Un Village Francais; — first episode as Germans take over
My Brilliant Friend aka L’amica geniale, Elena (Lenu) Greco (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila, Raffaelle (LiL) Cerullo — principal heroines
Antony (Ralph Fiennes) and Cleopatra (Sophie Okonedo) — National Theater
Friends and readers,
During this earliest phase of living with pandemics (WFH for those who can), a new but probably temporary genre (as popular blogging goes) has emerged among those paid to do it: the column telling readers what good movies series, recent and long ago, are available for viewing on-line; sometimes for free (YouTube, PBS portals, National Theater from London), sometimes part of a subscription (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Acorn, BritBox). I do not pretend to compete. The accent is on new or very recent programming (I have not seen or read about even one Game of Thrones episodes) when older, mystery thriller, British costume drama, “classic” serials (though I am kept up, this will not be about Inspector Morse & progeny); cable channel star products aligned with fashionable seeming politically serious series (say The Plot Against America, West Wing). I am a novice at learning what precisely is among the cornucopia. I just learned of a YouTube presence of Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife, with a young Lindsay Duncan — who knew? I’m not trying for little known, and, at a minimum, such blogs will recommend six to eight titles.
But I am offering advice in the same spirit, slightly altered — and much fuller. What you should not miss, on offer because of the pandemic and reflecting our hard era. Not one made in the USofA, two cannot be watched without subtitles; and the third, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra comes with subtitles. Maybe I should have called this Subtitled Movies.
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The exemplary hero and heroine — doing their best, meaning well enough — the mayor, Dr Larcher and the workman’s wife, Marie Lorrain
I’m only half-way through the seven seasons of Un Village Francais. I am hooked. What can I say that will be adequate (and not go on for too long). The first episode of the first season begins with three children killed as the Nazis fly a plane over shooting everywhere everyone in sight, accompanied by implacable bullying of the citizenry by men in trucks armed. We are introduced to three or four family groups plus others, several professional offices, see the Germans. The ongoing story justifies to some extent collaboration. It does more than explain how this happened, but leads us to sympathize with those who succumb, and even actively do the Germans’ bidding in return for favors not just personal but for the village as a whole. There is some unfair treatment of the communists (as senselessly killing): The communists were the backbone of the resistance: they were often the backbone of many of the parties against fascism – -in Spain, the Republicans, in China, around the world. Each was more or less locally run.
One way to sneer at the resistance has been to deny it existed in France — Caroline Moorehead is among those to demonstrate not so in either Italy or France. In two of her books, she demonstrates they were careful, cautious, respectful of one another’s lives – or they could hardly have survived though thousands were murdered. Importantly these many hours of believable sincerely imagined tough lives, wih their intermittent pleasures, griefs, warns us what fascists are and if they ever gain complete control in the US what we are to expect. 90,000 deaths and still counting, a collapsed economy with a stubborn refusal to help 85% of Americans for real is just a start; a laying on of the groundwork as the rule of law is savaged and the many agencies of the gov’t run by corrupt sycophants, made to rot from within. We see this in quiet enforced business practices that have the effect of starving and stealing all resources from the French to send to German privileged. Get rid of the weak, exploit and enslave those somewhat stronger, kill imprison the uncooperative.
So much of the power of fascists stems from those of decent beliefs for the real good of a public believing the people you are dealing with will operate decently, from at least roughly the same moral norms. It was extraordinarily creepy and awful —- I felt it in my body —as the mayor and police chief, etc, think they can turn the French thief over to the French authorities, and he will be treated justly, then are betrayed. There is nothing to do as the villager, who deserved a slap on the wrist, is turned over to the Nazis for what we know will be a horrible fate -— again and again, you feel the vulnerability of his body and the bodies of the men who unwittingly allowed this to happen, how they turn away, can’t watch, feel so utterly helpless and bad. Torture in front of us by burning people with cigarettes during interrogations as a first step.
Step-by-step is the process. (As we in the US are experiencing under Trump and his vicious Republican regime.) You understand, too, why the mill owner, simply seeing the immediate great benefits, makes the creepy deal with the Nazi commander to supply the wood planks to him. You know it will end badly, but you also realize that the French collaborator is not evil, just doing what seems to make sense at the time. Women now have to be careful who they have sex with — you are then identified as of that party. Interesting how the people fool themselves. Each person thinks individually oh I’ll just do this or that and I’ll survive. Schwartz switches to concrete when a new German commander has a new crony he wants to do deals for wood with. Contracts are worthless where law and justice don’t exist. The Jewish man thinks he will be alive when the war is done, and that he can take what’s left of his business back then so he does a deal too.
Schwartz
Mr Schwartz is a fascinating one: he is driven to murder a man who was trying to blackmail him into betraying the Jewish man who was lending him the money to transform his business and his wife — he is central, his well-meaning capable educated authority has led to him being a collaborator. His brother is now being pressured to move up from resisting by handing out pamphlets to killing in reciprocation, except the Nazi will kill as many hostages as they feel like for every murder the French commit. Lucienne, the schoolteacher now pregnant by the Nazi officer. Marie, a peasant’s wife who evolves into independence because she is gifted with strong intelligence, Henri De Kervern is the bearded policeman who becomes involved in the resistance.
