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      Gérard Depardieu’s Art Collection Sells for $4.2 Million at Paris Auction

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      Over 230 pieces went under the hammer, including sculptures by Rodin. The French actor — now dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct — once played the artist in a movie.The near-entirety of an art collection belonging to Gérard Depardieu, the prolific French actor whose career was clouded in recent years by accusations of sexual assault and harassment, was sold at a two-day Paris auction this week that brought in 4 million euros, including fees, or about $4.2 million.Over 230 items went under the hammer on Tuesday and Wednesday at a sale organized at the Hôtel Drouot by the Ader auction house, including paintings by Alexander Calder and sculptures by Auguste Rodin, whom Depardieu played in the 1988 movie “Camille Claudel.”About 100 people crammed into the auction room on Tuesday night for the sale of the collection’s most prominent items, including a small oil painting of a flower vase by Odile Redon, which sold for €50,000, and the three small Rodin sculptures, which sold for €15,000 to €65,000.The star of the night seemed to be a 4.5-foot enlargement of “Walking Man,” a bronze sculpture originally made by Germaine Richier in 1945. The enlargement, which used to dominate Depardieu’s living room, was hammered up to €510,000 — but the auction house said in a statement Wednesday that the actor decided at the last minute not to sell the sculpture, and withdrew the lot.“This is a serious collection,” David Nordmann, one of the two auctioneers at Ader in charge of the sale, said in an interview. “This is not the collection of a celebrity who bought artwork just to show off.”“The Walking Man” by Germaine Richier, which once stood in Depardieu’s living room.Adagp, ParisNordmann had previously worked with Depardieu when the actor sold off the contents of a Parisian fine dining restaurant that he owned. The two men stayed in touch and discussed the sale his art collection. Depardieu gave the go-ahead in early 2023, and let the auctioneer pick the pieces and set the prices.“He loved to collect,” Nordmann said, recalling how Depardieu spent hours telling him about Matisse’s superiority to Picasso the first time he entered the actor’s home. But “at some point,” he added, “he reached the end of that process.”He has also faced a growing number of sexual abuse accusations. In interviews in April with Mediapart, an investigative news site, 13 women — actresses, makeup artists and production staff — accused Depardieu of making inappropriate sexual comments or gestures during the shooting of films released between 2004 and 2022. Two other women made similar accusations against him in interviews this summer with France Inter, a radio station. Depardieu declined to be interviewed for this article, but has always denied any criminal behavior.The turmoil in his personal life might have factored into his decision to sell, Nordmann said, “but not in the sense that he is trying to prove a point” or distract from the accusations.“He wants to move on,” he said.Some items sold at prices much higher than expected, including a 1928 portrait by Christian Jacques Bérard that sold for €55,000 euros, 11 times the low estimate, and a monochromatic ink composition by Jean Arp that sold for €20,000. But most pieces sold within the estimated range.The collection, which skews heavily toward postwar abstraction and contemporary art, includes widely recognizable names — a Duchamp collage; several pieces by Miró. Depardieu appears to have favored rugged compositions, bold colors, thick brushstrokes and raw materials, in keeping with his larger-than-life personality, Nordmann said.He refused to lend pieces for shows, Nordmann said, including the Richier sculpture, which was recently requested for a show at the Centre Pompidou.Depardieu in the Netflix TV show “Marseille.” The actor has appeared in over 250 movies.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe sale did not include any Depardieu memorabilia. But it attracted unusually large crowds, both during the sale and beforehand, as thousands of curious visitors crowded the Hôtel Drouot to get a peek at the actor’s collection before it was snapped up.Depardieu is one of France’s most prominent and prolific lead actors, an internationally recognized figure who has played in the last 50 years in more than 250 movies, including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and in TV shows like “Marseille.”Over the past decade, though, Depardieu’s popularity has waned as personal scandals overtook his acting career. He became a Russian citizen in 2013 to avoid taxes in France, and has expressed a strong friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, although last year he denounced the invasion of Ukraine.But the accusations of sexual abuse against Depardieu have been more damaging. He has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations.But Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault in a case involving Charlotte Arnould, a French actress who has accused him of sexually assaulting her in Paris in 2018, when she was 22, during informal rehearsals for a theater production. Prosecutors had initially dropped that investigation in 2019, citing of a lack of incriminating evidence, but it was reopened in 2020.The French movie industry has grappled with several high-profile accusations of sexual abuse in recent years and taken steps to address them. But mixed reactions to the #MeToo movement in France — which has also given a warm reception to artists accused of abuse — exposed sharp cultural divides between France and the United States.Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle More

