On the first full day we were in Marseille, Jean had a bunch of preparations to do for the mechoui, so he cut me loose to explore the city, first drawing me a crude map of all the major attractions.
The day also happened to be what would have been my tenth wedding anniversary, so it was a little poignant, all in all, to contemplate the passage of time and the twists and turns of life while I explored the city on foot. This was particularly acute when I climbed the mountain overlooking the harbor to the sanctuary of Notre-Dame de la Garde, where the "bonne mere" statue is said to protect the sailors. The interior is a wonderful Byzantine revival style, commemorating the founding of the city by Greeks.
As I reached the top of the small mountain, the warm wind among the cypresses overlooking the sea felt exactly like the Greek Isles, which is where my ex-wife and I got married, and is my favorite part of Europe. It always makes me deeply peaceful to feel that kind of wind and that smell of the trees.
To Jean's later suprise, I managed to explore nearly everything on his crude map. In the late afternoon, I completed my trip by walking up the Canebiere, the historic boulevard that radiates out from the old Greek port. As I walked along the crowded sidewalks, I noticed a small movie theater tucked onto a side street. It was called the Les Varietes. Confusingly there was no marquee for the showtimes, and I couldn't tell which movies were even showing. But there was a small stand in the lobby with photocopied sheets that evidently contained the showtimes.
I snagged one for later use, and the next afternoon, with a little more free time by myself, I went back there and bought a ticket for Un mariage de reve, which was the French title for Easy Virtue, but which translates as "a dream marraige."
The auditorium was a medium-sized, with only side aisles. It had a huge high ceiling and all the walls were completely vivid red. The only other people in the audience were about half a dozen middle-aged women. For some reason, the ticket was only three euros, due to some film festival going on, which I didn't quite understand.
As far as the dialogue, it was in the original English. It turns out that "VO" (for version originale) movies are rare in France. Almost all movies are dubbed for the French audiences ("VF" for version francaise). But not in this case. Yet as in the case in Portugal, it was sometimes hard to tear my eyes away from the subtitles.
The movie is a period piece set in the 1920s. It follows a young sporty American woman (played by Jessica Biel) who marries into a family of the English landed gentry, and incurs all sorts of problems with her new English mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas, a multilingual workhouse of an actress).
Right away I thought: well this is sort of an interesting story, but the direction (by Stephan Elliot) feels sort of sloppy. As time went on, the biggest challenge by far in watching the movie was awakening to the fact that whereas Kristin Scott Thomas is impeccable, Jessica Biel is just flat out a terrible actress who has no business doing motion pictures outside of small range of characters.
It was painful to watch her on the screen. I didn't buy for a moment that she was an Ameila Earhart-style race car driver. I didn't buy for a moment that she was anything other than a young actress in over her head. It was terrible casting. A much better choice would have been, say, Amy Adams, who was in fact Ameila Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
The sloppiest aspect of the movie by far was the near constant use of 1930s period music, both in the soundtrack, and also forced into the mouths of the characters, who seemed to revel in quoting sound lyrics to each other. The entire conception of life in 1930s in the movie seemed to have been cleaned from the music that survives---extremely Postmodern.
Nevertheless, the movie proved the maxim that a film can succeed with sub-par acting and sub-par directing so long as the story worked. I kept thinking: who wrote this screenplay? Despite the atrocious acting form Biel and sloppy Postmodern dialogue, the story itself felt very tight and classical, exactly like one that actually could have been in a movie made in the 1930s. Someone really did their job on this one.
This was true right up to the end, which was the perfect resolution, the one that absolutely had to happen (ironically involving a man leaving his wife to go off and live a degenerate life in southern France).
Then during the closing credits, I got the punchline: the screenplay was adapted from a play written in 1925 by Noel Coward!
Well, that explains everything, I muttered to myself in theater, cursing the modern trend towards putting all the credits at the end of the movie. I have a hard time thinking that Coward inserted all those phony song lyrics into the dialogue.
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