For the most part there are no black and white villains or heroes/heroines in this drama. Everyone has to deal with complicated choices. Which I think is true to life. No one can say what they would or would not do given extreme circumstances. What I really also like about the series is how the characters evolve in ways you would not expect. We are in the middle of series three and could not have foreseen many of the developments. One of my favorite characters has been Gustave, the young son of the communist Marcel Larcher (brother to the mayor).
Schoolteacher, Lucienne
One of the many stories of private life: Lucienne is now pregnant by the German (Nazi of course) soldier. At first he has given her the cold shoulder. Despite her religiosity (and we see her praying repeatedly by the bed) and going to a priest to confess her sin (fornication apparently). Each man has a reason beyond himself why this is unacceptable. Priest: we will just about excommunicate you. You are a pariah if you do this. Lucienne leaves the church, having determined for own sake (and probably that of any baby caught up in this horror) to get an abortion.
What’s remarkable is again it’s the men who stop her. Reluctantly, but determinedly Marie visits Lucienne to see why she’s upset, suspecting all the while Lucienne is pregnant. Marie has self-aborted but takes her to a Jewish midwife, and they are in the midst of their operation, just about to start and De Kervern stops them. He says it’s against the law, he’ll get in trouble and he’s about to throw Hortense out. So they stop. Lucienne goes home and tries to self-abort and ends up bleeding profusely in the school; Mr Bedier (in love with her) rushes her to Dr Larcher who saves her life but refuses her an abortion. It’s not safe; just think of how much joy and meaning a baby wil give you. &c&c. Anyway he won’t. Then he bothers Mr Bedier who he thinks the father to care for her. Bedier is willing — this gives him power and purchase over her, but he is also a good man. The Nazi soldier comes back with all these offers of later loyalty. He is in love with her and wants her to have his baby. They are thwarted by the spiteful Mrs Schwartz who loathes Lucienne for not choosing her cake in a yearly cake-baking money-raising contest.
The story brings out how the women would all help but the men have the power and all stop her. The girl herself casts aside her religion (another force controlling her) and would risk her life to abort this burden and trouble – she will be despised by many for having a child out of wedlock, it will be despised. Not everything that happens in this series is the result of this particular war …
For commentary (analysis, evaluation on Seasons 3-4 click here).
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Across Lila’s kitchen table
My Brilliant Friend is one of these mis-named series from a cycle of books where the title of the first book becomes the title of the whole series. My Brilliant Friend is the title of the first volume and was the source of the first film adaptation series; the 4 novels are called The Neapolitan Quartet (they are mostly set in Naples); this season, the second, ought more accurately to be called The Story of a New Name as it is an adaptation of the 2nd novel, with this name. Lara Zuram in the Rolling Stone offers one of the best general assessments and interpretations of this second season I’ve come across. unfortunately this is not many: in Italian, Italian in feel, culture, places, on HBO, as one of the best TV films this year, and as a deeply woman-centered exploration, the 8 episodes are not getting the attention they deserve.
Here first is my review-essay of the second and third (Those Who Leave and Those who Stay) books. It is Lenu who by the end of the second series is being enabled literally to leave Naples: by going to college in Pisa, she has met and is about to marry an upper class young man who is himself becoming a professor, and through his mother found a publisher for her autobiographical novel (based on a story Lila wrote in their shared childhood), and by the third novel is living out her life among the intelligensia of Northern Italy, in Turin and Rome to be exact. Lila is said never to have left Naples and its environs (Ischia) ever.
Now to the second season for the second book: From the fourth episode: The Kiss
A viscerally felt experience of the beach at Ischia with Pinu (married to Lila’s brother, Lila is married to Pinu’s brother)
I’ve not seen or felt anything like this in a long time. It’s not just that all the actors and actresses project real feelings fully that we can enter into, but the whole ambience of the situations. Thes= prologues often focus on characters other than Lenu or Lila so in this way that part of the novels is brought into play. Or we see an incidents or strings of incidents that are to the side of the main plot-narrative. Only by having many more episodes than the company was willing to fund can you bring in these “minor” characters. They are often suggestively complex about characters falling to pieces by the system.
After said prologue, we first see them on Ischia as they trudge down the beach. In an other film it would be all surface, glamor, here we feel how tiresome beaches also are, how heavy the umbrella, how weary the walk, hot the sun, and a sense of sticky sand. I put it down to not magazin-ing everything. The house is like a house I would stay in, the curtains thin, the stone steps hard, the doors ugly and off-center, painted in such a way that the shades are not perfect. All the surroundings are like this — a boat is not super expensive, perfect in way but messy, slosh slosh.