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      John Eliot Gardiner, Famed Conductor, Accused of Hitting Singer

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      John Eliot Gardiner was accused of lashing out backstage at a singer who had headed the wrong way off a podium during a performance of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens.”The appearance by the conductor John Eliot Gardiner leading the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in southeastern France this week was supposed to be a celebration: the start of a tour across Europe by one of classical music’s most revered maestros and his esteemed ensembles.Instead, Gardiner, 80, provoked an outcry when, on Tuesday evening, he was accused of hitting a singer in the face backstage after a concert performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André.Gardiner struck the singer, William Thomas, a bass, because he had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, according to a person who was granted anonymity to describe the incident because the person was not authorized to discuss it publicly.Thomas, a rising bass from England who was performing the role of Priam, did not appear to be seriously injured and was set to perform again on Wednesday evening. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment.Gardiner withdrew from the festival on Wednesday to return to London to see his doctor, said Nicholas Boyd-Vaughan, a spokesman for Intermusica, the agency that represents him. Gardiner was unavailable for comment, Boyd-Vaughan said.Gardiner — a father of the period-instrument movement and the founder of some of its most treasured ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique — conducted at the coronation of King Charles III of Britain in May. In addition to making numerous recordings, many of which are considered classics, his 2013 book about Johann Sebastian Bach, “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” was well received by critics.The incident at “Les Troyens,” which was first reported by the classical music website Slippedisc, prompted criticism in the classical music industry, with some saying that Gardiner should face consequences. Gardiner and the ensembles still have four more planned stops on the tour, including at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, the Opéra Royal in Versailles, the Berliner Festspiele in Germany and the Proms, the BBC’s classical music festival, in England.“John Eliot Gardiner is still going to be allowed to conduct @bbcproms?” the mezzo-soprano Helena Cooke wrote on Wednesday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Are you joking?”The Proms said it was investigating. “We take allegations about inappropriate behavior seriously and are currently establishing the facts about the incident,” said George Chambers, a spokesman for the festival.Gardiner was replaced at the Festival Berlioz on Wednesday by Dinis Sousa, an associate conductor of the Monteverdi Choir, for a performance of the final acts of “Les Troyens.”Bruno Messina, the general and artistic director of the Festival Berlioz, said in a statement that he was “devastated by the incident,” which he did not describe or give details of, but that he felt it was important that Wednesday’s show go on. More

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      ‘Lady Killer’ and ‘The Strange Mister Victor’ Review

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      Two newly restored films by the director Jean Grémillon, whom cinephiles discuss like a special secret, get a second life in theaters.Compared to other heavy hitters from the golden age of French cinema — think Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game”) or Marcel Carné (“Children of Paradise”) — history hasn’t been kind to Jean Grémillon. This is especially the case in the United States, where the director’s work continues to be discussed among cinephiles like a special secret. It’s a shame. His films are among the most innovative and expressive from a period stretching roughly from the early 1930s through the ’50s — and in many ways they look ahead to the rule breaking of the French New Wave.Newly restored in 4K, “Lady Killer” and “The Strange Mister Victor” are essentially Grémillon’s breakthrough films, the midpoints between his early documentaries and experimental dramas and his greatest hits (“Stormy Waters,” “Lumière d’été”), which he made during the German occupation of France.“Lady Killer” stars the leonine Jean Gabin as Lucien, a womanizing legionnaire. Suave and sexy in his uniform, Lucien attracts the female gaze like moths to the flame. Enter the femme fatale Madeleine (Mireille Balin), a beautiful socialite bound to a wealthy benefactor. Lucien falls hard for Madeleine and takes up a job at a print shop in Paris so that they can be together. Then comes betrayal and murder, though Grémillon supplements the bleak fatalism and noirish intrigue with bursts of quivering melodrama that enrich and expand the story beyond its ostensible fatal-attraction framework.In his early days, Grémillon was a violinist who played with an orchestra that provided accompaniment for silent films. He applies this musical sensibility to his construction of drama. His films move between small, seemingly uneventful moments and ones that hit like a