'Don't Touch the Axe'

The Andalucian coast, and Paris in the 1820s. Based on Balzac's novella, published first as 'Ne touchez pas la hache' later 'La Duchesse de Langeais', 'Don't Touch the Axe' was previously filmed by other directors in 1942 and 1995. Guillaume Depardieu is Armand de Montriveau a withdrawn French General, a war hero with a gammy leg, honored in society despite his taciturn manner. Jeanne Balibar plays Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, amusing herself through the balls and receptions of Parisian society in the absence of the Duke. Through her lorgnettes she observes Montriveau and determines to take him aside and have him tell her tales of his suffering in the desert and toy with him in the process. The general for his part falls in love with her and embarks upon a lengthy campaign of seduction that veers between propriety and near-violence.

The pair interact in a choreography of visiting cards accepted or sent away, letters read or unread, meetings punctuated by the ring of bells for servants. Always there is the threat, for Antoinette, of scandal, and the sense above it all of a complicated game in which the rules are malleable by reference to a person's gender, status, rank. For all that the duchess and the general conceive a passion for each other, in their own ways, never do they appear to achieve that happiness and contentment glimpsed momentarily between the butler and the maid, below stairs, between bells.

Both leads deliver deliberately remote performances, Depardieu Jnr inscrutable beneath his brooding brow, Balibar (best known outside France for another Rivette film, 'Va savoir') working from a limited palette of pouts and side-to-side eye swivellings. But given the social context, who knows if such characters might not naturally occur, their expressions considered realistic?

'Don't Touch the Axe' ('Ne touchez pas la hache') ['The Duchess of Langeais' in some anglophone distributions] Dir: Jacques Rivette (2007).


Balzac's original is fairly typical of his output, enthusiastic description and digressions on society to the fore. An English translation of this novella can be found at Project Gutenberg.

'The Band's Visit'

Waiting for the 472 to Beit Hatikva


"Do you like Chet Baker?"

The Alexandrian Police ceremonial band finds itself stranded until morning in a small Israeli town which suffers remoteness and council estate architecture, without a connection onwards to their concert booking. Circumstances compel the band members to remain as guests and 'The Band's Visit' shows the encounter the band and some of the people in the town experience over the night of their stay. Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) is an ageing authoritarian and the band's conductor, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) a young Casanova type who plays violin but prefers the trumpet, and Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) is the dry-witted proprietress of the cafe who forms a kind of friendship with Tewfiq.

Khaled is taken to the best available entertainment for young people in the town, a roller disco where in a bladder-threateningly funny scene the visitor teaches his host how to approach girls, and they both conspicuously fail to roller skate. Dina takes Tewfiq to the equivalent for older people, a restaurant and supermarket, and later the park, much of the amenity of which is imaginary. Other members of the band have dinner with a local family and bond tentatively over jazz. There are visual jokes that resemble fragments of Tati, and plenty of humour in the dialogue, which mostly uses English as a lingua franca, with occasional discursions into Hebrew and Arabic to let hosts and guests communicate directly, aside from each other.

'The Band's Visit' never quite mentions the situation, the context - it's assumed that the viewer will know enough about this to hear all the resonances, feel some of the awkwardnesses for the characters. One of the band discreetly places his cap over the picture of a 1967 era tank hanging above his table in the cafe; Dina recalls a time when the streets in Israeli towns would clear as the population would watch the Friday afternoon Arab movie on television, though without elaborating on why this scheduling fell from popularity. Yet if we thought the two nations were thoroughly amicable neighbours the body of this film would be much the same, discords among hosts and band respectively, affinities and shared hopes and experiences discovered by the two groups together. There's something perfectly rueful and tender about Tewfiq and Dina's conversations. It's a film about small-town life, music, people who are different and the same.


"Arab Cultural Centre? There's no Arab Cultural Centre here. No Arab culture, no Hebrew culture, no culture at all. This is nowhere."


At the roller disco.

"Why the police need to play Um Kulthoum?""That is like asking why a man needs a soul."

The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret), Dir: Eran Kolirin (2007)http://www.thebandsvisit.com/

Bliznji

Somewhere around Amiens

Seen from above, maybe one or two storeys up and distant. An open window, sunlit, early or late as the light is very direct and tinted yellowish, in a warmer season than this. The face of an old man leaning into the frame created by the window, two-thirds profile, lightly bearded as if ordinarily he shaves. The pictures are very similar, they have been taken in sequence with a camera that is not fixed to a tripod, possibly with a burst function or manual repetition. With each successive photograph he is further into the frame, leaning forward towards something, or trying to rise. He bears an expression of discomfort or irritation. His eyes are blue and pink and watery. There are at least a dozen images in the series, which is run through several times, but nothing gives any clue as to why the pictures have been taken, of this subject, from a remote vantage point.

