How do you say "Miss the point" in French?

Pardonnez-moi un moment while I get my rant on.

In the October 6 Los Angeles Times, special correspondent Kim Willsher wrote an article with the title: "France bans ketchup in cafeterias." Note the slight disclaimer in the subtitle: "Well, it's allowed with one side dish (guess which one). But putting it on veal or boeuf bourguignon is now interdit at schools nationwide."

Hilarious: those funny frogs and their stuck-up culinary ways, trying to forcefully wrench the world's most beloved dipping sauce from their children.

I'll come back to the hurtful cultural stereotypes this article employs as its hook. Let's first discuss some plain bad journalism. The new policy was implemented on October 3, 2011 to improve the health of public school lunches after more than four years of expert nutrionist research. Here are the real highlights:

• A variety of 4-5 dishes must be served at both lunch and dinner
• At least one of theses dishes must be a vegetable-based side and one must include dairy products
• Fries (high in calories and sodium) can only be served once a week
• Water and bread must be freely available, but
• All sauces, including mayonnaise, vinaigrette and - yes - ketchup, are served in fixed portions directly on the student's plates and only when those sauces would be appropriate to the meal.

This policy will be enforced because schools have to document exactly what they are serving to students and report to the government. These records must be kept up to date for the previous three months.

This is a fantastic policy. France, who is simultaneously being a team-player in the European Union with this legislation, is doing hard scientific research and applying that data to better look after the health of its citizens. It's being responsible with both the content and enforcement of its legislation and shaping good eating habits in its youth. And yet, Kim Willsher decides to go with the "France Bans Ketchup!" angle?

A quick scan through Willsher's other articles for the LA Times demonstrates a competent journalist who specializes in news from Europe. The tone is even, the research is well-done and the writing is clear. So it's baffling to me how such a professional could succumb to such facile xenophobia. Let's put aside the poor translations of a few key words in the article. ("Canteen"? Really?) Maybe Willsher isn't a professional translator; but a the large proportion of articles about France, I will assume this person is at least competent in reading the language. Let's merely discuss the fact that it took me 10 minutes to Google the straight facts about this entire thing. To wit, after a digging through a "ketchup interdit" Google search, I found:

• "Moins de frites dans les cantines scolaires dès lundi" Decemeber 3, 2011. Nouvel Observateur's website.

And from that article, I made a simple search for "Journal officiel", then looked within that site for the October 2 publications. Egads, I had to cross-reference a pair of one-page publications to get the skinny on ketchup and its evil cohorts mayonnaise and vinaigrette. This kind of irresponsible journalism riles me to no end. It doesn't help, of course, they this article perpetuates anti-French stereotypes, but the fact is plain and simple KETCHUP IS NOT BANNED. Fact-check; sheesh.

However, what's more pernicious here is the xenophobia that allows such an article to be published. This isn't Willsher's fault alone. Maybe Willsher thought it would be a funny fluff-piece, maybe the editor did, too. But it sticks in my craw that this last line from the LA Times article is certainly meant to be a zinger: "Food is very important here," said Hazan of the parents federation, "and we can't have children eating any old thing."


That's not funny, that's a profound statement of cultural values. It's also plain common sense: we shouldn't have children eating "any old thing." We should look after their nutritional well-being. And in France, a country with a very rich culinary heritage, it's also a matter of national pride. But Willsher and the editor and probably several people who read the article all thought that it was hilarious. Because, you know, the French are narrow-minded and denigrate anything not in line with their simplistic world-view and maniacally seek to exclude foreign products and workers and tightly control their media and economy so that it wobbles on the brink of isolationism.


Oh wait...

Cold Burn

Welcome (Lioret, 2009)
There's something significant about the synopsis on the DVD jacket from Netflix for this film:

When authorities forbid young Kurdish refugee Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) from crossing the English Channel to reunite with this girlfriend, the 17-year old resolves to swim to his love - and finds an unlikely ally in the form of swim instructor Simon (Vincent Lindon). Facing an inevitable divorce from his wife (Audrey Dana), the middle-aged teahcer takes the resolute youth under his wing in this stirring, beautifully acted French film.

After watching this, I can hear my graduate adviser's voice in the back of my head: "What makes this movie French, anyway?" The question maybe a poor one, but its answers are illuminating. It's a poor question because it shouldn't really matter if this film is French or not. Indeed, in many ways, it's more than that. Take a look at the the nationalities and ethnicities involved in this production: a French film with and Kurdish protagonist headed for England. Nothing like this would ever be made by an American mainstream production company. In fact, I think it would be difficult for an independent filmmaker to do. This movie is an example of a growing new trend: transnational cinema. And Welcome wears is polycentric outlook and composition on its sleeve. The polyphony of languages alone used in the film is dizzying. Its very existence is already an socially and politically engaged statement: "We are not only French, or Kurds, or Europeans; firstly, we are all people. Humans, together."


And this movie is a slow, burning indictment of the horrible things we do to each other in the name of social order and economic stability. The synopsis above is vague about just who those forbidding "authorities" are, and the movie is pretty cagey about it, too. But the clues are present, dropped casually here and there: five seconds of a Nicolas Sarkozy press conference, the understated aggressiveness as of the Calais police barge into Simon's apartment, the purely-business attitude of a lead detective investigating Simon's involvement with those in "situation irrégulière." (No one can match the French in their use of euphemism; the term means "illegal immigrant," but literally translates into "those of unusual situation, those who are unregulated," and hence, unchecked, outlaws, dangerous.)

