Word: motly
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...buzz today about discontent, about social gloom and political drift, a crisis of faith in the future and a fading sense of national identity? An identity crisis -- in France? It sounds as unlikely as the notion of Cyrano de Bergerac fumbling his sword or groping for the mot juste. In his 1983 book The Europeans, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini, a seasoned and mordant observer of the Continental scene, cites Edmond Rostand's fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand's play...
...Hollywood has so much fun hating itself that the venom can taste like fine wine. Carrie Fisher puts plenty of savory laughs into her, well, perhaps slightly autobiographical script, and under Mike Nichols' direction, Meryl Streep parades her dazzling comedic gifts; she adds spin and sizzle to every bon mot...
...final triumph is Streep's. Forget the globe-trotting tragic-heroine roles that made her famous. Under the sorcerer's wand of director Nichols she proves again she is our finest comedienne; like the late Irene Dunne, she adds spin and sizzle to every bon mot. By sinking ever so slightly into world- weariness, Streep can locate the desperation in Suzanne's banter while keeping her delivery featherlight. And she can sing too, bringing her uniquely precise passion to ballads and down-home rave-ups. "I don't want life to imitate art," Suzanne says with her usual blithe exasperation...
Again and again, he reaches for the bon mot, the stylistic inflection to convince his readers, as autobiographers have shown theirs, of "the authority of style, [and] not self-revelation...
SOME of the letters give tantalizing glimpses into a personality who was as controversial in his lifetime as he still is today, but they are too frequently cut off before the reader's appetite is satisfied. Flaubert seems to have sought the mot juste, the perfect word, as much in his personal writing as in his novels, and the passages which include letters he wrote are beautiful. It would be better to read a collection of his letters than to read Lottman's biography...