(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

Posted in _thankyou_:

... for the colour of the evening sky, almost black in the east, deep blue over-head fading to turquoise and a shade of yellow in the west, with a brilliant half-moon. There's not enough colour in the world this time of the year...

Also, for the decadently delicious hot chocolate with rum and whipped cream we had after the movie.

Somehow these last few days I'm actually feeling grateful for those things, something I did have a problem with when I originally joined the community...



In other news, had a movie-breakfast with some people from work, we saw Die Kinder des Olymp (Les enfants du paradis), which I mostly found artistically fascinating and really rather liked (three hours and I didn't get bored, although I did freeze my toes off in a decidedly under-heated cinema) except towards the end when the whole the drama! the angst! aspect became a little too much for my taste. I'm aware you have to make allowances for the standards of the time with a movie sixty years old, but it's hard to entirely turn off modern sensibilities, and the whole entirely pointless suffering going on and on began to grate on my nerves after, say, two and a half hours. On one level the characters are convincing, but a snarky voice in my head still insisted on complaining about a plot where two people are in love each other, know they love each other, but for some reason still don't manage to get together and ruin four other lives in the process. It's hard to feel sympathy for Garance's suffering when to all appearances she never showed the slightest consideration for the impact of her actions and decisions on the people around her, and Baptiste, while interesting, is not exactly a likable person either. To me all the other characters - Nathalie, Frederic, Lacenaire and even a lot of the minor characters (Jericho, Avril...) were more interesting than the 'star-crossed lovers'; a movie where I enjoyed the small details more than the main plot. In a way it was too academically constructed, the fates of the four different men destroying or almost destroying their lives over the femme fatale...

[ETA: It's not as if I can't or don't appreciate art on an intellectual level, but with this movie I could have wish it breathed just a little more, had a little more life. One can see the thought that went into it, the different characters of the men, pantomime vs. acting, the overlapping between the relationships on stage and off-stage, &c., I presume there have been essays written about this movie, but with subjects like love and death I'd have liked to have been able to feel a little more immediate sympathy...]

And it suffers from what I dislike about French movies (though I'm aware this is really a gross generalisation), that it's vaguely depressing, vaguely angsty, but really inconclusive, and in the end, after everyone has appropriately suffered, everything and everyone is more or less where they started.

True to life, perhaps, but (to me) artistically unsatisfactory.