Tales from the Quartier: Summer Edition

1. Thousands of Londoners woke up this morning to find a new bike outside their house; I found 13 (and only two months late). It was almost like Christmas, although the last Christmas I actually wanted a bike was in about 1994. The bikes are part of the new cycle hire scheme, modelled on the successful Parisian vélibs (of course, the French have a much more laissez-faire attitude to cycling than the hardcore, power commuter Londoners, which is probably why Parisians get proper baskets on their bikes and we just get a rack barely capable of holding a copy of Metro). On my 20-minute bus journey to work this morning, I witnessed at least three incidences of Boris Biker muppetry (including one woman who was pretty much camped out in the bus lane at the intersection of Baker Street and the Marylebone Road; thank goodness for natural selection).

The nearest cycle hire station to my flat is actually at the bottom of my stoop. The nearest pub, meanwhile, is about three doors down. When I returned home this evening, the (presumably drunk) people leaving the pub decided that it was hilarious to ring the bells on the Boris bikes over and over and over. This is going to get old way fast.

2. Although the weather is still warm, it wasn't so sunny as it has been this evening, which meant we actually managed to get served in under five minutes at the Temperance and even found a table. My booking at Monkey & Me, a local Thai, proved unnecessary although by the time we left, the ever unpredictable Marylebone restau-going population had showed up in large numbers and the restaurant was full.

3. The quartier featured if not prominently then at least in a supporting role in the new Sherlock Holmes Y2k10 series on the BBC. The upper end of Baker Street (NoMaRo) these days is filled with Subways, Baskin Robbins's and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which always has a hella long queue of peeps waiting to be photographed with a genuine(ly fake) London copper outside. In this new series, however, they've made the street more nondescript with just an anonymous sandwich shop and some nameless, faceless buildings. This is fine. What isn't fine, though, is the sign. The "Baker Street" sign, that is. You see, the sign says, "Baker Street - W1," whereas every resident of the quartier knows that in SoMaRo, the postcodes begin with W1 but in NoMaRo they start with NW1 and 221b Baker Street is definitely NoMaRo. This is hugely pedantic, of course, and besides the point as, having been deprived of decent Jonathan Creek episodes for about ten years, I really enjoyed the new Sherlock and his ninja deduction skillz. I guess I was just hoping that NoMaRo would get some credit for once.

The Songs Remain the Same

"You know the music but do you know the man?" asks the international trailer for the movie Gainsbourg. Actually, though, first-time director Joann Sfar explained, in a Q&A after a preview tonight, that he wanted to make a movie about Serge Gainsbourg's music and not Gainsbourg himself, a topic by now well inscribed in the canon of every Frenchman. Sfar, a comic book artist and graphic novellist, hates biopics but quite likes musicals but quite likes musicals so he made a film in which most of the scenes were inspired by the words and tunes of Gainsbourg's songs rather than what the press--and the world--said about him. Perhaps this is why the Gainsbourg family gave Sfar their blessing after blocking films for 19 years: they knew he wasn't going to tell their secrets, he said.

The film was certainly not what I was expecting. I had no idea from the trailer that there would be such a strong fantasy element in the film--throughout, Gainsbarre (the evil alter-ego Gainsbourg coined for himself in the song Ecce Homo), a large, cartoonish character with a caricaturishly large nose and ears, follows him about, criticising his decisions and trying to lead him into temptation. During the credits, Gainsbarre swims through a Beatles-esque sea, filled with jellyfish and other creatures, exploring the Octopus's garden. They left this out of the trailer because "French people don't like fantasy films" (which, added Sfar, is a shame because he wants to make a movie with vampires in it and he can't understand why the French don't like films with lots of sucking...).

When asked by an audience member tonight which parts of the film were true and which were made up, Sfar explained that everything was based on the ideas expressed in the songs but obviously, not everything Gainsbourg wrote in his songs was true... I knew almost nothing about Gainsbourg before seeing the film apart from that he sung Je t'aime... and had some involvement with Jane Birkin (whose name I know mainly from the Hermes bag named after her). I didn't know he was originally a painter and only played the piano to pay for canvases until (in the film at least) Gainsbarre convinced him to ditch the painting but this matters little.

I wanted to see the film because a) I enjoy watching French films (and want to try to keep up my French) and b) the actress who played Birkin, Lucy Gordon, to whom the film is dedicated and who took her own life last year, went to my school and I was interested in seeing her last movie. As I said, I'm an expert of neither Birkin nor Gainsbourg but Gordon and Eric Elmosnino, who played Gainsbourg, had great chemistry and were really fun to watch on screen. The surreality counterbalanced what could have been a melodrama--the affairs, the divorces, the alcoholism, the deaths. Gainsbourg is not portrayed as a bad man, however, and never judged. He is who he is and yet people love him nonetheless. "It is a film about a man who just wants to be loved by everyone," said Sfar, "although he gets confused between being loved by his women and by his audience."

