PVLD CINE-MONDE Film Blog: Movies and Mirrors

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Happy Go Lucky!

Everyone seemed to enjoy the film Orchestra Seats by Danièle Thompson.  It’s a movie that puts a smile on my face and reminds me of what it’s like to be in love, to win and lose in love and life, and how to do it gracefully.

One of the audience members asked whether the shrine shown in a couple of the scenes in the movie was the one dedicated to Princess Diana. I had not noticed it until she mentioned it, and when she came back described it to me in more detail, I looked for it again on my DVD at home.

Et voilà! Our viewer was right on!  I have included a picture of the shrine above and a link to a couple of websites with some more background information on it.  From the Wikipedia site you can also follow links to the ‘pont d’Alma’ and the ‘8th arrondissement’ where the film was shot.

Thanks for noticing this detail.  It’s where the pianist and his wife finally reunite.

Anthony’s Home page

Wikipedia

In the next few posts, I hope to cull together some of the things we learned during the festival thanks to the rich and frank discussions we had with the viewers.  Please stop by and comment if you can, and share your own thoughts and experiences with us.

Thank you!

Crossing cultures is most definitely exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. There is always something new to learn, a faux pas to avoid, and a constant struggle to understand and evaluate how far we are willing to venture in our appreciation, tolerance and acceptance of the socio-linguistic and cultural elements often foreign and strange to us. Yet, the moment we successfully get through an interaction, the satisfaction we experience seems to make the effort worthwhile.

Words carry the weight of a society and of the individual, and since in and of themselves they are arbitrary symbols, it is always a challenging task to know what the same word might convey in different settings, especially when one is an outsider.

The films screened at the festival this year included representations of life in a variety of settings and thus a diverse range of language use: the French spoken in the elite-high-end sections of Paris, the French spoken in la banlieue parisienne, the French of times gone-by, the French spoken by students, the French average adults use in their daily lives, the French spoken in Belgium, as well as the languages connected to French and the French-speaking world owing to colonialism and modern immigration patterns including, as represented in the film picks, Albanian, Russian, Arabic, Romanian, and Romani.

Needless to say, not only did the different languages and registers convey a sense of place and time but also of the particular type of cultural group they represent. As viewers, we might relish as much in hearing the words “chéri”  as we might in “putain,” given that both words in their own particular way communicate a sense of the French world to us. It’s clear that “chéri” is much easier to understand and use than “putain.”  It’s more widely recognized, its connotation is usually positive, it belongs to a ’standard’ register, all of which make the word an easy bridge to cross. “Putain,” however, is a word that literally translates to “prostitute.” Most of us would not use such a word, but in contemporary France, this word can be used to mean any of the following: damn, ‘damn it !’, or the ‘F’ word.’  It also often expresses happiness, as in, “putain mais c’est trop cool!!!!” –”damn, this is too cool!!” or disgust, as in “putain c’est la galère!!!”– “damn, this is the pits!” Depending on who we are, we may or may not appreciate or employ this word.  This becomes especially challenging for second language speakers often unaware of the nuances of the same word.

A couple of our audience members were extremely offended by the language use in the film “Gadjo Dilo aka Crazy Stranger,” and let us know about it.  It included a liberal smattering of swear words used in the common parlance of the Roma people as well as French swear words commonly used by the French in informal settings.

We would like our patrons to know that we acknowledge and respect their reactions and comments.  We also hope that the this post is helpful in placing the film into a larger perspective. The library supports the rights of individuals to decide if they would like to watch a film, or a read a given text.  To this end, all the films shown are thoroughly reviewed and documented in the library’s film blog. We respect that an individual might find the language or themes of any given text or film offensive and also respect when they get up and leave the auditorium. At the same time, the library is committed to allowing and encouraging the expression of all material that is widely recognized as is the case of the film in question, Gadjo Dilo, celebrated and honored by the some of the world’s most prestigious film awards.

With the intent to continue the dialog and learning, I would like to share an excerpt from a memoir written by Dr. Alice Kaplan, the John M. Musser Professor of French at Yale University. It’s a great book, a great story, and it’s real.

Kaplan excerpt pp. 180-181

Finally, a comment on the title of this post, “Stinky Feet.”  One of the members of the audience who is from China shared with us several wonderful examples of the intricacies of language and how easy it is to be become offended by words in a language that we don’t know. I remember one of her examples. She asked whether anyone in the audience would ever think that calling someone (a child, I think) “stinky feet” could be one of the worst things you could say to that person?  I find that hard to believe but I take her word for it.  Thanks for that lesson, and send in more, please!