Le Cochon d'Inde et L'aubergine, sacre bleu!
I have the only angle poise lamp in the world that refuses to be angled or poised. I arrange its sinews and tendons into a position that suits, i.e. one that lights what I am actually doing, and, like a nervous dog it shrinks immediately back into a cower, head down, lighting its base and only its base.
Once I have arranged it into position I have about 30 seconds to type or read as the light moves across my canvas and back to its preferred position. So here goes, I have 30 seconds to write this….
Why do I find French films so ridiculously sexy?
Even though pretty much nothing of any consequence happens during a French film, the level of sexual tension is maintained throughout at a height unattainable by an English or American flick. And that’s just in relation to a film called Le cochon d'Inde et l’aubergine which doesn’t even have any people in it.
I can always recognise a French film immediately, and not just because there are subtitles along the bottom of the screen and people speaking French.
The clarity of sound is always so sharp; I can hear every fleck of sputum being passed back and forth between the pouting, lust puffed lips of the 14 year old heroine as she passionately kisses the impossibly hideous, gargoyle-esque 50 year old hero. How she even gets between his enormous nose and Punchinello chin to taste the lips which only millisecond ago were wrapped around a fetid cigar and which conceal behind them a set of donkey’s teeth I will never know.
Is this how it is in France? Are all men like caricatures of themselves, with features 50% more pronounced? Does every girl have luminescent skin, so flawless and translucent that it looks like a single sheet of filo pastry stretched over a moquette of perfect bones? Is everyone constantly covered in a dewy mist of sweat which makes clothes cling like vertiginous rock climbers to nipples?
My Sunday afternoon was spent transfixed by a French rental from Blockbuster. I think I am the only person that rents things from their World Cinema section; “Do you have anything without a storyline, where most of the film is taken up watching a scruffily dressed and yet ridiculously sexy woman sans brassiere walk across bridges daydreaming about the hook nosed beast who will be seducing her in the dilapidated, flaky shuttered chateau that afternoon.?”
“Ah yes we have just had an influx of just that kind of film…”
‘The woman who longed for the man as she walked across a bridge’
‘The bridge and the woman and the man and his nose.’
‘The forlorn braless woman who got bonked by the ugly man, near a bridge.’
‘The woman who hated bras and who became aroused by bridges.’
It doesn’t matter though that nothing happens, because the sex scenes make up for it, in fact every scene is practically a sex scene, full of innuendo; The massively lipped girl brushes her teeth and farts and scratches her bum – sexy. The hideous man opens a cupboard door – sexy. The lilo-lipped girl delicately grasps a pubic hair that is stuck to the toilet seat and smells it – sexy. The bubonic plague ridden man watches a dog crap in the village square under the dappled light of a plane tree – sexy.
Music is quite noticeably absent from most scenes. I revel in the sounds we get to hear that are normally drenched by repetitive background (or rather foreground) scores that Hollywood movies insist on having.
I get to enjoy the creaking of the red leather heels that the ugly man bought for the nymph and insisted on putting on her feet achingly slowly. Then the sound of him slowly prizing them off her hot feet before de-robing her to the sound of her gasps and belches, all with no music.
That reminds me, do all men have a selection of sex music?
It dawned on me recently that a historical lover used to use just one CD in preparation for sexual events. For some time I didn’t know him well enough to say, “Oh god enough of the generic seduction CD, I would rather listen to an audio book of the entire Harry Potter series than that old chestnut!!!” In fact I got so used to that music that I could measure how far through ‘events’ we were just by what song we had got to on the album.
I think I cured him of that CD though the night he was in charge of the music selection at a New Years Eve dinner ( I knew him well enough by now) and I ‘accidentally on purpose’ (I love that phrase) announced to the room full of his friends that he had just put on his sex music for us to listen to over dinner. I just couldn’t go through the meal thinking, ‘so this is the starter of smoked salmon and baby peas in their pods and right about now he would be putting his tongue in my ear ‘ole whilst neatly folding up his trousers and placing them at the end of the bed.’
I digress, so, French films, yes. I highly recommend them.