Their dialogues are what people might say: not elevated into top wit or reflection, but such wit and reflection as comes out is from offhand, slightly spiteful distrustful talk, the way people do ever one-upping one another — a real sense of contingent interaction
The fights every one has, the ambiguity of positions only once in a while made explicit: Lenu who is treated as a servant and yet is the educated person there with books with her. The mother says I’ll be blamed. When a quarrel happens, the debris and then how sordid
things can be — yet the beauty of the air, light. When they swim, they swim as awkwardly as I do — I mean the girls, as feeble in the sea and yet moving along. What the film does is give us in a way what book can’t — the viscera through sound, music, real presences — the series fulfills the book.Yet OTOH, it has to simplify so the central story line stays with Lenu/Lila in conflict, Lila and her husband’s inadequate (I’ll call it and for both) relationship, and the entry of Nino into this mix. Lila begins an affair with Nino when he chooses her over Lenu (who is profoundly hurt and turns to Nino’s father and allows him to have sex with her one night on the beach) Another parallel is Pinu’s relationship with Lila’s brother, Rino — it’s too based on sex for her taste and now she’s found someone who she likes better and treats her as a person more, Bruno, and she wants to escape the conflict but also Nino. Almost she’d rather have neither man, but she is not permitted that choice of no man.
In the book other more minor characters are also developed: especially Pasquale Peluso. That he’s a communist bricklayer matters. The book and series wants to present Italy as it’s felt through the class system with all its nuances. Pasquale has no chance whatsover of getting to the beach. He gets his books from the library or cheaply made ones, and rag newspapers. So this stream-lined season (only 8 episodes) would or could be so much richer
From the sixth: Rage
One of many moments where it’s apparent Stefano has beat up Lila in his rage
Enzo picking Lila up to take her home (to Stefano) when Nino has abandoned her
Lila has been in a repressed rage since she was a young child and thrown out of a window by her father, and not allowed to go on to school beyond the most basic primary learning. The rage comes out again and again, mostly in the form of what’s called bad behavior. She is often mean to people, says things that hurt others very much, spiteful, mocking.
The episode opens with Lenu doing spectacularly well with another of these public questionings in front of all her classmates and all the teachers, told she should go on to university, demurring but urged by the teachers, and then when she tells her parents and her mother goes into a rage and forbids it (she is getting above them, where will she get the money from), defying them, going by train, arriving at this pretty looking city and off to take the exams, which if she does well she will be supported. She then says the hardest thing to tell now is what happened to Lila during this time.
We see fleetingly Lila give Lenu a box of notebooks; these are Lila’s life story, and then we see Lenu walking by a canal with them — in the book you are told what she does — and thus are prepared for why Lenu when she is in her sixties writes these 4 books after (the opening scene of the whole series), Lila in her mid-sixties disappears.
In this episode — for the rest of it — we see Lila in probably the first year or so of the marriage to Stefano defies the deeply entrenched norm of these people and leaves her husband for Nino. They live in a slum in a broken down apartment; only very briefly and from afar do we see their 23 days of joy. That’s all they have because suddenly without much preparation, Nino turns on her, and begins to complain ever bitterly about her lack of middle class manners, nuance, that she does break out and say what she thinks, she is an embarrassment to him. He packs and leaves.
Meanwhile upon her leaving — in a scene where Stefano is stunned, astonished, finally tells her how he loves her and has done all he can give her everything. She begins her telling him by saying she will no longer go to the shoe store, the grocery, hates staying home, hates him. He does not believe she will leave and goes to work and when he comes back she is gone. He weeps, and goes to the family, they are horrified and accuse one another of knowing where she is. They decide she has gone to stay with Lenu because they can’t bear any of the alternatives. What happens is the gangster type threatens Antonio, home from conscription and emotionally destroyed when Antonio asks for a job, then threatens him to go find Lila but not tell anyone. This mode of threatening is Mafia stuff – just what we see nightly on TV in the killing criminal Trump.
Antonio promises, but wandering near where Lenu has gone can’t find Lila; he goes to a neighborhood spectacle and tells Pasquale, who loves Lila and he and Enzo say she must be found. They do find her after Nino has left her. She is writing on a typewriter. After some
talk Enzo persuades her she must return to her husband, she is starving in this dump.She does return, and there is Stefano all rejoicing. She tells him she is pregnant, and he is delighted until she says it is not his Now this is cruel: not only is there no need to tell him but she was pregnant before going off with Nino, and in the book it’s obvious she flees because the pregnancy is a final nail on the coffin. How can she now ever escape.
I’ve heard that phrase many a time from my father — a nail on the coffin that kept me here … What’s missing is the inwardness for you are through Lenu as narrative in the subjective consciousness of Lila at last.
