Tag Archives: films

Not my “Favourite”

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I was expecting farce, but I wasn’t expecting gratuitous sex and violence. The farce would have been fine, but it was despoiled by the constant intrusions of sex and violence, neither of which was portrayed with any real human reactions, like love or compassion.

“The Favourite” was meant to be a farce about the British monarchy, in a turbulent period, around 1700. It shows the pettiness, the hypocrisy, the double-dealing, the ineptitude of the monarchy. These are all appropriate themes for farce.

Sex and violence, however, are many things but are never funny. They cannot be made farce of. When I say sex, I don’t mean love, romance, or even infidelity. I mean the sex acts themselves that most people prefer to keep private. Violence? You know what I mean.

Crudities, obscenities, grotesqueries, these can be necessary elements if they’re related to the characters or the story. In that case, they deserve to be treated seriously. “The Favourite” gave us crudity and grotesquery in almost every scene, but for no apparent cinematic reason other than trying to make us laugh at things that are inherently unfunny. The producers have, I suppose, succeeded in creating a sensation and padding their box office receipts, though.

Oh, the picture will win lots of awards, despite being (in my opinion) mostly trash. But go see something better, infinitely better: go see “The Green Book”. That remarkable film had disturbing violence and even some sexual themes, but there wasn’t a single word or image that didn’t belong there and there was nothing to diminish the film’s impact, its mission. When the final credits came on I wanted to stay until the very last line. And savor.

I can’t say that about “The Favorite”: I wished I had walked out after the first thirty minutes.

“Thank heaven, for . . .”

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Her gaze wandered over Paris, over the sky from which the light drained a little earlier each day, with an impartial severity which possibly condemned nothing.

We saw the movie, recently, about her, and decided we wanted to read one of her books. We had never heard of Colette. But it turns out that we were very familiar with her work. Gigi is one of my wife’s favorite movies. And when I was a kid and began learning to play the cornet, the title song of Gigi was one of the songs in my head that I longed to hear coming out of the bell of my instrument.

So from the library we got Colette’s volume containing her short story Gigi and her short novella The Cat. Reading this mere sample of Colette’s work does not make us experts. It only makes us fans. Here are some thoughts from a fan:

Gigi is a charming story, the movie tracked it pretty closely, just adding a few scenes and characters and a perfect musical score. With refreshing realism and sweet undertone of satire, Colette wrote a story of what one publisher refers to as “the politics of love”. That interesting phrase seems to be a good label for the story, which I would probably have called a comedy of manners. But labels don’t do justice to the story, which is a very special sketch of a very unique romantic entanglement created by the moral ambiguity of early 20th Century Paris. I finished the story with the sudden realization that I had just read a fine piece by a writer of underestimated talent. The Cat did nothing to dispel that opinion and only cemented it.

The Cat gives new meaning to the term “cat lover”. It is a sweet portrayal of human weakness and shortcomings, including awkwardness, jealousy and mistrust between lovers. Colette painted the portrait with a keen sense of observation. And, assuming that the translation is true to the original*, she wrote in language of such rich color and impressive depth that I will keep some of her work in the little gallery in my head where I try to collect bits of artistry, bits of intelligence that may not be masterpieces to others but are priceless to me.

*My brother-in-law could tell me. He used to teach French.