But this kind of understatement is precisely what makes this movie French. It takes part in a long line of films à thèse whose central focus is neither narrative twists nor fancy camerawork nor spectacular special effects, but using characters as manner of sociopolitical critique. Welcome is chock full of engaging people. There's self-assured Bilal, once a soccer star in his native land, now a desperate outsider with only a whiff of a plan. Marion, Simon's ex-wife, is tender, engaged, uncertain and defiant at turns. She wants to do what's right by the hundreds of immigrants flooding Calais, but she wants what's best for Simon, which means staying out of her humanitarian work. Simon is existentially lost, hunting desperately to... do what? He's never entirely sure. Win his ex-wife back? Give his life meaning through charity? Regain a sense of masculine bravado by defying the law? Just do the right thing? Their stories, as they weave together and apart, are filmed simply, in the most unassuming manner. Save for a few travelling shots and deliberate point-of-view takes, the camera is stable, at eye level, the narrator as invisible as possible. It reminds me of something Chabrol said about his 1984 Une affaire de femmes : "C'étaient des gens simples. Il fallait les filmer simplement." (These were simple people; they needed to be filmed simply.)

Welcome does take a while to get its feet under itself. It's twenty minutes into before we even see Simon, who eventually becomes the true protagonist, and it's a solid fifty minutes before I felt properly engrossed. But Lioret's work rewards patience, and attentiveness. Taking a card from Pierre Melville's deck, scenes often jump right to the heart of the important part; there is no exposition;  characters don't catch each other on what just happened. The film takes for granted that you were watching two minutes ago. I love this about French films, a quality that is so often missing in American ones.

Coupled with a clear, but never directly stated, agenda to indict the French crack down in illegal immigrants (including detention centers, police raid, tear-gassing French citizens and illegal search and seizure), this intelligence is what gives Welcome its cold burn: that slow, creeping, ironic sense of heat you get from swimming in cool water too long, from the Channel winds nipping at your exposed skin. It becomes sharp and hot, like the indignant rage you feel when a young man nearly accomplishes the nearly impossible, swimming alone across the Channel, only to drown 800 meters from shore, chased down by the coast guard.

IMDB | Movie Website | Interview with the director

Les Croix de bois

After a harrowing brush with death defending a cemetery - of all places - the staunch if fatalistic Sulphart composes a grim tune : "Oui, tu l'auras ta croix / Si ce n'est pas la Croix de Guerre / Ce sera la croix de bois." This moment encapusilizes Raymond Bernard's 1932 film about the Great War: the dire circumstances of les poilus and their attemps to come to terms with the absurdity of their experience. Song is an important part of the French soldiers' lives, which oscillate wildly between drunken merry-making (that are more desperate than jovial) and fatal, oppressive artillery barrages in the wastelands between the trenches.

For contemporary audiences, Les Croix de bois doesn't bring much of anything to new to our knowledge and understanding of either World War One or historical filmmaking in general. Works such as J'Accuse! (Gance, 1919), All Quiet on the Western Front (Mileston, 1930), Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, 2004) and Paths of Glory (Kubrik, 1957) are better known and take more innovative approaches to the unprecendented horrors of the Great War. Content-wise, Les Croix de bois provides what had already become fixtures of the era on-screen: the filth of trenches, the hyprocisy of the aristocratic officer corps, the out-moded insanity of tactics and the desperate oscillations of hope and despair amongst the troops. Neither is their much to say about Bernard's cinematography. Aside from some dramatic tracking shots and hand-held camerawork that lend battle scenes a sense of urgency, the superimposition special effects seem to be either a non-sequitir in this otherwise very realistic movie, or incompletely realized - especially in comparison to the earlier J'Accuse! or the poetic Un long dimanche de fiançailles.

Nonetheless, it is illuminating to consider Les Croix de bois in the historical context of its creation and original release. Firstly, in 1932, very few French films had dealt with the still-fresh trauma of the Great War, which had decimated nearly a quarter of the adult male population and laid waste to vast swaths of the northeastern countryside. Also during this time, class tensions were high in France, and Bernard's film anticipates the pro-proletariat attitudes of the Popular Front by focusing on the clearly working-class foot soldiers. An interesting note is the quasi-sympathetic depiction of the German soldiers (again, through song), which in early works had been thoroughly demonized. Again, all of is much better treated in other films, notably Renoir's Grande Illusion (1937).

Les Croix de bois does include some laudable elements, notably in its realistic reconstruction of life on the front and the focus on the trials and tribulations of the common poilu. The hand-held camera work and rapid tracking shots of the battle scenes were rare at the time and their visceral nature certainly influenced later cinematic treats of war. There are some moments of elegaic poetry: protagonsit Demachy's visit to a comrade's grave, his prayer to the Virgin Mary ("We just want to survive"), langquid establishing shots of the desloate no-mans-land. These are occasional but heart-wrenching moments. Additionally, the ending is remarkable, even for the French who are more accostumed to unhappying endings: tragically (and with excruciating slowness) killing your protagonist is a dramatic statement about war's absurdity.

However, the tone of this ending is part of what's not quite right with the film: the obvious switch from location shooting to a studio set, the almost risible pacing and the non-sequitir superimpostion soliders (both French and German!) marching to their graves, each with a literal cross to bear. It's not over the top, in fact, it's insufficient, especially when compared to the expressivity of Jean Renoir's fluid camerawork and striking characterization or Abel Gance's visual reworkings of 19th-century poetic tropes that have the dead marching not to their graves but back home. Thus, Les Croix de bois may have had a certain influence on later war films (one can see direct borrowings in Paths of Glory), it remains a work of secondary importance.