Then the girl in carriage 18, seat 52 goes back to watching action movies on her laptop, the glossy keyboard surround surfaces of which she strokes occasionally as if to remove perceived dust. I go back to my book and read the page twice over without the text sinking in because as guilty as I ought to feel for peeking out of the corner of my eye at the scenes on my neighbour's fold-down tray, I cannot stop thinking about the old man, and the person who took his photograph, from a distance, in sequence.

Paris, metro, sounds

A tube train, in motion, often gives a good aural impression of some kind of metal-beating workshop, or a particularly discordant performance by Einsturzende Neubaten. The Métro doesn't exactly a whisper, but the rubber tyres and so forth make it possible to talk, etc. So the passenger is more aware of sound.

Where in the Code Penal is it written that buskers and beggars must populate the Etoile-Nation line in greater numbers than all the others combined? Not frequenting jazz clubs etc, I'd never before been exposed to the noise of a double bass (plucked rather than scraped) at close range - it's impressive, you can almost feel the sound on your outer clothing. Must be a nuisance to get through the ticket gates, esp. if not paying the fare.

I need to understand sound better. I still don't understand the Doppler effect, or why clock tower chimes get carried by the wind and if it's a strong one from the west I can be waiting in bed for eight to strike for ten minutes before I realise it has been and gone. If two notes are put together, surely they're indivisible? But there are definitely two on the Métro door closing warning alarm, presumably to make it more distinctive, or simply more interesting to the ear. There must be something independently uneven in each. Reminiscent of a wind and string collaboration, and preferable to the usual bleeping.

Next station announcements are being introduced. Levallois-Gallieni has them, not sure about the rest. The station name is announced first on an ascending note as a question, then as a statement with decisive emphasis. Tentative, then confirmatory. Invitation, then welcome. As if to say: Anyone for St Maur? Well, here it is take it or leave it, St Maur! Or: Is this Parmentier approaching? Yes, Parmentier, of course!

Not a jarring voice either. Compare to the woman who calls out the station on our own Jubilee Line, in such an inappropriately celebratory way 'The next station is: Neasden!' clearly demonstrating that the person who recorded the message has never actually alighted at Neasden in their lives, or she would not sound so bizarrely pleased about it. Though Mme. Ligne 3 probably makes even Porte de Bagnolet sound inviting, rather in the manner that mermaids once called to mariners 'Not rocks, but pillows! Big fluffy cushions! And we're not all scaly below the navel, honest!'

The Seven Whores of the Messe

The xylophone truly is the instrument of madness, all music it makes is dressed as Napoleon

For a very long time metro tickets were turquoise. The streets of Paris were strewn with them, discarded after use. I have seen them in other cities, too, jettisoned from the wallets of Parisians abroad and visitors returned. Then not so long ago they became mauve. Now, with swift caprice, they have become white. With all this change it's no wonder that the celebration of incoherence that is Post-Modernism continues to be so popular among French intellectuals.

Beaujolais Nouveau isn't half as bad as it sounds, if pretty close to grape juice. Better for your kids than Ribena, that's for sure.

Later that night I dreamt of Hammersmith Bridge, in all its greenish glory, and woke in terror, as if I had looked on Hades itself. Odd, and a little unfair. What can it mean?

The recently opened John Lewis Food Hall is just a Waitrose, and not even in disguise. The Wholefoods on High Street Ken does not sell big tubs of chocolate raisins, so what's the point?

If you've ever listened to 'You and Yours'

Consider the terrible fate that befalls so many who earn their living via their own pen. For a minuscule few this is the occupation as imagined: wads of money coming from royalties from the last two volumes, film rights from the first of these, and the hefty advance from the publisher for the one that's in the chamber. The work in progress being addressed from a table on the balcony of a Tuscan villa (the ninety day rule, you understand), a few hours every morning, then into town to be lightly interviewed by a visiting journalist before an afternoon and evening of sensualism and rest. Here and there a little pestering from one's agent, but that itself is only a form of flattery, easily fended off, should put yourself about a bit more to increase sales she says, but really why bother?

For all the other poor sods, oblivion. The economising, the doing just about anything that pays and involves writing so that one can maintain truth over the creeping fiction (hah!) that writing is one's occupation. The hundred word book reviews that generate about as many pounds in payment and hours in reading the blasted thing in the first place. The side pieces for magazines including (oh dear god no) trade publications. Running creative writing classes for the county council in some wire-mesh-windowed community facility. Always with financial consideration at the back of the mind, closely associated with the act of writing itself, rendering it a necessity, a nuisance, a burden. Work.