reverberating gong. What starts out as a placid relationship between Lucien and his meek doctor friend, René (Réne Lefèvre), moves on to new, devastating terrain. Their bond is capped by a startlingly intimate scene of male camaraderie that plays like a fever dream.Working in the tradition of poetic realism, Grémillon intermingled documentarylike visions of working-class milieus with stylized interludes of psychological tension. “The Strange Mister Victor” begins like a panoramic drama about the socially diverse inhabitants of Toulon, in the south of France, and eventually reveals an ethical crisis about the entanglement of two men. Victor Agardanne (Raimu) is an upstanding businessman with wife and child, though he secretly consorts with a band of crooks. When he kills one of them for threatening to blackmail him, he uses a tool that belongs to his cobbler, Bastien (Pierre Blanchar), as the murder weapon, which leads to that man’s arrest. When Bastien escapes imprisonment, the guilty Victor goes out of his way to harbor the unsuspecting fugitive.There’s perhaps more to chew on in “Mister Victor,” bolstered by an expert performance from Raimu that straddles genuine moral anxiety and self-interested desperation. Yet one particular scene from “Lady Killer” continues to live in my head rent-free.Midway through the film, a mirror captures Lucien as he spots Madeleine from a distance and then steps back into the shadows when she meets his gaze. The plots of Grémillon’s films are meaty and sociologically probing, but what sets him apart from the directors of his time — the majority of them narrative-focused artists who came from a theater background — are moments like these: brief, wordless, but throbbing with desire and despair.Lady KillerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.The Strange Mister VictorNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jane Birkin: Made in England, Forged in France

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      Birkin had a thriving career as a singer and an actress, in both communicating a seemingly nonchalant demeanor that camouflaged a melancholy core.For most of her life, Jane Birkin, who died Sunday at 76, acted as a bridge — an elegant one, with an affectless grace that never betrayed the strains of load bearing. She connected her native Britain and her adopted France, two countries physically close but often at odds. She never lost her English accent when she spoke, somehow joining the two languages into her own Birkin-ese, “the improbable French that added to her charm,” as Le Monde put it. She floated among song, cinema and theater, and she could reach large, varied audiences while also connecting with France’s auteur culture.Her career did not go in a straight line. She made the most of her unassuming, breathy voice in her recordings, and while her unconventional glamour stood out onscreen, she was never afraid to veer off in unexpected directions when choosing roles. She let herself be guided by adventurousness.After a small role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ode to Swinging London, “Blow-Up,” Birkin left England in 1968 to make a French movie, Pierre Grimblat’s “Slogan.” On the set, she met Serge Gainsbourg, the brilliant, tortured musician, who was in the cast and wrote the film’s score.They fell in love and soon became an It couple, impossibly stylish and cool. Crucially, she also became one of the leading interpreters of his songs, starting with their erotically charged duet “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” and continuing through six solo Birkin albums, released from 1973 to 1990. The poppiest and catchiest is “Ex fan des sixties” (1978); the poignant “Baby Alone in Babylone” (1983) largely deals with the couple’s separation.Birkin left Gainsbourg in 1980, fed up with his drinking and temper, but their personal and professional partnership outlasted the breakup. And despite a reductive media habit of describing Birkin merely as Gainsbourg’s muse, it enriched both of them.Birkin remained loyal to the Gainsbourg songbook throughout her life. Five years after his death, she released an album of Gainsbourg covers, “Versions Jane” (1996); followed by “Arabesque” (2002), an album of Gainsbourg songs arranged by the Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles; and “Birkin/Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique” (2017), backed by a symphony orchestra.But she also escaped Gainsbourg’s shadow, working with younger musicians and producers, and eventually writing or co-writing the lyrics on her albums “Enfants d’hiver” (2008) and “Oh! Pardon tu dormais …” (2020), both largely drawing from her life.That last record is a good illustration of the way Birkin hopscotched among artistic fields, one feeding into another: “Oh! Pardon tu dormais …” has the same title as, and was inspired by, a made-for-TV movie Birkin directed in 1992 and a 1999 play she wrote and appeared in.Birkin performing in 2001. As a singer, she made the most of her unassuming, breathy voice.Jean-Loup Gautreau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeyond her success as a singer — not blockbuster by any means, but attracting a loyal fan base around the world — Birkin had a thriving career as an actress, communicating a similar vibe onscreen as she did in music: a natural, unadorned beauty; a seemingly nonchalant demeanor, camouflaging a melancholy core.In 1969, the year that “Slogan” came out, Birkin had a supporting role in Jacques Deray’s scorching, now cult thriller “La Piscine” alongside Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. With “La Piscine,” and popular comedies like “La Moutarde Me Monte au Nez!” (1974) and “La Course à l’Échalote” (1975), she could have continued to mine her gamine charm and cute accent for a comfortable if predictable acting career. But in typical Birkin fashion, she made an abrupt stylistic U-turn by starring in Gainsbourg’s provocative debut feature “Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus” (1976), in which she portrayed an androgynous waitress who has a rather complicated relationship with a gay man played by Joe Dallesandro, the Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey regular.For much of the 1970s and early ’80s, Birkin alternated between making Gainsbourg records and appearing in mainstream movies, including “Death on the Nile” (1978), which featured the kind of international star buffet that blockbuster movies of the time ate up: Her co-stars included Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, David Niven, Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury.Throwing yet another twist into her career is that after Gainsbourg, Birkin was in a relationship with the uncompromising filmmaker Jacques Doillon. In 1984, she starred in his brutally intense, fever-pitch movie “La Pirate” as Alma, who is torn between her husband (played by Birkin’s own brother, Andrew) and a woman (Maruschka Detmers). It felt like a new Jane Birkin, inhabiting her physicality in a way that was almost dangerously unrestrained — and it earned her the first of three César Award nominations.The next year, she appeared in a Marivaux play directed by the influential Patrice Chéreau at his Nanterre theater. Despite her trepidation, her performance was a success, and Birkin continued to appear onstage, alternating, as was her wont, between boulevard fare and Euripides.Another consequential encounter in the 1980s was with the director Agnès Varda, who made the gloriously unconventional film “Jane B. par Agnès V.” (1988), in which, as Glenn Kenny noted in The New York Times, Birkin “retains a slightly breathy girlishness that complements her largely cheery, open personality and her intrepid intelligence” — words that neatly capture Birkin’s enduring appeal. Varda encouraged Birkin to write, and the two collaborated on the script of Varda’s “Kung-Fu Master!” (1988). Birkin went on to direct an autobiographical film, “Boxes” (2007).For Birkin boundaries were porous: between public and private, high and low, art and life. In his tribute to her, President Emmanuel Macron called Birkin “a French icon.” Of that there is no doubt. More

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      Jane Birkin, Singer, Actress and Fashion Inspiration, Dies at 76

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      She was a lithe beauty of 1960s European film, a famous musical collaborator and lover of Serge Gainsbourg, and the namesake of elegant Hermès handbags.Jane Birkin, who helped define chic female sexuality of the 1970s as an actress in arty and erotic European movies and in her relationship — equal parts romantic and artistic — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris. Ms. Birkin, who later became known for inspiring one of the best known lines of luxury handbags, was 76.Her death was confirmed by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called her “a French icon” in a message on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been found dead at her home but that the cause was not immediately known.The child of a famously beautiful actress and a socially connected British naval officer, Ms. Birkin led a life guided by many happy accidents.While she was on a flight in 1984, a plastic bag in which she was keeping her possessions broke, leading her to complain aloud that Hermès did not make a bag that could fit all her things. The man sitting next to her happened to be Jean-Louis Dumas, then the head designer of Hermès (and later its chief executive). The company released the Birkin bag line the same year — in just the large size she had requested.Standard Birkin bags now sell for $10,000, and the difficulties of obtaining one — given a complex manufacturing process and a deliberately rationed supply to boutiques — have given the bag the cachet of exclusivity.Her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg began just as fortuitously, in 1968. She was in her early 20s, her first marriage having fallen apart, when, without particular renown as an actress and without speaking a word of French, she managed to be cast in a French movie, “Slogan,” starring Mr. Gainsbourg.The two fell in love, but Ms. Birkin did not see a way to remain long in France. Then, dining out one night, she had a chance encounter with the French director Jacques Deray, got hired to act in a movie of his, stayed in the country and solidified her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg.She lived in France for the rest of her life, and her engagement with Mr. Gainsbourg and his music proved equally enduring.The most notable product of their collaboration and romance was their 1969 hit recording of Mr. Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”).In the song, a duet, Mr. Gainsbourg speaks of sex in a low, conversational voice as Ms. Birkin confesses her love in suggestive murmurs and moans and the high-pitched singing of an ingénue.The song was condemned by the Vatican and banned in several countries and by the B.B.C. television network. But it sold millions of copies.Nearly 50 years later, in 2018, Ms. Birkin was still singing music by Mr. Gainsbourg, by then on a world tour of orchestral versions of his songs.