarts posts on February 29 and March 5) to the sullied history of the Oberammergau Passion play to more harmless little Passion plays and school, I have been surrounded with this story often enough. I don't know the exact effects of the Oberammergau staging and its contribution to the Holocaust, but growing up long after World War II, the last thing I took away from these depictions was a particular hatred for anyone. Indeed, Gibson's account, save for the graphic nature of it, corresponded surprisingly well with the naively benign picture I had about the Passion from childhood on. German though I am, I would object to the claim that I must have grown up amidst rabid Jew-haters and that I was nurtured with propaganda fostering “interreligious aggression.”

Mel Gibson either did not try or did not succeed in making this his story; it is the story of Christ. Whatever his personal beliefs, untimely as they are to me, I believe he tried to make a depiction of the Passion as faithfully as he could, being a religious man, and as good a movie as he could, being an artist. That's what he does. Movies. Tricky as this may be, I believe he succeeded. This is not The Lord of the Rings or Erin Brockovich, where a director imposes his view of a book or story onto a subsequent film. It is not Moses in The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. This is a director making moving pictures out of a moving account of Jesus with the means that he knows from his trade.

But Chris Lehmann, writing for The Revealer ("Picturing the Passion"), makes the point that it is precisely not “a faithful, realistic account of the [...] the greatest story ever told, [but] Gibson's loudest command ever barked.” Am I one of the unthinking victims of his insidious Leni Riefenstahl propaganda flick? Sorry, I don't get it. Am I naturally inoculated against the message or too ignorant to discern it? Sure, there were a few moments in which I thought that Gibson the director had taken over from Gibson the “faithful” storyteller. Especially when the cloth, which Veronica holds after cleaning Jesus' face with it, looks suspiciously like the Holy Shroud of Turin. Or when Jesus gets thrown over the cliff only to dangle in front of Judas. Where was that again in the Bible? But neither that nor the italicized Latin nor all the beautiful tall people nor Satan's four cameos really justify the claim that the film is trying to “bend it” or “stretch it” whenever “it comes to the Jews” (Krauthammer) or to whatever else. The link that Krauthammer draws between Satan and the Jews among which he (Satan, not Krauthammer) moves in two of those four appearances—concluding cynically with “a perfect match: Satan's own people"—is pugnacious, or at least silly.

All Suffering, No Love?

Another frightfully ill-perceived criticism comes up surprisingly often. Somehow, the claim is that The Passion of the Christ is too much about the suffering and not enough about “the message” of Christ. Kenneth Turan from the LA Times complains that the film “fosters a one-dimensional view of Jesus, reducing his entire life and world-transforming teachings to his sufferings, to the notion that he was exclusively someone who was willing to absorb unspeakable punishment for our sins.” Smarty-pants David Denby from The New Yorker, too, finds that “Gibson is so thoroughly fixated on the scourging and crushing of Christ, and so meagerly involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in danger of altering Jesus' message of love into one of hate.”

Now I am only a non-believer, but isn't the suffering precisely the point? The quibble that there is no focus on the message and doing of Christ—say, a juicy quote from the Sermon on the Mount—but only this assemblage of carnage misses the point spectacularly! If you are looking for Hippie-Jesus with a smile and a bumper-sticker quality quote on love and peace on his lips you might want to try your corner bookstore's esoteric section. Don't look for it in Catholic thought, though—and don't look for it in this film.

The very message of Jesus was his suffering, was his sacrifice. Every doing and saying of Jesus makes sense only in light of his crucifixion, his willingness to die for our sins. It may sound pretty stupid to Krauthammer and me, but that's the belief. And if and only if you understand that can you look beyond the film as Gibson's “personal obsessions” and “a sickening death trip” (Denby). Focusing on a part and making it the whole is, perhaps singularly, appropriate when it comes to the Passion. That's why people unfamiliar with the story should not see this movie, and by “not unfamiliar” I mean “very familiar"! Not because there is something to hide from anyone else, but simply because it won't make sense otherwise. It would then indeed be nothing but an oddly spiritual gore-fest. But if understood rightly, it ought to be the feel-good movie of the year.

