Tony Gatlif kiss me anywhere you like

In my early vixen period I was the kind of person who would correct the spelling errors and problems with syntax in love letters and send them back to where they came from. I once didn't speak to a boyfriend for a week because he sent me flowers at work (and because he had a pus-clogged pimple glistening on his chin). I once received a mysterious Valentine's day card which said simply: "Bet you dont [my italics] remember me, but I remember you Pinochiette". I spent years trying to find the author of that missing apostrophe who never dared come forth. One sentence and he/she/it couldn't get the grammar right.

Of course things have changed since those dark days. Bring on the flowers now. I dine on flower petals and chew their stalks. I love to let loose the scent of flowers in my dull-aired flat which is sealed off from the world to keep the cold out and the cat in. And after four years in Paris, exchanging mangled English and French words of love, I've become accustomed to grammatically incorrect love.

In the spirit of February 14 I've posted below a snippet from my old blog about the language of love, and I'd love to devote the rest of this post to one of my greatest loves, European cinema, more particularly French cinema.

I met some film students a couple of weeks ago, a German and an Italian, who have come to Paris to do five weeks study of French cinema as part of their overall university degree. While I was extremely positive about the current state of European cinema, they dismissed the German, French and Italian film industries as scabby dinosaurs and instead they believe the US is where it is all happening.

The German guy kept saying that the French don't seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the idea is not to bore the audience. I was adamant, barking like a terrier, that in most French films it's exactly the opposite of boring because you don't have to follow set plot points, you don't have to look at your watch and think, well we still have to go through a re-building montage and then reconciliation and one person has to save one world before the film finishes. No, instead the film just ends suddenly and keeps on turning in your head. Men and women (women in particular, because they get to be all sorts of things beyond the devastatingly beautiful/middle-aged neurotic dichotomy they are granted in Hollywood) are free to roam outside structure. And don't go talking to me about Coppola's "Lost in Translation". Because. I've said it once. And I'll say it again. It was an ok film but it wasn't that great. The French are constantly releasing films just as subtle, and just as good, and not making such a hoo-ha about it. Subtlety is the welcome norm in French films.

Interestingly enough, when I probed these film students as to what recent French films they have seen one of them said `L'enfant' (poor old Belgians, yet again someone mistaking their frites for someone elses) and then unable to name anything else, he started mumbling something about Godard!
Godard - did he release a film last year?

I hope to talk in more detail about some of the great films I loved and saw in 2006. However, after watching Nanni Moretti's Journal Intime this weekend - there is one scene where he imagines going to the house of a film critic with copies of her reviews and force feeding her this over-flowerised drivel - I don't have the guts to attempt it right now. So for the moment I will just leave you the following images of ten of the great European (mainly French admittedly) films that I saw at the cinema in 2006, and encourage you all to see them, before it is too late for us all.