Being at home all day. Unnaturally attuned to the rhythms of the place, the postman's delivery, central heating switching off, noise of kids in the street a reminder that it's already twenty to four and nothing has got done. The time that can be taken in making your own lunch. Then the temptation to have a nap in the grey afternoon of this close, airless prison.

That's just if residing on your own, if living with another there's an inevitable list of tasks - explicitly written or tacitly understood. And if this actually doesn't prevent you from getting on with the job, it's nevertheless far too good an excuse to pass up ('There, cohabitee, I've done the ironing and fixed the door on the bathroom cabinet, but at the expense of the novel that was to define the latter half of the 20th century, I hope you're satisfied').

That's before anyone's even put a pram in the hall. Or a television in the living room. And don't get me started on the internet, bloody hell...

The temptation to allow 'local author' status sets in, leading to a stifling kind of prominence within the district, among other people who are never to be found more than the capacity of a weak bladder's distance from their own front doors. This would be fine in W11, NW3, Park Slope, the Cinquieme, where the pavements are regularly shaken by the tread of literary titans, but in Chiswick?

Then the writer's worst enemy lurking on every High Street - Ryman's. Even in parts of the country where functional literacy is at or near zero and there are fewer books in the entire conurbation than there are sitting beside the Andrex on my toilet cistern lid, there will always be a branch of this bland stationery shop. And in each you'll find at least one aspiring writer shuffling about in comfortable clothing, searching for the pen, the A4 binder refill pad, the print cartridge, the package of high gsm paper, that will in some way stimulate a creativity that has been so compromised by demeaning ill-use and suffocated by crushing domesticity. Hopeless.

Villiers-le-Bel? We brought back a couple of bottles of that from Calais didn't we?

Foreign languages, lots of them, I love it. There's something about seeing all the letters jumbled around in wild new conjunctions, all the differences, similarities, apparent and misleading. Half the fun of being abroad is not having a clue what's going on, then thinking that you're picking it up, but finding you were a bit or a lot wrong...

Not calling other places by their right name, why do we do that? Sometimes it makes the place-name easier to pronounce, but often not. In English the decision seems as much based on what the French call it as anything. Cologne is hardly a word likely to naturally occur in our language, yet we use it rather than Köln. Perhaps it belonged to the French once? Ditto Bruges, which almost everyone lives there knows as Brugge, but we persist with the Francophonic. Perhaps it too belonged to the French once? They seem very careless with their cities.

While we're in that region, I should pause for a moment to congratulate Belgium on having given up on government. They've been without one for nearly six months now and provide an example to us all that one can manage without.

Switzerland is littered with them, places squarely in the German speaking region which we in England cannot imagine as anything other than of Gallic stock. Luzerne become Lucerne, Bern gets an extra e on the end, and we commit the unforced error of calling Basel 'Basle' and silencing the s - because we're au fait with that pronounciation, y'know - despite the French calling it Bâle. Why? Who are we trying to impress?

Worse is when they do it themselves. The amount of nonsense graffiti I've seen on Northern European bus shelters using English words - which far from being hip just look like those little self-help phrases one sees stuck to the desk partitions of the unfortunate.

See also football, that sport that looks back to its mother country, undeterred by the homeland's intermittent failure to qualify for international competitions. Consider FC København, so irretrieveably middle class that they make Brøndby look like Milwall. Several years ago I happened to be in the Trianglen district when they were at home to Lazio and it was deeply embarrassing: 'Everywhere we go / people wanna know / who we are / and were do we come from / we are København / we come from Copenhagen...' all in perfect Engelsk. Makes one nostalgic for the Vikings.

And Rotterdam's Feyenoord, who have made the Feijenoord post-industrial district in which they reside more phonetically available to the easily confused English tongue. "Zowel Stadion Feijenoord als Feyenoord Rotterdam met een lange ij geschreven werd. Pas in 1974 besloot de voetbalclub een y te gebruiken, de lange ij gaf namelijk problemen met de uitspraak in het buitenland." It's like having your food cut up for you as for an invalid.

The Dutch have a natural sensitivity to hearing their language mangled - see how relaxed they are about our mispronunciations of 'van Gogh' "Van Goff, fine! Van Go, if you like!" Anything but hear us attempt the blend of strangulated respiration and expectoration required to emit the correct sound. Not until one of the kunstenaar's descendants got assassinated did we get to hear the real sound of it. See also what we call The Hague, which to them is Den Haag because even they can't be bothered to enunciate 's Gravenhage.

And while I couldn't hope to be able to pronounce 'Scheveningen' with any hope of being understood by Nederlanders, for their part they'll never be able to say 'squirrel'.