From the seventh: Ghosts
Lenu studying
Lenu’s mother while caring for Lenu
We fast forward to Lenu being integrated into the university (Pisa, Normale superieure); she is the girlfriend of a wealthy young man who tries to buck the exam system where we are shown “orals” are a form of bullying or humiliation (if you don’t produce the right answers). We have seen Lenu go through this 3 times. The young man refuses; says what we are leaning is divorced of all social, economic, political context, he is excoriated, mocked, dismissed from college. She realizes when she goes off with him and he tells her he must leave now (deprived of all income) that she has not integrated socially into the college. She has spent her time in the library studying — so now he’s gone she is alone — not part of some group
She grows ill and very touching her mother shows up and takes care of you. The rough hard selfish seeming woman loves her daughter. Lenu slowly gets better. We get flashback where Lenu and Lila are together after the birth of Rino and where Stefano has asserted himself to the point he control her body and her movements. She fears her notebooks will be found and destroyed. She gives them to Lenu but Lenu sees them as Lila’s way to dominate and control her and make her choices seem inferior, lousy. There is truth to this: Lila has acted as a kind of DuMaurier’s Rebecca to Lenu with Lenu the submissive second Mrs DeWinter.
Lenu has to get rid of them — and she stunningly throws them into the river. These are all that Lila has created that’s worth while. They are better than anything Lenu can write since Lenu has been educated out of telling such direct truths.
OF course we are to infer that these four novels are Lenu’s way of retelling her friend’s story which she did read.
While reading Lila’s story is dramatized: from her first refusal to come out of the apartment and let all these people use her, to her giving birth, to her trying to educate her boy to be something quite different from a fascist male. At first Stefano is submissive and loves her but slowly he becomes enraged. He has a relationship that satisfies him with Ada (I think she might be Paaquale’s sister) and Lila knows that Ada represents a direct threat to her, for she needs the set up she has to bring her boy up. She comes out to mingle and of course finds there is no good choice for her. She won’t go live with Solaro — just another fascist relationship based on sex and money.
It is time to go and she gives Lenu a letter to give to Enzo — in the book we are expected to understand this is Enzo who promised to care for her absolutely. But Enzo is not someone who has either a degree or business from his family.
We return to Lenu and see her mother leaving. The film of her walking away to the train and finding her way with difficulty was so touching to me. I know I may not be able to do online teaching because I may find they are lying and will not give me the support and direction they pretend. Getting on a train if you have never done it is hard.
When I finished I found myself wishing Ferrrante could have won the Mann Booker or some such prestigious prize or that her oeuvre would be given a Nobel – never happen because the focus is on women, women’s lives and the aesthetic l’ecriture-femme.
I’ve joined a tiny group of 4 to read or discuss these books together but do not know if it will come off – it’s online. Without benefit of a listserv
The last for the season, the 8th The Blue Fairy Book: This was a powerful episode. A wonderful finale to the book which ends just as the movie shows.
Lila as dressed for hard work in freezing environment of meat-packing factory
Lenu uncomfortably listening to disdainful criticism of her book at her book launching
An unexpected direct parallel to today — when Lila pays the price of freeing herself from her violent husband and the comfortable way of life he can provide her and her child, she cannot do this alone, not in this dangerous patriarchal society. So she accepts Enzo’s offer but that means helping support herself and she descends rapidly. We find her where? in a meat-packing factory, yes. The movie version does not begin to describe the filth, noise (screams of killed animals), the blood, the disgusting techniques for making sausages, the cold the people must endure, how they are cut, their skins bruised, the word hard and long.
So while the US meat packing workers are probably more comfortable because of improvements in technology, my guess is the rest — low pay, low status, long hard hours, coercion as a way of dealing with workers – is all there. Nowadays on top of that you can catch a lethal virus, but don’t expect unemployment insurance if you don’t come in. There are very high numbers of people sickening and then proportionately dying.
Ferrante is no fascist and last night’s concluding episode showed us how Lenu was being led to stay in the longer rungs of the upper class — be a teacher in a high school because you haven’t got the accent or the generations of family to justify putting you in a university level academic job. The way she nearly reaches that is to marry in. She has recognized this is also her path to getting her novel published. Piero Airota introduces her to his family and she is found acceptable, so he produces a ring. They will have to wait two years for him to get the position he needs to support them as upper middle people — there is no worry in his voice he won’t get that position, and as the next novel opens he has it.
We see Lenu come home and how she has been educated out of belonging and yet still belongs because at a gut level she understand. The scenes with her family and her mother seen now as a denizen of this pitch perfect. Their pride in her too.
The story of Lila’s replacement by Ada is told by Ada in the book as it is here. We see in both that Stefano’s way of coping is still to beat up a woman, and his deepest impulses conformity. Had Ada not gotten pregnant, not had the nerve to come to Lila, and Very Important, Lila accepted her, let her into the apartment and start just living there, it is possible she would not have been able to take her place as Stefano’s new woman. She does have to work long hours in the grocery store, and then a new baby to care for and also obey this man. A look in her eyes shows she knows the price of the ticket.
One of the beauties of the book is how the working class women can band together and recognize one another. So too the middle class but the middle class does not recognize those beneath them. We see that in the teachers’ behavior, women even more than men.
One interesting aspect of the price of refusing to conform to the role of wife in Lila is we see that in Enzo there is no violence, no forced sex so at night. She likes him for that. I feel we are to feel both our heroines capable of liking sex, but the way it’s practiced (so to speak) makes it a chore or betrayal after a while. Lila has some liberty to study, albeit supposedly with Enzo and for him — though as to talent for mathematics we will discover in the next book that Enzo doesn’t have much. She does remain grateful to him.