“If I am singing in Argentina in two weeks’ time,” she told The Guardian, “it is because of ‘Je t’aime.’”Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to Judy Campbell, an actress who gained renown for performing for British troops with Noël Coward during World War II, and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy.In 2021, her father’s exploits during World War II were recounted in “A Dangerous Enterprise,” a book by Tim Spicer, a former British military officer. Commander Birkin’s duties included navigating boats on moonless nights across the English Channel to bring to safety Allied spies, stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of war who had found themselves in France.Ms. Birkin, at 18, married the British composer John Barry, known for arranging the trademark theme to James Bond movies, and they had a daughter, Kate. At 20, Ms. Birkin appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hit 1966 movie, “Blow Up,” an erotic tale of a London fashion photographer. She played a fashion model — the credits listed her as only The Blonde — and gained some attention for a risqué nude scene.Ms. Birkin with the English actor David Hemmings in a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow-Up,” released in 1966.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images“Had it all worked out with John Barry, I would never have been curious to know what was going on anywhere else,” Ms. Birkin told The Guardian in 2017. “I would have just gone on being his wife. I would have been delighted. But because he went off with someone else, and I was left with Kate, I had to find a job quite fast.”That led to her audition for “Slogan.”The movie that kept her in France was “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. (It found unexpected renewed popularity in the United States in 2021.) A sun-soaked film of sex and jealousy with many shots of scantily clad actors, the movie proved to be an effective showcase for Ms. Birkin’s long-limbed beauty.Her romance with Mr. Gainsbourg captivated the French public. She was the young doe-eyed expat, he the aging but still virile artistic genius. The relationship lasted for more than a decade, ending when she left him in the early 1980s for the French film director Jacques Doillon. Mr. Gainsbourg died in 1991 at 62.Though Ms. Birkin would later speak self-deprecatingly about her role as Mr. Gainsbourg’s muse, she embraced becoming “the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame,” as The New York Times labeled her in 2018.She described to The Times connections between the music he wrote for her and work by classical composers like Chopin and Brahms.“I would have thought that he was probably France’s most modern writer,” she said. “He invented a new language, he cut words in two like Cole Porter.”Ms. Birkin and Mr. Gainsbourg with her daughters Charlotte, left, and Kate Barry in 1972. Charlotte became a singer and actress. Kate became a photographer who died in 2013.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin released “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her first album of her own songs written in English, in 2021. “The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France,” the music writer Ben Cardew wrote in a review for Pitchfork.Ms. Birkin also continued to act, including in films by Agnès Varda and plays by Patrice Chéreau. She was also popular in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights as well as for her British accent when speaking French, which the French found endearing.“The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a message on Twitter on Sunday. “We will never forget her songs, her laughs and her incomparable accent.”Ms. Birkin in 2021 at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Hermès put her name on a line of exclusive handbags.Stephane Cardinale/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin had a mild stroke in 2021 and had recently canceled a series of concerts because of health issues.She is survived by two daughters, one with Mr. Gainsbourg and the other with Mr. Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, each of whom has, like their mother, inspired designers and followers of fashion. Her other daughter, Kate Barry, a photographer, died at 46 in 2013 in a fall from a window of her fourth-floor Paris apartment.Ms. Birkin discovered that her romantic separation from Mr. Gainsbourg did not dim their collaboration. He kept writing new songs intended for her until he died.After their breakup, “you could talk back to him for once,” she told The Guardian. “You were not just his creation any more.”Guy Trebay More

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      Ticketmaster Pauses Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Sale in France