Would I have gone to see the film if I'd known it wasn't a straight biopic? Probably not. But did I enjoy it? Yes, definitely.

Not Your Average Tuesday

Last summer, on a Daily Candy-inspired whim, I had a go on a flying trapeze in Regent's Park. Three goes in fact. It was pretty scary but very fun and highly exhilarating and I was very keen to have another go but they were all booked up for the rest of the summer so I had to wait until this year.

Somehow, I was more nervous today than I was last year; maybe because although I felt no nerves walking up the ladder or standing on the platform, as soon as I had to do the counter-intuitive lean out over the edge, my heart started beating a lot faster. The same thing happened this year, of course, although I think my swings were more successful. This might be because as well as a few n00bs, there were quite a few people who had swung before, either on the "big rig" (like me) or as regulars on a lower rig as part of a circus skills class. It was certainly inspiring to watch the pros and I did indeed manage to be caught on my final swing, even if it wasn't the most elegant or ladylike of swings. I did it!

I still don't remember very much of the aerial bits, other than seeing the catcher dude's chalked-up wrists and almost forgetting to grab back (last time, my problem was that--untrusting person that I am--I tried to grab first). But it was such fun--maybe even the best fun you can have in Regent's Park with your clothes on? I'm now very tempted to sign up for circus classes. Or maybe just run away and join the circus...

Living the Dream

After a few film-free weeks, I've made up for it this week by watching six films, including three at the cinema. Inception was definitely the best of the lot and not just because it was so < cliché > mind-blowing < / cliché > on a weekend when my mind was definitely in need of blowing. In fact, it was so good that I'm not going to comment further until I have seen it again and at the IMAX.

I watched Hard Candy this evening, which was, well, hard. I'd only seen Ellen Page in Inception and Juno before this and in both, she plays a girl; not so much when she's playing the paedophile-bating 14-year-old Hayley Stark, who is the worst nightmare of every man--even the nice ones. Then there were the two films I saw on iPlayer: It's Grim Up North (if Brian Clough thought the Leeds squad of 1974 were bad, he should have seen what happened 405 years earlier) and It's Grim Out East (London). Sticking with a Russian theme, I also saw Le Concert -- the surprisingly funny tale of the former conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra (currently a janitor) who attempts to pull off the Frank Abagnale-worthy con of getting 50-odd Russian musicians without passports or even suits out of the country and into the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and perform a concert with an amazing solo violinist while also convincing everyone they are the real Bolshoi Orchestra. The plot is pretty silly and yet rather charming--not least because the French are mocked for their snobbery just as much as the Russians are parodied for their, er, enterprising nature. I did roll my eyes a lot but I did also smile at the end.

Finally, there was Partir the latest Kristin Scott Thomas film. I'm not really sure why I went to see this because although I think KST is a great actress, she tends to play characters who irritate me--they tend to be the same as one another too. Partir is like Please Give but without the humour, without the sharp writing and without Catherine Keener--both involve women with supposedly perfect, bourgeois lives who yet feel a sense of guilt or emptiness. Keener's character deals with this by randomly giving away money and volunteering (with hilarious consequences); KST's character deals but hooking up with the first red-blooded male to enter her passion-free existence: a builder named Ivan.

They don't have anything in common but that's OK because they spend all of their stolen moments getting intimate; when she's not accidentally running over his foot (hospitalising him) and encouraging him to steal paintings from her house to flog, that is. Naturally, though, KST's husband--a possessive, rich and boring guy called Samuel--is not particularly happy about all this and let's just say that hilarity does not ensue. I didn't really care though because KST was the coldest, most detached impassioned woman I've ever seen, her husband wasn't exactly charming either and Ivan had no personality to speak of other than Former-Convict-Lower-Class-Bit-of-Rough.

Certainly, if I ever need to see a film that will frustrate me hugely, I'm going to have to rewatch The English Patient: KST plus Ralph Fiennes equals detachment overload. Incidentally, I was planning to link to a post of mine where I explain my boredom with Ralph Fiennes' constant playing of cold, aloof characters about whom I cannot care but it seems that I never wrote one. The Reader, The Duchess, The Constant Gardener and The End of the Affair are recent examples of this; In Bruges is an exception as he's in "geezer" mode, although I realised that actually, he's better at cold bastards.