Amen.

Unfortunately, the apparent inappropriateness of expressing strong, “outdated,” and politically incorrect faith in public rubs many people the wrong way. Take that, Mel Gibson's personality, the hurt ego of journalists, the hype, and the incredible ignorance that many reviewers brought to the subject matter and apparently you get the loathing response that is still being poured out over this venture. I don't suppose that the criticism is any more anti-Catholic than the film is anti-Semitic, but it's surprising and pathetic in both of the meanings of the word.

All the more interesting, it becomes what professional movie critics have to say. Calm and a no-nonsense approach come from Roger Ebert ("Ebert & Roeper") and Richard Roeper (Chicago Sun-Times): “It's the only religious film I've seen, with the exception of The Gospel According to Matthew by Pasolini, that really seems to deal directly with what happened instead of with [...] cleaned-up, postcard versions of it,” says the former. The latter concludes, “Mel Gibson's [Passion] does not preach that anyone—past, present, and future—must bear sole responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ. [...] It is not a work of hate. It is a powerful and important film, helmed by someone with a sincere heart and a warrior's sense of justice. It is [...] ultimately a message of redemption and hope.”

Ultimately, it is not a film for a thumbs up or down; I don't give the Bible a thumbs up or down. But many of the overblown attacks on this film deserve a big thumbs down. Try again: this time perhaps with more love, less hate.

That's Good Reading: Fully Credited Links

To prove that we at Ionarts are not solely enraptured with seeing our own words in print, here is a selection of interesting things to check out, out there in Blogistan (a humorous alternative to the less sonorous "blogosphere," brought to my attention by Byzantium's Shores):

• I had already learned that Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes shares my interest in hockey (Tyler is a Caps fan, which has got to hurt right now), and now it turns out that Terry Teachout's blogging partner at About Last Night, Our Girl in Chicago, has an interest in that noble sport, too. On March 10, she had some interesting comments to divert us from the negative attention the game received following the terrible injury inflicted on Colorado's Steve Moore by Todd Bertuzzi of the Vancouver Canucks. (Bertuzzi has a long record of nasty checks and other goonery, and we are not surprised that he has finally put someone in the hospital, only that it took this long.) We also thank OGIC for directing us to Eric McErlain's hockey blog, Off Wing Opinion. For the record, the Ionarts film critic and I grew up together in the great state of Michigan and are ardent supporters of the Detroit Red Wings. Are there other bloggers out there who like hockey, too? (I already know that Byzantium's Shores does not.)
• I had to laugh at Nathalie Chicha's Not Nice Observation, No. 3892 at Cup of Chicha. Liv Tyler is a beautiful woman, and if her Oscar appearance and performance in the Lord of the Rings movies do not make you realize that, then you have only to view Stealing Beauty to see that I am right about this. She has an awkwardness about her that, although it can be embarrassing (as in the still on display at Cup of Chicha), is ultimately appealing.
• I believe that you can never see too many images of France, so it's good to learn that photoblogger David F. Gallagher of lightningfield.com has decamped to Paris for a while. (This link comes to us by way of Greg Allen at greg.org.) David informs us that the RATP, the authority that administers the Métro system in Paris, has recently offered 47 blank billboards in its stations for passengers to write on. These spaces will be available for free expression through March 18.
• Heather Mathews Mungen (a thousand apologies to Heather for this mistake), whose reporting on the arts in Germany at hem|mungen is regular reading, had some interesting commentary on the exhibit of works from the Museum of Modern Art in Berlin, on February 14, February 16, February 23, and February 25. You can also see reviews from Deutsche Welle (February 17) and an article (Le MoMA divise Berlin, March 7) by Odile Benyahia-Kouider in Libération. This sort of exhibit, a large selection of a foreign museum's important collection brought to your city, is remarkable and, I would guess, rare. Anyone out there have a preference for a museum they would like to have come to, say, Washington, D.C.?