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      Fans trying to purchase tickets to six of the pop superstar’s concerts faced long queues and technical issues before the company said that a new on-sale time would be announced.Ticketmaster has once again cracked under the weight of a Taylor Swift ticket sale — this time in France.As French fans prepared on Tuesday to purchase tickets to six concerts in May and June 2024 on Swift’s Eras Tour — four shows in Paris, two in Lyon — Ticketmaster’s website displayed a gigantic queue of customers ready to buy; one screenshot appeared to tell a fan that 1,023,504 shoppers were in line ahead of them.Soon, Ticketmaster announced that sales for those shows had been placed on “pause.” The company said that a new on-sale time would be announced, and that “all codes not already used will remain valid.” But some fans’ social media posts seemed to show technical errors on Ticketmaster’s website, including a progress icon that “keeps spinning and spinning and spinning,” as one fan — speaking English with an American accent, but with 762 euros’ worth of tickets in their shopping cart — put it.A few hours later, the French branch of Ticketmaster offered some more detail on social media, blaming the problem on a “third-party provider” that the company did not identify, and adding that tickets were still available. A representative of Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s corporate parent, said that the provider works with Ticketmaster only in France.The situation in France appeared to be a frustrating repeat of the problems that plagued Swift’s North American presale in November, when an influx of millions of fans — and bots — overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s systems, and fans reported issues like tickets in their shopping carts disappearing before they could be purchased. Ticketmaster shut down its public sale as a result, though the company also said it had sold more than two million tickets to the tour in a single day.Problems like those at Swift’s presale in November — as well as long-simmering concerns over Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s market dominance — led to a brutal Senate Judiciary hearing in January. Senators from both parties flatly called the company a monopoly and were skeptical of an executive’s explanation that Ticketmaster was unable to defend itself against an onslaught of bots during Swift’s presale.“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said at the hearing. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”Yet the demand for Swift tickets has been extraordinary, with Swift selling out stadiums everywhere she plays and tickets going for thousands of dollars on the secondary market. She is scheduled to complete the North American leg of her tour next month, then play in Latin America, Asia and Europe.The Justice Department has separately been conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation. The Justice Department has not confirmed that investigation, but Live Nation’s chief executive, Michael Rapino, has spoken about it openly. More

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      At Glamorous French Festivals, Poverty Is Only Onstage

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      The opening productions of the Avignon and Aix-en-Provence Festivals brought tales of the down-and-out to well-heeled spectators. It got awkward.Two events tower over France’s summer festival season each July, held in cities less than 50 miles apart. One, the Avignon Festival, is a bustling, overcrowded celebration of theater; the other, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, offers a more genteel operatic lineup.This week, well-heeled audiences sat down to opening productions at both festivals. Aix, in lieu of opera singers, unusually welcomed actors from the Comédie-Française, France’s most storied theater troupe, for “The Threepenny Opera,” directed by Thomas Ostermeier; in Avignon, the theater collective In Vitro was supplemented with some new faces for Julie Deliquet’s “Welfare.”Both productions touched on a subject that was an awkward fit for those affluent crowds: poverty.Since France has seen the cost of living rise quickly over the past year, it might have felt like an appropriate nod to the times. Yet few things are trickier onstage than asking actors — a profession in which the working class is hardly well-represented — to act “poor.”In the event, the Comédie-Française fares better than Deliquet’s actors, if only because Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 “The Threepenny Opera” is a riotous satire. Its amoral criminals and beggars are over-the-top inventions, and Ostermeier’s visually subdued production derives most of its pleasures from letting the cast’s superb talents loose.“Welfare” is another matter. It is a close adaptation of a searing 1975 documentary by Frederick Wiseman, who brought his cameras to a New York welfare center and bore witness as claimants dealt desperately with a rigid system. Wiseman himself long wanted to see the material translated onto the stage, and brought the idea to Deliquet, the director of the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis, France.Yet “Welfare,” which shared the opening honors in Avignon with a dance production, Bintou Dembélé’s “G.R.O.O.V.E.,” looks as absurd onstage as it is affecting on-screen. No one involved seems to have realized the insurmountable issue: Re-enacting the hardships of real people with performers turns those people into characters, so their stories lose the ring of truth. Fostering the same empathy takes more work, but here, Deliquet seems hesitant to step in.It doesn’t help that the unaffected black-and-white cinematography of Wiseman’s film has been replaced here with a technicolor recreation of a school gymnasium, including a bright teal floor that stretches across the vast outdoor stage of the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s most imposing performance venue. It’s as if the sitcom “That 70s Show” had opted to tackle welfare benefits, complete with well-cut, visibly new costumes. (Nothing says “my children are about to starve” like a neatly placed red beret.)The stories told in Wiseman’s film are loosely reorganized here into a day in the life of a welfare center, as case workers deal with one exasperated claimant after the next. One man lost his home in a fire. A couple of recovering addicts are trying to get their lives back on track. A heavily pregnant woman is asked for medical proof of her condition, while the husband of an older lady is withholding her checks.There are comedic moments in the film, but in Deliquet’s stage version, they start to feel involuntarily farcical. The energetic delivery of the cast may be because they need to project in the cavernous space, which holds around 2,000 spectators. The actors playing the claimants use their moments in the spotlight to play up the injustice of the system, instead of simply exemplifying it, as Wiseman’s subjects did so effectively.