Selected excerpts, clipped for concision but otherwise untampered with.
03.07.02 Mercredi: Il pleut.
Back at the self-service laverie around the corner; reading Hazlitt's On Reading Old Books while my clothes are spun around.
Second time at Bouillon Racine. I have the foies de volaille aux olives et taboule this time, precisely cooked, and 140 (+/-10) moules en bouillon de curry doux and frites - smaller, more slippery and lubricious, sweeter than the first time.
Le Quartier Latin, disconsolate and desolate art-house cinema off rue des Ecoles, is showing Bunuel's L'Ange Exterminateur. Contrary to baseless preconceptions, the seats are very comfortable, velvet-rope red plushness. But the walls are a lustrous blue with gold gilt; pair of cherubs apparelled in false burnish looking positively fiendish planted in the wings; large lotus-lights; simulacrum of Dutch/Flemish religious painting (Van der Weyden?), gaudily framed prints of august anonymous personages - the perplexing mise en scene of Tales from the Crypt. Something quite sinister is about to happen. There are a total of about seven patrons in the cinema. Sepulchral silence, not even the ambient hush of air-conditioning. Spectators to a stage which is uncannily appropriate to the film - florid accents and decor which bespeak facile glamour, mimicry, sham and semblance, cheap baubles with false glitter.
L'Ange is in Spanish with French sous-titres. It is a genuinely discomposing experience; to be made to feel a child, to grope through mechanically and cumbrously even the simplest and most perfunctory dialogue. Visually however the circumstances have all the comic, absurd deliberateness of a mime, actions and gesticulations elastically stretched and distended - wan women of delicate constitutions languishing and expiring, supplicants in hasty prayer, superstitious simpletons clutching colourful charms, people eating paper and plaster off the walls, "il n'y a plus du cafe?" intoned in a petulant whimper, desperates thronging to glean water from a water-pipe which bursts while they are trying to hack a path through from the inside; silly altercations, fraying composures, stunning circularity, the grotesquerie of self-incarceration, histrionic exasperation, a pretty predicament.
03.07.02 Mercredi: Il pleut.
Back at the self-service laverie around the corner; reading Hazlitt's On Reading Old Books while my clothes are spun around.
Second time at Bouillon Racine. I have the foies de volaille aux olives et taboule this time, precisely cooked, and 140 (+/-10) moules en bouillon de curry doux and frites - smaller, more slippery and lubricious, sweeter than the first time.
Le Quartier Latin, disconsolate and desolate art-house cinema off rue des Ecoles, is showing Bunuel's L'Ange Exterminateur. Contrary to baseless preconceptions, the seats are very comfortable, velvet-rope red plushness. But the walls are a lustrous blue with gold gilt; pair of cherubs apparelled in false burnish looking positively fiendish planted in the wings; large lotus-lights; simulacrum of Dutch/Flemish religious painting (Van der Weyden?), gaudily framed prints of august anonymous personages - the perplexing mise en scene of Tales from the Crypt. Something quite sinister is about to happen. There are a total of about seven patrons in the cinema. Sepulchral silence, not even the ambient hush of air-conditioning. Spectators to a stage which is uncannily appropriate to the film - florid accents and decor which bespeak facile glamour, mimicry, sham and semblance, cheap baubles with false glitter.
L'Ange is in Spanish with French sous-titres. It is a genuinely discomposing experience; to be made to feel a child, to grope through mechanically and cumbrously even the simplest and most perfunctory dialogue. Visually however the circumstances have all the comic, absurd deliberateness of a mime, actions and gesticulations elastically stretched and distended - wan women of delicate constitutions languishing and expiring, supplicants in hasty prayer, superstitious simpletons clutching colourful charms, people eating paper and plaster off the walls, "il n'y a plus du cafe?" intoned in a petulant whimper, desperates thronging to glean water from a water-pipe which bursts while they are trying to hack a path through from the inside; silly altercations, fraying composures, stunning circularity, the grotesquerie of self-incarceration, histrionic exasperation, a pretty predicament.
posted by D at 12:39
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