With the promise of Cannes looming in our near future and an upcoming audition for me for a film paying homage to French New Wave Cinema, James and I decided to have A French Day.
We listened to French language CDs in the car while I drove around to hang my posters for my class (finally ! )
He read a Cannes guide while I went into various businesses.
We stopped in a French cafe and had a conversation with a Frenchman while we ordered baguette lunch with cafe au lait
I sat and scored my sides with my accent guide book while he cooked French roast boeuf.
We cooed to our chien (that’s french for dog) in French accents.
And finally we culminated our French day with the Godard classic A Woman is a Woman (1961).
James loved it. I thought it was okay.
I felt like Angela and Emile spent an awfully long time talking in circles about wanting to have a baby or not and that it took a long time for anything to actually happen.
James thought it was a beautiful tribute to women – to their vulnerability and the virtue of that in a time when the sexual revolution and woman’s movement was encouraging woman to be tougher – and perhaps – more like men. When in fact – a woman is not a man, a woman is a woman! I’m not a film critic and have not read any literature on the film, but that made sense to me – and somehow made me like the film just a little bit more.
and I must admit, my accent did improve quite a bit after watching the film. As technically sound as I was coming across in my pronunciation today, James thought the accent was good but that I sounded an awful lot like Tom Waits when I was doing it. Not like a woman at all!
Fact is, French woman are softer than me. I don’t do many things delicately or softly. I am blunt, forceful, loud. Maybe at times, I am a bit like a man.
So, it took watching a whimsical, uninhibited French exotic dancer with Hepburn like style and no shame about her predicament to get the nuance of the accent and loose the forcefulness.
Adding a little bit of Anna Karina to the part took away the Waits and suddenly, I was French! – and very much a woman.
Voila!
Merci Godard!