“Welfare” means well, and it’s easy to see why the new director of the Avignon Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, opted to put the project in a prestigious spot. It acts as a statement of change after the lumbering tenure of his predecessor, Olivier Py, and Deliquet is only the second woman director to receive a Cour d’Honneur slot in the 76-year history of the Avignon Festival.Deliquet deserves it: She is one of France’s top theater-makers, with a string of successes to her name. In “Welfare,” however, she is too respectful of Wiseman’s source material. Some directors, like Alexander Zeldin with his “Inequalities” trilogy, have found the right tone in recent years to tackle underprivileged lives, but “Welfare” looks as if it is playing at poverty.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella in Thomas Ostermeier’s “The Threepenny Opera,” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.Jean-Louis FernandezIn Aix, “The Threepenny Opera” may not be an unqualified triumph for Ostermeier, its German director, but at least the show’s roll-call of lowlife misfits is luxuriously cast, and with help from Alexandre Pateau’s sharp new French translation, comes across as it was presumably intended: wry, charismatic, brilliantly individual.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella are exuberantly, wackily brilliant as the shallow Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, who set out to take down the notorious criminal Macheath for eloping with their daughter Polly. Not all the actors are equally fine singers, so Vella’s powerful voice is an asset here. So are the vocal talents of Marie Oppert, a recent recruit to the Comédie-Française troupe and a trained singer who, in the role of Polly, turned “Pirate Jenny” into a showstopping number.Well-crafted scenes come thick and fast in the first half, but the energy tails off later. It’s as if Ostermeier, directing for the first time in an operatic context, stopped short of going truly big. The set designs are minimalistic: four mics downstage, a black platform behind the actors and a few screens above it that show repetitive Russian constructivism-inspired collages. On the main stage of the Comédie-Française in Paris, where the production will transfer in the fall, the company could simply repurpose the very similar set of Ivo van Hove’s 2022 “Tartuffe.”Maxime Pascal conducts his own ensemble, Le Balcon, who play off the actors well: At one point, a musician even caught a mic Benjamin Lavernhe — a whimsical highlight as the corrupt policeman Tiger Brown — had inadvertently dropped into the pit. Pascal’s reorchestration, adding electronic instruments, lent an intriguing edge to the biting momentum of Weill’s score.As in Avignon, the production was staged on an open-air stage of historical significance, in the courtyard of the Palais de l’Archevêché, where the festival was born in 1948. While it is reasonably sized compared to the Cour d’Honneur, it’s a prestigious venue, where audience members pay up to $180 for the privilege of seeing “The Threepenny Opera.”As with “Welfare,” there is whiplash in watching impoverished characters in such rarefied company. But that’s the reality of prestige theater today. More

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      Anya Firestone, Tour Guide and Star of ‘The Real Girlfriends of Paris,’ on ‘The Art of Drinking’

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      Anya Firestone leads what she calls “cou-tours” around Paris: Tours tailored to the clients’ interests, be they dinosaurs, drag queens or booze.On a recent morning at the Louvre, Anya Firestone handed out bottles of Evian. “Because ‘the art of drinking’ begins with hydration,” she said.Ms. Firestone, 34, a museum guide-conférencière (tour guide) and art integration strategist, wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of olive martinis, pink Manolo Blahniks, the Mini Bar clutch by Charlotte Olympia and a Marni dress printed with likenesses of Venus. She escorted Matt Stanley, her client, and his Parisian date, Salomé Bes, 30, past the long lines at the museum’s entrance and toward the Code of Hammurabi. The set of ancient Babylonian laws included “an eye for an eye,” she explained, and it also dealt with issues of alcoholic beverages, like watered-down wine and the peoples’ “right to beer,” as she pithily put it.“Pretty impressive!” said Mr. Stanley, the chief executive of a memory care community near Austin, Texas. Mr. Stanley, 43, had hired Ms. Firestone to design a two-day visit around alcohol.