The Morning After the Weekend Before

I always thought that weekends were meant to be relaxing, leaving you refreshed and ready to face the new week with batteries fully recharged. I've started this week feeling completely exhausted, leaving me wondering if my mini French film festival had been such a good idea. Finding myself with an entire weekend to myself, rather than get outside and enjoy some Summer weather and some much needed exercise, I elected instead to spend from Friday evening to Sunday night watching subtitled films. Fuelled by a case of that cheap French supermarket beer and dry-roasted peanuts (not distinctively French, I know, but I like them, the alternative was buying a packet of Gauloises, except I don't smoke), I kicked off with Days of Glory, a terrific war movie about North African soldiers who fought for the Free French in World War Two, on Friday and concluded with In All Innocence, a contemporary tale of crime, lust and mid-life crises (which had fortuitously been showing on BBC2 in the early hours of Sunday morning and which I'd recorded), on Sunday.

In between these I managed to schedule Melville's masterful (and incredibly downbeat) Le Circle Rouge - another great crime drama - and the historical epic The Horseman on the Roof, (from which I learned that vigourous breast massage is apparently an effective treatment for cholera). I wasn't able to fit in another viewing of 36, a fairly recent policier with Gerard Diepardieu, or any of my Belmondo collection. Maybe next weekend. As you've probably gathered, I'm something of a fan of French film. It's refreshingly different from the Anglo-American product. It isn't just the language, it's the whole look and approach, good and bad aren't so clearly defined and the film's often refuse to take a clear moral stance, leaving the viewer to make up their own minds. However, the vague impression most people in this country have of French cinema is that it is either pretentious, or raunchy. Indeed, this was the reaction I got at work today, upon mentioning the fact that I'd spent the weekend watching French films - all knowing winks and innuendo. Upon mentioning that you actually had to wait right until the end of Horseman on the Roof for a decidedly non-erotic nude scene, I was simply confronted with more gurning and innuendo. And the morons I work with wonder why I try and avoid speaking to them...