Some in the French press have been having their usual field day at Cannes and some have gone so far as to rechristen it the Cannes fesses-tival, a suitable moniker for all the nearly bare bums on view!
One of the films at this year’s festival raised no cheers at all, the biopic about the late Princess Grace of Monaco, with Nicole Kidman as herself. It was so awful and so banal that some in the media have been overworking the idea of the audience having to go for treatment afterwards to have their toes uncurled! But another film,Deux Jours, Une Nuit, has received an entirely different reception. Marion Cotillard plays a factory worker who wants to save her dignity and her job when threatened with redundancy and by all accounts, she has played a scorcher with this role, so much so that many at the festival say she’s in the winning circle for the prize presentation this coming Saturday night.
In other film news, Dominique Strauss-Kahn says he is going to sue the director of the new film about him and his sex life, Welcome to New York.US director Abel Ferrara is alleged to have defamed DSK, as if he didn’t do a good enough job ruining his own reputation. He still has to face charges in France of providing prostitutes for sex parties, which he denies.
More trouble in the media, this time at two French national newspapers. The editor of Le Monde, Natalie Nougayrede is quitting, a year after her appointment as the first female editor of the paper. Staff had been protesting vehemently over her plans to do a makeover on the paper. At the left wing newspaper, Libération, staff are busy covering a civil war, their own, as battle rages between journalists and the owners over plans to downgrade and even dispense with the printed version of the paper, all the while using its name for a whole lot of new consumer facilities. The journalists’ slogan is simple and straightforward, “nous sommes un journal”. There’s also a big row going on over the dismissal of Anne Baldassari from her job as director of the Picasso museum in Paris. The project to renovate the museum is running three years late and the cost overrun is €22 million, a mere bagatelle in schemes of this kind. Incidentally, Claude Picasso, son of the great painter, is supporting her.
Also on the media, I must mention the dreadful state of Radio 4 on the BBC. Once, it used to be a very creative channel, with lots of programmes worth listening to each week. These days, its schedule is mainly absolute rubbish, so arid and lacking in creativity that it’s hardly worth listening to.
Back to the media in France. A comedian there, Nonitube, made a telling three minute video on YouTube. In one sequence, he’s dressed as a down and out. He collapses in the public street and is ignored by everyone. In the next sequence, he puts on a shirt and a tie, and collapses in the street, only to be surrounded by people wanting to help. So what’s new?
Two new interdictions in France are interesting. In Paris, the administrative tribunal has cancelled one of the permits given to the LMVH luxury goods group for their total overhaul of the La Samaritaine building, once one of the top department stores in Paris. Then comes news of an even more interesting interdiction, from the mairie in Béziers, in Hérault, which has just come out, forbidding people from hanging out their washing on balconies, windows or any building open to public view. I can see their point, but it still seems over the top. The temperature at this time of year is ideal for hanging clothes out to dry, very quickly, but trying to do the same thing indoors is much more troublesome. After all, who minds a few scanties hanging out to dry when you walking along the street?!
Meanwhile, news of yet another scandal. SNCF ordered €15 billions worth of trains, 2,000 new trains to be precise. The only trouble was that the train operating company, RFF, sent the wrong measurements to SNCF. The new trains will fit all the new railway stations built over the past 30 years, but not those built before then. So far,€50 million has been spent adjusting platforms, but there are still 1,000 to do!
Across in Switzerland, they’re rejoicing that April was the warmest April there since 1880. The world’s climate is certainly changing and not for the better, not only hotter, but also wetter, too, going by the current spate of floods in Bosnia and Serbia
And if you are thinking of flying anywhere soon, a couple of aviation stories could put you off. The other day, a flight from London to Florence had to make an emergency landing, when part of a wing fell off in midflight, while also the other day, a flight from Milan to Oslo also had to make an emergency landing because a passenger window cracked and fell out. I’ve also been reading about the first book to come out about the mystery disappearance of Malaysian flight MH 370. This book alleges that the plane was shot down by mistake during war game exercises by US and Thai fighter jets and that the recent search in the southern Indian ocean was nothing more than a coverup.
It’d all make you wonder about the strange circles that have just been discovered on the seabed of the Adriatic off the coast of Croatia.Marine biologists are so puzzled that they can offer no explanation as to who built them, why or when.
But at least in France, good progress is being made on one medical front. The government is currently preparing its fourth plan for dealing with the vast wave of dementia; rather amazingly, the UK government is only now preparing its first such plan. If you get ill and depend on the public health service, you’re still much better off in France than in the UK.
I was also very amused at the action in 27 lycées in Nantes at the end of last week, when boys were encouraged to leave their trousers at home and don skirts as part of a rather dubiously named “lift the skirt” anti-sexism campaign. It provoked widespread outrage on social media.
This week of course sees the European parliament elections and it’ll be interesting to see to what extent the predictions made about UKIP in the UK and the Front Nationale in France come to pass. Here in Ireland, all the polls are predicting a meltdown for the Irish Labour Party. Will it implode and disappear into oblivion? I noted the comment of Vincent Browne, distinguished columnist, in today’s Irish Times, who says that the whole governmental system in Ireland is basically dysfunctional. He ends up his piece by wondering whether the British made a big mistake in offering Ireland home rule 100 years ago.
But what people think of politicians in Ireland-the same as across the rest of Europe-was well summed up in the photo of a graffiti I saw the other day. Someone had written on a hot air hand dryer in a loo somewhere in Ireland: “press button for short speech by Enda Kenny”. He’s the taoiseach (prime minister).
Surprisingly, in France, people are now saying that there’s an amazing amount in common between Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far left leader, and Marine Le Pen, the far right leader. In other words, a plague on all politicians’ houses!
So it’s time for something a little more entertaining! There’s a an amusing shop in Paris called Au Bonheur du Jour, at 11 rue Chabanais, in the 2nd., not far from the Louvre in Paris. It’s been run since 1999 by a woman called Nicola Canet, who began her career on the stage in music hall. Now, she’s running this fabulous shop, which has all kinds of bits and pieces, fascinating artefacts from the glory days of the Parisian brothels, an era that ended in 1946,as well as vintage erotic photos and gay art. The shop is right across the street from where one of the leading brothels, the Chabanais, was located, which drew such regular customers as King Edward VII of Great Britain, an arch-fornicator is ever there was one. Nicole’s shop is open from Tuesdays to Saturdays,14h30 to 19h30.Currently,it’s staging an exhibition in its art gallery based on a new book showing rare images of Sicilian nudes, taken in the late 19th century and up to 1915.
In the meantime, Britain’s oldest escort is still going strong and she features in a Channel 4 documentary next week called My Granny the Escort, going out on May 29th. Sheila Vogel-Coupe is 85 years old and after her second husband died four years ago, she was lonely and wanted to earn some money. She says she loves sex and is totally uninhibited, besides enjoying the companionship of gentlemen. So despite losing some of her intestines in a operation not so long ago, she’s still doing a roaring trade, having romps with men as young as 20 and charging £250 an hour!
That seems a good cure for any recession. George Osborne, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, please note, as a way of boosting the economy without causing a housing bubble!