I was very touched by the closing scene. How both girls say let us not be lost to one another — because they could be. I knew that Lila would burn that child’s book — we have had in the series all the scenes between Lila and Signora Oliviera to know how Lila knows now how little er talent mattered once she did not go on to the conventional trajectory of schooling.
The concluding scene where the novel is published and Lenu is unable to commandeer the room or present a presence that is intimidating so the male reviewer gets up and condescends. Pietro had told Lenu to “remove the racy bits” and this guy makes fun of the presentations of the scenes of sex. They are so necessary to the women’s stories (see above). But suddenly our ambiguous hero stands up and defends Lenu. There he is, Nino, also part of this upper middle class, and he’s read Lenu’s book
I left out the touching flashbacks, especially of the two girls as very small, reading Little Women. Lila curled up in Lenu’s arms, the thinner one, dressed in a cheap sack dress. There are others and they correspond to moments of flashback in the book
As children, Lila in Lenu’s arms, reading Little Women
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Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theater
I recommend watching as strongly as one can — there may be as good productions as this one but probably since A&C is not that often done, it’s unlikely to get to see one better.
A playful moment
What impressed me is how the the actors (Ralph Fiennes, Sophie Okonedo, Tim McMullan, Tunji Kasim) and director (Simon Godwin) did not flinch from Shakespeare’s un-idealized Antony and Cleopatra. He is an older man, old, declining, spends a lot of his time drunk and befuddled, lascivious and lazy; she is a continually grating sort of mate, continually teasing, asking for validation, giving Antony a sort of hard time as a version of fun. Samuel Johnson endlessly claims Shakespeare’s real strength is the true characters. That’s one of the strengths of production. They had the uncomfortable comedy and the ridiculous.
When Antony is at that party roaring drunk with his fellows, we see (first time I’ve seen this), which the language allows, homosexual sex as part of Antony’s make-up and tastes. He’s false at times – he knows very well he won’t stay with Octavia. He takes the easy way out. She acts senselessly too — badgering her messenger. He also is too self-glorified. His strength is as a soldier, on land, but no he will fight at sea – and then lose. He is jealous of Octavius as this young effective man. Similarly the actor who played Enorbarbus is not done heroically (the way I once saw Patrick Stewart do it) but as a flawed human being whose flaws fit Antony’s but sees (as Antony does not) Antony’s self-destructiveness; when he hates himself for deserting it’s all the more effective.
But they have another side, and they do love one another, like their Egyptian life together; and as the play went on gained in stature based on being what they are, true to it, non-politicians, warm passionate, as opposed to the prig Caesar who is part of a long line of politicians in Shakespeare, starting with Bolingbroke in R2, Claudius in Hamlet. Antony owes a lot to Richard II, the development of this figure of a non-politicians, not a wheeler-dealer, a Hamlet, can’t be bothered to fit in, like the young Hal; also to Henry VI – aspects of these characters. It’s a very hard part to play. Cleopatra has no progenitor that I can see in Shakespeare except maybe some of the women in the history plays — those who love, those who are politicians; she played Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife in Hollow Crown. A flaw (it must be admitted) is the actor playing Octavius is too sweet, too young, not hard, mean, dense determined for power in the way of Shakespeare’s politicians.
Until they begin to fail and then as actors they can soar – – I was very moved by the ending. See how they both botched it and yet were just the embodiments of what love can be – sometimes so stupid — why did she flee and he flee after her during the sea fights? As he died in her arms, I remembered Jim dying in mine.
I also saw Frankenstein last week with Jonny Lee Miller as a powerful Frankenstein and Bernard Cumberbatch an astonishing creature; next week at the National Theater is Streetcar Named Desire; and if you want an alternative, or more traditional Shakespeare, the Globe is also on YouTube, for free for now (I spoke of Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance, Stephen Fry and others on a Sylvia II blog,scroll down)
So there you have it — how to wile away your hours in the evening (after work from home is done) with deep pleasure and growth in understanding and life
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Diane Reynolds:
“I got to the end of season two of The French Village. As I mentioned before, I found the first episode extraordinary—you know the Germans are going to invade but you don’t know how it will happen, so the vulnerability, especially the children’s, is intense. By the end of season two, however, much that is quite good is marred by soap opera/melodrama. The series is constantly setting up hyper-dramatic triangles in which a person has to make a wildly dramatic decision. There is the prostitute with the heart of gold, who dies, then Lucienne, the school teacher, who has decide at the last minute between the man she loves and the man she is going to marry, the communist Larcher ordered to kill the woman he loves and having to decide between her and the communists, Hortense, aka Emma Bovary, the mayor’s wife, deciding between her brother in law and the man she loves (or thinks she does). … It does start to feel contrived: you do have to wonder, for example, that the communist Larcher is able to walk so freely about when the Nazis know he has killed one of theirs or that de Kercher gets the offer of the 50,000 francs he needs—if he rats someone out– just exactly as his lover needs a life saving operation. It reminds me, thought is less frivolous, of a soap operatic Spanish series called Gran Hotel.
