March 2012
|
|
|
|
| The channel M6 gave us a good documentary on Jean Dujardin in the week where his film The Artist won 5 Oscars. I have a great admiration for this actor who started as a stand-up comic in little clubs, graduated to sketches on the telly (Un gars et une fille), made a name in cinema with a wonderfully silly comedy film (Brice de Nice), then the magnificent OSS117 films which you can find here. After which he showed that he could play serious roles in Un balcom sur la mer and Le bruit des glaçons. And finally The Artist. But never completely accepted by the snobby French establishment of le septième art. No matter - the Americans think he's great.... | Here is Le Pianiste, of Roman Polanski. An excellent film in itself, and of some interest linguistically to us. While it is true that dubbed English language material is often easier to follow than French, that is not always true of cult and art films, where the dubbing studios take great care to be faithful to the original. So here you have a Jewish family (with the excellent Frank Finlay and Maureen Lipman) discussing excitedly their reaction to the invasion of Poland by the Nazis... A very good exercise, I think | |
|
|
|
|
| Direct 8 gave us a whole evening of the supernatural at the weekend, under the title Faut-il y croire ? - a rhetorical question if ever there was one in the case of Mathilde and the Abby of Mortemer. But very entertaining, and the two ladies who try to persuade us of the existence of this flighty phantom offer a nice little test of the ear. | Burn after reading is an American black comedy starring, in this clip, John Malkovich. I won't try to to describe the plot which is complicated. But it is entertaining and on the linguistic level is fairly straightforward. - although the rapid pace and natural dialogue make it a little harder than much French dubbing of French films | |
|
|
|
|
| A really superb documentary from Arte on the eve of International Woman's Day Domination masculine. I have cobbled together four scenes to give the flavour of this piece. It starts with children speaking naively about male and female roles, which makes us laugh. But the tone hardens... at the very end | I used regularly to watch Les grands du rire, a Saturday afternoon programme on France 3, which offers comedy clips, and I have an enormous collection of these 3-5 minute gems, many of them still too difficult for me. So here is one from the vaults. Sandrine Alexei imitates Muriel Robin, who unravels a song by Axell Red. Sounds complicated, but it's very funny | |
|
|
|
|
| Garfield is deservedly famous, and the French dubbing artists have taken some trouble with the French version of this film. The result is fast-paced, funny and colloquial and makes for an excellent listening exercise at this level. | I'm not a great environmentalist, but the idea of bees disappearing from the earth because of the quantity of chemicals farmers use these days to increase their yields is not at all reassuring. Another nicely made documentary from France 5, and the voices of these country men - with the sound of the bees in the background - gives the ear something to work on | |
|
|
|
|
| Prêt-à-porter is an American film about the Paris fashion scene, here dubbed into French. It was screened by Arte Télévision, and it is fast, funny, and the dubbing actors do a great job. Not so easy to follow, obviously, but it is well worth the effort. | I very much enjoyed La maison Bonnadieu, a French film classic from 1951 starring Bernard Blier. The dialogue is crisp, intelligent and funny. A film well worth watching | |
|
|
||
|
France 3 transmitted a docu-fiction on the crash of
flight AF447 from Rio to Paris which disappeared in the middle of
the Atlantic. There are quite a few of these disaster
re-enactments on TV, so I recorded it, but didn't watch it. When I
came to edit out a clip I was stupefied. There had been much
discussion of this mystery on French TV, with everyone protecting
themselves, while blaming everyone else, as usual. But this
programme laid the blame squarely at the door of the second co-pilot
who - they said - pulled back on the stick, causing the plane
to stall and drop like a stone - and kept on pulling back on it
until it hit the water. It turns out that a writer,
J P Otelli, has released a book where he makes this
accusation, using the transcription of the conversation between the
three pilots as proof. |
||
|
|
|
|
| ArteTélévision returns lovingly from time to time to The Avengers, the cult British TV series of the 1960s. This was, they told us, the first episode to be shot in colour. The dubbing studio takes care with it - and that means they try to reproduce the rather poor sound quality of the original. And that - as always - tests the ear somewhat. | Here is a film which I recommend to those of you who love the sea. It was a Breton sea-captain friend of mine who told me about it, and I was bowled over - Crabe Tambour which you can read about here. The film evokes at once the waters of Newfoundland and the Indochina of the French Empire. Not easy to follow for us, but very rewarding. I've chosen a scene where the Chief Engineering Officer, played by Jacques Dufilho, tells a story of the Bigouden... | |
|
|
|
|
|
Bend it like Beckham is the sort of film that the British do well these days. It is at once a comedy about a young Indian girl who wants to be a professional footballer, and a celebration of two ancient cultures, the English and the Indian. I liked it very much - although sadly, the title proved impossible to translate into French. Here is Joue-la comme Beckham |
Nothing better illustrates the gulf between French and Anglo-Saxon societies than the difference between our justice systems. To see the accused interrupting the proceedings to speak when he feels like it, to see a progression of witnesses saying what a nice man he is, to see the judge chatting amicably with the jury as their chairman - all that leaves us perplexed. But at the end of it all, our two types of society produce the same type of judicial decisions - approximative. So here is a clip from a nice documentary on the experience of being a jury member in France | |
|
|
||
| Every so often Michel Drucker hosts a spectacular celebrating a French national organisation - the police, the army, etc. Here it was French astronauts, and they sent a very pretty singer called Shy'm aloft in a Boeing 707 to experience zero gravity. And full marks to this redoubtable young lady. She is young, she speaks quickly, and with the background noise this is not an easy listening exercise | ||
