Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Settings: France

I've been having a bit of a Francophile moment since my recent trip to Paris (which I may or may not post about in more detail at a later date), so in an attempt to scratch that itch, here are some of my favourite books and films set in France.

Books

Paris by Julian Green
I bought this in Paris and read it on the train and it is just gloriously beautiful. Paris is a short collection of reflections about the city where Green lived for most of his life, and was first published in 1983. There are no characters (unless you count the city itself) and almost no dialogue, but it's completely entrancing. It's so easy to be roped in by Green because of his evident love for the city, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who has been to or would like to go to Paris.

Mistress of the Sun by Sandra Gulland
This one is the story of Louise de la Vallière, who was Louis XIV's mistress in the 17th century. I didn't know anything about this period at all, so reading about the court in Paris, the political scandals, and the building of Versailles was all really interesting. Around the halfway mark the characters started to grate on me a little (Louis is kind of an arsehole, Louise is kind of a drip), but the setting is still really interesting.

Pure by Andrew Miller
This book tells the story of Les Innocents Cemetry in Paris, which had to be closed down and exhumed in 1786 because of overuse. Again, this book was about a topic I wasn't familiar with (I think the exhuming of an overcrowded cemetery in the 18th century is probably obscure enough to justify that), so I found it really interesting to read about, and I liked reading the descriptions of Paris in that era. Also since this book is set just 3 years before the French Revolution it deals with a lot of interesting political subtext.

Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Perfume is set partly in Paris, and partly in various small towns in the South East of France in the 18th century. This is another one that provides an interesting snapshot of a historical setting without actually being about it. This novel follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born with a superhuman sense of smell who dedicates his life to creating the perfect scent. It's a pretty weird premise, but it's a really interesting read.

Films

Midnight in Paris
This film is shamefully the only Woody Allen movie I've ever seen, and I love it. It's got everything you could want - beautiful people, beautiful setting, interesting story...it's just great, and you get to see modern day Paris as well as the Paris of the 1920s with F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Amélie
I know it's probably a cliche, but this is one of my favourite films. Get lost, Zooey, Audrey Tatou is the only manic pixie dream girl for me. Amélie is essentially just a love story about a quirky, and slightly lonely girl who lives in Paris and works in a cafe in Montmartre. The setting is beautiful, the characters are all weird and delightful, it's just all round great, and a really memorable film.

Julie & Julia
Laugh all you want, I loved this film. Half of it is about Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams, a woman who starts a cooking blog, and the other half is about Julia Child's time in France where she first learnt to cook and started writing her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Marie Antoinette
A lot of people didn't like this film because it was very heavy on style and very light on plot, but I love it. To be honest, I think that criticism of it is missing the point somewhat. Personally I think that Coppola is trying to show a snapshot of the extravagant, frivolous way in which people saw (and still see) Marie Antoinette, and I think she does it very well. It's a beautiful movie, and the soundtrack is amazing.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Watch This Thing: Sita Sings The Blues

This film came out in 2008, but I had never heard of it until last month when I saw it reviewed in a favourite films of all time list, and was immediately intrigued. This film can broadly be divided into 3 parts, all told intermittently over the course of the entire film, each of which has a different style of storytelling and animation.

Part 1: The story of the Ramayana (an ancient Hindu epic which tells the story of Rama and the kidnapping of his wife Sita). This part of the story is told entirely through  the music of Annette Hanshaw - an American jazz singer from the 1920s.

Part 2: Three unnamed characters (represented by shadow puppets) discussing their own personal recollections of the story of the Ramayana.

Part 3: This part is set in present day America and tells the story of the breakdown of the marriage between the film's creator Nina Paley and her husband after he moves to India for work.

So, this film is pretty unorthodox, and that combined with the fact that it's centered around a story and a mythology most western audiences probably aren't familiar with, suggest that it might be kind of inaccessible or alienating, but it's so not. This film is straight up adorable and fantastic. Not to mention freaking impressive considering the entire thing was made by just one woman on her home computer, and it's more compelling and heartfelt than a lot of big budget animated films. Rodger Egbert described it perfectly: "I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord... To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle." And yes, I did rip this quote straight from Wikipedia, but the source is here.

All the different elements of this story just work so well together, even though at first they might seem like a strange combination. The shadow puppet section where the narrators discuss the details of the story give it the grounding and context the audience needs to not feel out of the loop and confused by the characters, the music (besides being amazing) gives the movie a more lighthearted tone - as well as making clear the themes of the movie (love and rejection), and the modern storyline shows us the universality of those themes. It's freaking perfect.

I probably could carry on gushing about this film for a lot longer, but I think I'll just leave it here by saying - WATCH IT! It's available on YouTube for free so you have no excuse not to.