But beneath the soap opera, the series does explore seriously issues of collaboration and the difficulties of navigating the Nazi occupation. At the end of season two, the Larcher’s Jewish maid is arrested. When Larcher manages to see her in jail, she tells him bluntly that he is part of the problem—good men like him shouldn’t collaborate with the Nazis because it confuses people: it makes what is going on seem legitimate. She advises him to leave collaboration to the creeps. What she says is true, but the series also faces us with the dilemma of how much worse life will be for people if the good people like Larcher don’t collaborate. These are not easy issues. And while the communists are represented as foolish, there is the legitimate issue of how to wisely strike back against the regime. So there are complex questions being raised under the guise of melodrama—I could wish the series could scale back on the sensationalism, but I don’t imagine that will happen as we careen from cliff hanger to cliffhanger. And yet the issues matter … I keep watching.”
Thank you. I’m not as far along. With all its flaws, there is nothing in the British or American or Canadian film productions to come near what this film has to tell us amid all the melodrama and (yes) misogyny. The spiteful wife of Schwartz; that Dr Larcher’s wife can prefer a Nazi torturer to the genuinely well meaning and good physician are just the most striking instances.
Diane: Ellen, I did read this–I do think The French Village is worthwhile if soap operatic.
Me: Often protest fiction is written as a victim novel. If you want persuade people, you must avail yourself of these emotional techniques. Think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; more sophisticated novels show the victim is also a colluder as well as no saint, but nonetheless a victim. Say Dreiser’s American Tragedy or Sister Carrie. There are also the harder books to get: Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli makes the error of not realizing that the world he is presented is itself a world of deliberately engineered victimhood. I’d say A French Village is close to Dreiser and the better muck-rakers, but if race and ethnic prejudice gets in the way the well-meant book can reinforce racism. I’m thinking of Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Again Diane on My Brilliant Friend:
“I watched this some days ago . I thought it was very good, but I found myself wary as the story veered into what seemed like conventionalized romance—though it never stays there. I felt the earlier episode in which Lila had the beachside affair with Nino hit some wrong notes for the same reason. There were moments when Nino and Lila were kissing in the waves when I didn’t know if this were parody or not—but it was treated as serious, if utterly conventionalized. Perhaps the stereotyped filming was pointing to how ultimately empty it was.
In the opening of this last episode—and the ending–Lenu seemed to be having the conventional “happy ending, triumphant narrative” of the conventional romance heroine, updated to include career success: she has met the right man from the right upper class intellectual family, they like and embrace her, he is in love with her, she is going to get married. She has finally pulled herself from the slums of Naples. She is vindicated through this marriage and family against the professor who tries to slot her onto a lower career path because of her accent. We see his surprise as he runs into her having dinner with this family, one he respects. He tries to take credit for her as his student, condescends to her. And finally, this family gets her “scribblings” quickly published as a book—they are impressed with her. She has writing talent. She has connections. Her path is smoothed. Nino defends her—again she is vindicated. Somehow it was all too good to be true—and perhaps that was the point.
Lila in a sadder way, and so more real for me, has her own version of a “happy” ending. I felt glad for her for getting away, finally, from Stephano and the thick of the neighborhood. She is finally seemingly free. She pays a heavy price by having to work in the meat factory, but I felt palpably her relief at being free from living what to her was a horrible lie of a life. The freedom felt important, more important than all the money and status Stefano could offer her. But also such bitterness as she throws her childhood treasure of a book into the fire. I felt, however, that was not done as well as it could have been—the moment we see the fire conveniently burning next to where Lenu has the book, it is far too obvious what is coming.
It felt right that the two affirmed their bond, their friendship, at the end, even with all that had gone awry.
I liked the episode, but it had a feeling of wrap of, of summation, that made it less gripping or immediate for me. Lenu’s ascent to success is almost too perfect, though we can also imagine it inevitably meeting obstacles later. I hope this series will continue. It is one of the best I have ever seen.”
I agree with Diane here. I’ve said all along that this is a mainstreaming by Ferrante of her work. One of the way she mainstreams is to have a character like Lenu the lens through which we see Lila. I do compare Lenu to how Elinor Dashwood structurally functions in Sense and Sensibility to how Marianne does. They are both pairs also parallel characters. Lenu is moving up throughout Book 2; she does not dominate the narrative (as I recall), and to me what happened was the “ambiguous” heroine became the true or stealth one. Lila carries the burden of the kind of story we find in the novellas — she pays a high price for what liberty she manages to carve out and there is little sentimentality in the presentation.
It is too good to be true, especially Pietro even being the “good boy” of the 1950s style novel, so he won’t take her virginity (or have full sex with her) until marriage. It’s all too obvious – except maybe that many a girl dreaming of going to college and graduate school will imagine that once she has those high grades and gains all that respect she will necessarily flourish — without the needed marriage. I think I thought so, almost, or hope against previous knowledge, until I had my first encounter with an woman administrator who confronted with me and my grades first took the out to disbelieve me and demand I bring my transcript. The second time I showed up was no better for me than the first; she was a lot less polite than the man who discourages Lenu from looking for an academic life and posting. So these truths might not be obvious to her readership.
