Political Films (Joy)

The ever-adventurous Richard and Annie once again extended an invitation for me to join their weekend adventures. (I would be absolutely lost without these two; they have been beyond kind.) Annie got as far as, "Richard and I wanted to know if you want to join us Saturday in Tours--"

"Yes."

"--for the Festival Cinéma et Politique."

D'oh! Political films. Crap. Well, what the heck, it's in Tours... I'm there. And can I tell you, after weeks and weeks of feeling like a blockhead all the time, it was awesome to be in a place I knew well enough to confidently direct them. "Rue de Bordeaux? Oh yes, it's right this way, follow me." I was even able to take Richard to the street with all the booksellers, and he was in hog heaven.

We saw three movies; the first was "Young Soul Rebels," which was about these two fellas in east London in 1977 who have a pirate radio station that plays funk and soul. One of them looks gay but isn't, while the one who looks straight is gay. One is black and one is mixed race, and there's something about some dude who gets killed by another dude in a park where all the gays hook up, and the mixed guy gets blamed for it and the gay guy doesn't care because he's out with his white anarchist boyfriend. Right, not really sure what was going on there, and I think if you want to make a political film, you should probably try to focus on one or possibly two issues at a time, rather than tackling homophobia, racism, police corruption, poverty, youth unemployment, murder and prejudice against soul music all in 93 minutes. But hey, what do I know?

After the movie, we had lunch and then went to our second film of the day, a 95-minute acid trip called "Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment." It's a black-and-white film starring a young and lovely Vanessa Redgrave, but beyond that I have nothing positive to say. This movie was absolutely insane. Vanessa Redgrave is divorcing her husband, Morgan, because he's nuts. He's obsessed with gorillas and his brain constantly superimposes National Geographic-type films over every day interactions. The guy taking his ticket in the train station becomes a yawning hippopotamus, his mother-in-law becomes a peacock, etc. I think it was supposed to be a love story but I had trouble feeling sorry for poor jilted Morgan because, and I really can't emphasize this enough, dude was nuckin' futs.

Of the three we saw, I was most looking forward to the last one, cryptically entitled "Who Killed Maggie?" I was told it was a documentary, and I was all excited because as you might know, I am ridiculously fond of true-crime type shows, "48 Hours" and whatnot. So I was all ready to hear poor Maggie's tale and examine the evidence and so on.

Only it turns out the Maggie in question is...

Okay, not what I was expecting. And as you might be aware, Margaret Thatcher is still alive, ergo the "killing" referred to her political career. This isn't to say the documentary wasn't interesting-- it was-- just that it was unexpected. Richard and Annie, diehard Anglophiles, were cracking me up; they were actually pointing at the screen and identifying background characters. At one point Annie leaned over and whispered, "Look, that's Lord Baker!" in the same tone one would say, "Look, that's Bono!"

After the third film, we stayed for a mind-numbing scintillating debate on... I don't know, something British, I wasn't really listening. The guy moderating the debate spoke French but with this atrocious accent I couldn't place. Finally I leaned over and asked what kind of accent he had, and I was told he was English. Nuh-uh. I have heard a lot a lot of Brits speaking French, and none of them sound like they're channeling Bela Lugosi. Then he mentioned his family in Liverpool and the lightbulb came on: he sounded like the Beatles. Craziness.

We went to dinner at a Lebanese restaurant and the service was so bad all we could do was laugh. The waiter was just plain rude, and made it clear that we really got on his nerves with completely unreasonable demands like, "Can we have coffee and dessert at the same time?" He yelled at us for stacking our plates on the corner of the table because we were supposed to keep them for the next course; when he plunked down a dish of what amounted to silver-dollar hamburger patties, Annie asked if there were any accompanying vegetables or sauces and he said, "This is what you ordered," and walked off. At that point we didn't even try to behave anymore; it was great fun.

We took a walk by the cathedral on our way back to the car, then headed home. A long day, but a good one. Only now I've got to really buckle down and work tomorrow. Argh.