“You’re going to see that drinking and art had the same upbringing and moved in the same direction — from a religious context with prayers and libations to decadence and debauchery,” said Ms. Firestone, who calls her custom tours “cou-tours,” a play on couture.Ms. Firestone speaks before “The Romans in their Decadence” by Thomas Couture at the Musée d’Orsay. “I don’t describe myself as American,” she said. “I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesLast fall, Ms. Firestone starred in “The Real Girlfriends of Paris,” a reality show broadcast on Bravo that followed six 20- and 30-something American women as they navigated work, life and l’amour. She said that the opportunity to put her business, called Maison Firestone, on public view was the main reason she had done the show. But Ms. Firestone had also liked the idea of elevating the oft-scorned TV genre with art and culture. (Not to mention some pun- and Yiddish-inflected wit.) “By the way,” she said, “I don’t describe myself as American. I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”Ms. Firestone was raised in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood Manhattan; her parents were actors. She first moved to Paris in 2010 after college at George Washington University, for an artist residency, during which she wrote poetry and sculpted oversize macarons. (People thought they were colorful hamburgers,” she said, explaining that the confection had not become popular yet.) She worked briefly as an au pair, channeling Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp, she said. But Ms. Firestone likened her current plot to the TV shows “Emily in Paris” — “Love her chutzpah, less her bucket hats,” she said of the protagonist — and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” After a master’s degree in French cultural studies from Columbia Global Center in Paris, she spent a few years traveling between New York and Paris, offering custom tours and writing about art and brand intersections for Highsnobiety. Maison Firestone — which also designs themed events with luxury brands — followed from that interest in “art as branding,” she said.Ms. Firestone often dresses according to her tour theme. In this case, she carried a “Mini Bar” clutch by Charlotte Olympia.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesAt the Ritz, Ms. Firestone wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of a martini.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesAt “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” a white marble statue from Hellenistic Greece, better known as “Niké,” for example, Ms. Firestone noted that the figure’s wings had inspired the sportswear empire’s Swoosh logo.Ms. Firestone’s clients used to find her only by word of mouth, but now about half of them, including Mr. Stanley, come to her via the Bravo show and Instagram. The majority are visiting France from the United States; the cost of a tour starts at $2,400 for one or two people for one day.Her angle is to take “art off the wall to show its intersection with things that people already enjoy and consume,” Ms. Firestone said, be it champagne or Schiaparelli or N.F.T.s. Recent and upcoming tours have been designed for drag queens, the crypto team at a venture capital firm, “Eloise-like” little girls with a fondness for dinosaurs, and a man who is blind.The female statue is a Roman copy of a Greek statue of a maenad, at the Louvre.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesWorking her way through Dionysian art and decorative works, Louis XIV’s stemware, and the occasional Bravo fan (“I just want to say that I loved the show!”), Ms. Firestone directed Mr. Stanley and Ms. Bes into the museum’s largest room, where the Mona Lisa hangs on a wall across from “The Wedding Feast at Cana,” an immense piece by the 16th-century artist Paolo Veronese that depicts Jesus Christ turning water into wine. “You can see wine tastings happening all over the painting,” she said.After lunch at the Ritz, which naturally featured cocktails and champagne, the itinerary called for the Musée d’Orsay. “The Louvre was a former palace, this is a former train station,” Ms. Firestone said. She likes companion visits to the two museums, which, she said, help to show how art entered modernity by breaking from the monarchy, the church and the academy and spilling into the cafes of Paris.“L’Absinthe” by Edgar Degas pictured what she called a “tapped out” woman with a glass of the infamous green spirit on a table before her. Nearby was a painting by Édouard Manet of the same woman (the actress Ellen Andrée), titled “Plum Brandy.” Ms. Firestone prompted her clients to ponder the difference. “She’s not nearly so sad or so schnockered here, right? She seems OK.”The tour naturally included Louis XIV’s stemware at the Louvre.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesParis, she said, had by then been transformed by Napoleon III’s urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, bringing with it grand department stores like Le Bon Marché and Samaritaine.Ms. Firestone and Mr. Stanley met the next day at Samaritaine, where she had arranged for a cognac tasting and some shopping in the private apartments with a stylist. “Bonjour. How y’all doin’?” Mr. Stanley said, greeting the staff. “I’m not an aristocrat — I’m just a cowboy!” He chose a pair of drawstring trousers by Maison Margiela.Afterward, in a taxi, Ms. Firestone pointed at a Prada ad featuring Scarlett Johansson. “I think they’re referencing that Man Ray photo of Kiki de Montparnasse,” she said. “We like a good art-brand ref.” She Googled the Man Ray photograph on her phone and held it up for Mr. Stanley to see, who said he felt like he had gotten a master class.“Who doesn’t love their hand held in Paris?” Ms. Firestone said. More