Also the bringing of Nino and making his validation so important. Very grating really — and not presented ironically — in either book or film.
I do have give away a bit to agree more: when the book next opens Lenu’s marriage is not going ideally – but realistically. I’ll leave that at that. Plus we are again confronting rivalry over
Nino. There is also the question, who is Rino’s biological father. Nino in the third book carries on indifferent to any children or damage he does – like his father not taking responsibility for bye-blows or sex outside marriage. So Lenu’s story is not sentimentalized. The close of book 2 is upbeat deliberately I fear to get us to want to read on to Book 3.
But now Ferrante has the problem of Lila have sunk so low and the way her climb is done over-idealizes aspects of her — I’ll leave that at that.
There are real problems in this mainstreaming of Ferrante’s vision — as there are comparable real problems in Mantel’s third book. Here is a parallel: both are paying far too much attention to pleasing the audience, making a book the audience will not turn away from and find readable. Ferrante’s method works; Mantel not.
The series itself seems to me the best one — barring A French Village — TV type serial I’ve seen this year. Was not Davies’s Les Miserables last year? Also the Ruth Wilson PBS special. And that Howards’ End. There have been very good one time movies of books (McEwans’s Lost child of Time). Some series are spectacularly well done but the matter leaves a helluva lot to be desired: for me that includes Outlander. Perhaps others can cite other series. I don’t watch appt TV much.
What I thought particularly good was how viscerally real what the film conveyed was. None of this glamorizing which has come to the point I am sickened — on the other hand easy–to-read stereotypes. The way Lenu is dressed for example. Picture perfect for a 1950s girls and still very respectable way of dressing that will enable you to be accepted as you try for promotion and respect.
Ellen
Elaine Showalter: “A French Village! We are a bit ahead of you. Enthralled, horrified, making the same connections to the fascism of our days. Can’t watch the torture scenes, of which so many. The Nazi hierarchy, punish each other too. But Trump has no one above him.”
Me: He has several known torturers just below – like the woman who is at the head of the CIA. With Barr there it is fast becoming (is) a criminal syndicate who need fear no prosecution. The film is melodramatic at times — but that’s how you write protest ….
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More on A French Village: eason 3: The Gestapo has entered the village, and Jews are being rounded up and they are told they are to be put on a train for Paris. Then rumor has it they will be taken to Poland. They are being treated horribly, cruelly, starved, humiliated, three have now killed themselves.
What is extraordinary is that the film-maker has set up the situation based on the idea that nearly all the Jews and all the French, collaborators and not, have no idea these people are going to be sent to their death. I’m not sure all the Germans know, some do. What is being conveyed is that the idea they are being sent to be killed never enters the minds of most of them – because it is so extraordinary. It is such an outrageous horrific unthinkable thing to do – until we are after it’s done — in 1946 and all see what happened. By showing how such wretched treatment of them still does not evoke in most minds what could be the aim here. they are told they can take only one small suitcase. It’s strange but they don’t think about this beyond that maybe there is no room or the suitcase inconveniences their masters.
Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets. The point of her books (including A Train in Winter) is to vindicate the Resistance from 70 years of denial from the right, trivializing them and turning them into “thugs” or naive simpletons. A French Village party keeps that perspective up, and partly vindicates or explains how decent people came to collaborate. By the end of season 3, Judith de Morhange emerges as a woman collaborator: she just can’t conceive that what is about to happen is extermination. Dr Larcher, on the other hand, is beginning to see that there is no compromising with these people, alas only beginning.
The slow creep still goes on. I was struck by one moment where Marchetti (whose conscience bothers him) asks Servier if he can get a letter to his wife’s mother. Servier looks astonished and puts him off. Marchetti asks for an address. Servier’s face turns to stone. In that moment my guess is we are supposed to see that Servier knows these people have been sent to their death or are dead and had not realized Marchetti didn’t know. Or if he knows Marchetti didn’t know, did not realize how such a question would be “natural.” Marchetti says he doesn’t why a natural letter and address is not available. He seems not to guess – the truth and horror of this is as yet so unthinkable.
It is not unthinkable today. Were trains to come in and take black people, we would all immediately think extermination.OTOH, the US population has not risen against Trump when he broke all laws and intentions of immigration and separated parents from children and began to throw all the people in privately run prisons. Trump’s new rule for hospitals tells all medical people you need not treat LGTBQ people.
I wonder if in 1942-43 there were the same kinds of murders of Jews everywhere — they are profoundly unsafe wherever they are in the world of the series. The point is made that gradually the very worst people are rising to key positions (as with Trump) and now the mayor is someone prepared to slaughter anyone he doesn’t like — anyone called a Resistance person, communist, whatever.
