Word: fran
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...earnest, furrowed-brow debates. Sure, Ségolène Royal was there at the beginning of the proceedings (she's the President of Poitou-Charentes, La Rochelle's region) and she was there at the end, smiling at the jokes in the closing speech of François Hollande, the party secretary - and, to complicate matters, her partner (they are not married) and the father of her four children. But while her colleagues were laying out their views on everything from the minimum wage to how to give the European Union more heft, Royal, who turns 53 this month...
Call it the Fran Townsend treatment. Once in 2004, when then Homeland Security Under Secretary Asa Hutchinson tried to beg off giving his department's view on raising the terrorism threat level to orange until he checked with his boss, Tom Ridge, Townsend cut him off. "I need to know now," snapped George W. Bush's top adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security. "The President will be calling, and I have to have an answer." When Representative Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, phoned Townsend earlier this year to complain that the Coast Guard was dragging...
...recalling the deaths of 71 French soldiers in the ill-conceived mission to Bosnia in the early 1990s. In October 1983, 58 French peacekeepers died in a suicide bombing in Beirut widely attributed to a precursor of Hizballah. "The sense of déjà vu is overpowering," says François Heisbourg, a security expert who was a chief adviser to the Defense Minister at the time. "I hope the government doesn't put our troops in harm's way without a clear commitment that Hizballah is disarmed." The French position underlines an obvious truth: like most diplomatic compromises...
Over the decades, French films have meant different things to the American audience. For a long time they were ooh-la-la, saucier, more worldly than their robust but prim Hollywood counterparts. Then, when movies became films, they were the heart (François Truffaut) and the brains (Jean-Luc Godard) of international cinema in its glory days. Then there were the boulevard comedies, like La Cage aux Folles and Three Men and a Baby, that got remade by Hollywood. After that they retreated into austerity, into the perfunctory embrace of minimalism. And now... well, frankly, now French films...
...reminder that French cinema ain't dead yet, Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle arrives just in time: July 14, Bastille Day, commemorating the start of the French Republic. (Two other French films, Laurent Cantet's Heading South and François Ozon's Time to Leave, have their U.S. theatrical premieres this month as well, but, entre nous, you can skip them.) Based on Joseph Conrad's story The Return, the film, written by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic, concentrates the anguish and ego-busting of marital life into a few days in the lives...