The Triplets of Belleville

In your desperate attempt to see all those Oscar-nominated films you missed, you should definitely go to see the French animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville (in its English version, The Triplets of Belleville). Or, if you are like me and the Academy's pronouncements seem ludricrously irrelevant, you should see it because this movie was easily more worthy of the Best Animated Feature than Finding Nemo (allegedly a ripoff of a French comic book: see posts on December 21 and March 14), which won that award. Big surprise. The film made $340 million, so we should also crown it with a gold statue. Hooray. If you need another reason to see it, go because there may be the added bonus of seeing the short film envisioned by Salvador Dalí for Disney, Destino (see my review on February 26). Of course, here the Oscars got it right . . . oh, wait, no, it did not win Best Animated Short Film either. What a show: the pageantry, the intrigue, the glamor, the recognition of milestones in cinematic history. Yawn. *Click*

The director of Triplets, Sylvain Chomet, was born in 1963 in Maisons-Laffitte, a small town in the suburban region of Paris that is in part the inspiration for the dreary home of the movie's two main characters. He went to arts school and did advanced studies in animation at a new school in Angoulême. The first work on what eventually became this movie began ten years ago, and he had a difficult time getting it funded and produced. The story is charmingly strange, and the style of animation is hard to describe, but it is definitely image-based and relies on very little dialogue. In an interview published on the French Web site linked above, Chomet describes his animation style the following way (my translation):

It is based on mime and the interplay of characters. I am more influenced by real scenes than by animation. By Tati's films, yes, but also those of all the masters of silent movies: Chaplin, Keaton. The sense of timing is also very important. It's the reason why I love Louis De Funès so much and the whole English comic school, as in series like Absolutely Fabulous or Black Adder with Rowan Atkinson. I also love the animated work of Richard Williams and Tex Avery. In comic books, Goossens is also a master of timing.

The movie is dedicated to Jacques Tati, and at one point, I glimpsed a movie poster for Tati's movie Les Vacances de M. Hulot, on the wall of the triplets' apartment. The movie's main characters are an old grandmother, short and triangular in shape and with one leg longer than the other, and her depressed grandson. The latter is shown first as a solitary, chubby child who is always a little blue. He finds his reason for living in cycling, and his grandmother helps him train for, what else, the Tour de France. Her tall, narrow house is located in an imaginary suburb of Paris: at the opening of the film, it seems like the countryside, but then a new Métro line is put in on an elevated railway that goes so close to the house that it has to be bent backwards to accommodate it. (In the image from the movie shown at right, the far-off image of the Eiffel Tower is lost behind a construction crane, industrial smokestacks, and ominous passenger jets above.) As she helps him train, they ride through the streets near the house, dangerously close to a bus whose destination is marked as the imaginary "Mairie du XXIe Arrondissement" (modern Paris has only 20 arrondissements, each with its own mairie, or town hall). The interviewer asked why the interiors of the film were "modest but warm, a picture of ordinary France in the 50s and 60s," and why Parisian scenes are so important in the film. Chomet answered as follows:

Because I came from a rather modest background, and not a fashionable one. I remember going to visit an old lady, the neighbor of one of my aunts, and finding a small apartment that smelled of floor polish, where each little object, even the smallest, was valued. I would be incapable of producing stories that take place in comfortable surroundings. Naturally I draw inspiration from what I have lived.

The grandson, Champion, rides in the Tour behind the leader who is identified as "Nanard," which was a nickname of the legendary cyclist Bernard Hinault (he was also called le blaireau, or the badger), who won five Tours de France (1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, and 1985). Like most Tour winners, Hinault was a phenomenal climber who could probably have won the Tour again, except that he was challenged in 1986 by another legend of la grande boucle, American Greg Lemond. In the movie, Champion abandons the race, along with two other cyclists, on an unidentified mountain that is, I think, the infamous Mont-Ventoux. Although Hinault never raced on that mountain, it has ruined many cyclists, the worst case being Englishman Tom Simpson, who died there in 1967. It is identifiable in the movie by the windswept desert seen on the peak, where the powerful Mistral wind makes the growth of vegetation impossible. (The mystery of that landscape has made the Ventoux a revered site for centuries. In the 14th century, the poet Petrarch made the ascent and wrote about it in a famous letter.)

==>> Continue reading this review.