No Jew is safe anywhere from anyone. This reminds me of what black people repeatedly said during the protests, demonstrations & riots: they can’t leave their houses without being afraid some small incident will cost them their lives. Indeed Taylor was murdered in her house – not the first. I keep my eye on how many disabled people police murder with impunity.
A brilliant actor plays the sadistic Nazi officer, Muller
Great ironies at the end. Marie’s photo in the paper and Schwartz runs over it with his latest girlfriend. It is beginning to penetrate though except in the scene where Muller gloats over how he kills groups of Jews and can get individuals about to be killed to dig the mass graves to Hortense Larcher, it is not explicit – -to penetrate individuals the people sent away on the train “will never come back” i.e., are being killed somehow. But that this is a strategy, a plan for all Jews is beyond comprehension
Some very ugly portraits of women. Much to my astonishment Hortense, Dr Larcher’s wife, prefers the sadistic Nazi Muller to her husband — this after he was prepared to torture her and wounded her arm. Schwartz’s wife tells him she loves savagery — I take this to be a slur on all woman’s sexuality and something brutal men want to believe, but the program has Hortense as another prime example. So too Marie with her affection for Schwartz: while he is not altogether devoid of any principle, he is profoundly untrustworthy and un-principled as a principle.
A Jewish young woman, Rita, refuses to accept Marchetti’s deportation of her mother (some might), flees him but is (we learn) re-captured
Women are presented as irrational: Beriot’s wife, Lucienne, loves him now because he has learned some physical technique and we watch her pray; she is against the Resistance. Marie is the most competent of the resisters — and a prostitute whose name I didn’t catch (what an old myth here). The two Larchers are now our emerging our heroes, together with DeKevern and Beriot.
The old lie about the Nazi-Soviet pact is worked tirelessly to condemn communists as if every minute of their conduct is controlled by it. There are superb books about occupied France reviewed in the New York Review of Books: it was the communists and socials who resisted the Nazis and fascists, and who the allies were determined to throw off once their use was over — for they had supported fascism itself as a bulwark against socialism and communism for years. The article does ample justice to twists and turns and details. Who Resisted the Nazis.
As I come near the end of the fourth season I was moved to compare A French Village to Renoir’s famed Grand Illusion (as I saw that for another course where the sentimental teacher conceded how Renoir idealized and mourned the death of an older aristocratic world — where aristocrats transcend mere local wars …..
Not only is Grand Illusion too kind, and too idealistic (especially about individuals confronting one another), with the women and captors sentimentalized (like when food is offered to prisoners so politely), but Renoir believes in this film that people in general will hold out, be brave against the threat of death, he does not begin to comprehend what people in general will accept, do without thinking of cruel consequences, how communities will dissolve. A French Village is sincere in its depiction of the hardness of people and how they seek first to protect and second to place themselves. He does not come near to understanding or dramatizing how weak bodies are.
I do think the depiction of some of the women in A French Village is unfair: two especially who are shown to be drawn to cruel men they know will turn on them and do. Two of them do push back: one flees her lover once she discovers he deported her mother (and everyone now knows to death), and the other tries to kill herself by hanging. The third is kicked out by her sadistic Nazi officer lover. I did wonder to what extent women collaborated with Nazi men, collaborators and police and military for protection. They are show as active in the Resistance the way the men are (in Grand Illusion they are only sentimental lovers or prostitute-like)
Grand Illusion is itself filled with naive illusion.
This may be too much of a detail for anyone who has seen the series to remember. The fourth season culminates in Antoine pulling off a spectacular stunt, which both unnerves the Nazi-Vichy regime and inspirits the townspeople — & the Resistance fighters who pull it of: Antoine and his training soldiers. The Nazi attempt to force young men into enslaved labor in Germany has backfired for a number of local village young men have fled to the wood to join the Resistance under an emerging new leader, Antoine. They stage a parade across the village bridge (see above still), hold a ritual ceremony for (and on) November 11th for WW1, where the French (let’s recall) were on the winning side, play La Marseillaise, sing & dance. For not very long. To do it at all is astonishing — which to me at first seemed a senseless stunt but which when it succeeded did have meaning and added strength to the Resistance when the Nazi regime was unable to hunt the men out. Perhaps this is improbable, but I suspect some real incident lies behind this story
They had to have trucks, guns to some extent, but most of all cut off communications — cut off phone lines, radios, telegraph and get the occupying force out of the village. They do this – our focus is the two women who disable the radio – Lucienne and the new singing teacher, a Resistance person and it turns out lesbian. But quickly Muller (no fool) realizes a phone call which directed the occupying force to hurry to the next village was a key moment. I cannot remember who made the call. Was it dramatized? Or was this the sort of thing mystery-detective stories often do – I am to infer from what people said who did it? This is so frustrating. I will give this series that I feel I should have been able to infer (or saw ti) because generally speaking they do not go at lightening speed and everything is developed coherently with explanations emerging as we go along. I asked but no one remembered who made the phone call? I suppose I could re-watch the two (or maybe three) episodes to try to catch it … I do have the time ….
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