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      ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

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      For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Taste of Things’ and the Transcendence of a French Meal

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      “The Taste of Things” is the latest movie to luxuriate in France’s gourmand tradition, a safe way of attracting audiences outside the country.In France, a robust appetite is a virtue if not a heroic trait.Eating gratifies all the senses: We take in the aroma of a handsome dish, delight at the sound of a sizzling steak or crave the crunch of a crusty baguette. So to fully appreciate the various sensory dimensions of a fine French meal is, essentially, to express a sophisticated artistic judgment.“The Taste of Things,” by the director Tran Anh Hung, is a 19th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. The feature opened in theaters Wednesday in France and will play on screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 10 before its Oscar-qualifying run in mid-December.The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.“The Taste of Things” is an 18th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. via Carole Bethuel/IFC FIlmsWhen I first watched “The Taste of Things” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surrounded by a delightfully vocal audience. The oohing and ahhing was ubiquitous and, apparently, a visceral response, similar to what is elicited by beholding Monet’s water lilies or being wrapped in the velvety textures of Whitney Houston’s voice. Savoring a tasty meal (or even just watching one come together on a big screen) brings a kind of joy that can’t be explained by logic or reason.Reviews of the film in France have been mixed. Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre found its blissful atmosphere and near-absence of dramatic tension perplexing and boring. Olivier Lamm of Libération wrote that there’s much more to the film than its food-porn attractions — it’s also about the assault of junk food and globalization on French standards.“Chocolat,” starring Juliette Binoche, also celebrated the French devotion to the culinary arts and made a lot of money at the U.S. box office.AlamyThe country’s rich gastronomic tradition — and its long history of federally regulating the quality and authenticity of its wines and produce — is a particular point of national pride, and French film industry leaders have embraced the gourmand label. This year, “The Taste of Things” was selected as the French submission for the Oscar’s best international film category over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”The decision was met with objections from French critics, who said Triet was punished for the political charge of her acceptance speech at Cannes. However, the selection of Hung’s film isn’t all that surprising given the selection committee’s evident partiality to films commenting on the country’s national identity — or, from a more cynical standpoint, films that offer Oscar voters a tourist-friendly idea of France.The French devotion to the culinary arts is a bit of an onscreen cliché, and Hollywood films like “Ratatouille” and “Chocolat” (the latter, also starring Binoche, made big money in the United States, but fared far less well in France) have relied on stereotypically French settings, like a rustic village and a Parisian bistro, to communicate lessons about food’s revolutionary and unifying powers.More rewarding — and complex — is the 1956 French classic “La Traversée de Paris,” starring the Frenchest of all Frenchmen, Jean Gabin, as an artist-turned-black market courier in Nazi-occupied Paris. This black dramedy stars Gabin and the comedian Bourvil, who play a bickering duo who must transport four suitcases of contraband pork across the city while evading the authorities and a horde of hungry hounds.Political instability not only cuts off access to revered foodstuffs, it drains the very spirit of those committed to the art of eating. In the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French chef, is forced to flee from her Parisian neighborhood when the Paris Commune, an insurrectionist government, seizes power in 1871.Seeking refuge in the Danish countryside, Babette moves into a spartan Protestant household manned by two Protestant sisters accustomed to eating the same brown fish stew, which has a mudlike consistency. Fourteen years into her employment with the sisters, Babette miraculously wins the French lottery and, rather than fund her return to France, spends all her winnings on a multicourse dinner for the townspeople.Stéphane Audran as Babette in “Babette’s Feast.”Entertainment Pictures, via AlamyThe feast — a turtle soup, stuffed quail, rum sponge cake and more — breaks the guests’ brains, while Babette, in the final scene, emerges as an emissary of the sublime. Her culinary gifts, her cooking’s ability to disrupt the very foundations of what her Danish friends perceived to be reality, make her angelic.At the same time, isn’t fine dining — like certain kinds of music, literature and art — rather bourgeois? Nothing screams upper middle class like the prim and proper dinner scene. This is delightful in films by, say, Éric Rohmer, who was fond of depicting the natural choreography of mealtime, the mess of wine glasses and plates of fruit and cheese floating between guests in the middle of a meandering conversation.In other films, dinnertime can seem ridiculous. Consider Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which three couples try over and over to enjoy a white tablecloth feast, but do not actually eat. Over the course of the film, their polite mannerisms and refined gestures become increasingly absurd.Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe” plays like a glutton’s version of “Salo,” linking the pleasure of eating to consumerist society and the gross hedonism of the leisure class. In the film, four friends literally feed themselves to death, feasting on an endless parade of shrimp, turkey, pot roast and sausage while reading excerpts from canonical works of literature and, notably, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomical bible, “The Physiology of Taste.”Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi and Andréa Ferréol in “La Grande Bouffe,” which links the pleasure of eating to consumerist society.Alamy“La Grande Bouffe” is a nauseating showcase and a welcome retort to the glorification of tunnel-vision foodies like Brillat-Savarin. Ferreri was also a gourmand, and he reportedly had difficulties keeping himself from binge eating. His film points a finger at himself as well as society at large.“The Taste of Things” is an adaptation of the 1961 novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, which was itself inspired by none other than Brillat-Savarin. “The Physiology of Taste” is supposed to be about the science of eating, but it often veers off into discussions about sex, love and sensuality.Brillat-Savarin’s passion for food is not unlike the passion he might develop for another person, a dynamic that Hung’s film depicts with a hypnotic warmth. When I see Binoche’s Eugénie, laboring away on a buttery risotto or a vegetable omelet, I’m overcome by the sense memory of something deliciously intimate, like being held tight or a loved one’s scent. In that moment, nothing else seems to matter. More

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      in Theater

      Théâtre de la Ville Reopens After 7 Years of Renovations

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      The Théâtre de la Ville, now named for Sarah Bernhardt, reopened after a seven-year renovation. But its once-radical approach to dance is now less of a calling card.A lot can happen in seven years. When the Théâtre de la Ville — a flagship venue for Paris’s contemporary dance and theater scene — last welcomed audiences, in late 2016, TikTok had just launched. A pandemic seemed like a far-fetched idea. La(Horde), the influential dance collective featured prominently during the theater’s reopening festivities this month, was still wholly unknown.Roughly half of the Théâtre de la Ville’s current employees joined during the closure and didn’t set foot in the building during renovations, its director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota said during a tour of the playhouse last month. (While it was closed, shows continued at a temporary location, the Espace Cardin, at partner venues and on the Théâtre de la Ville’s second stage, Les Abbesses.)Anticipation for the reopening was high, and the Théâtre de la Ville does look — and feel — different. First, it boasts a new, slightly unwieldy name: the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt, a nod to its most famous owner, the French actress who ran the space between 1899 and 1923. (The venue’s website has yet to reflect the rebrand.)The biggest change, however, hits when you walk through the doors. The heavy-looking concrete staircase that led from the entrance into the auditorium has been eliminated. Discrete stairs are now hidden in the back of the hall, and two curved mezzanines in warm wood tones hug the facade — with panoramic views of the neighborhood, including the Théâtre du Châtelet, the rival playhouse that stands across the street.The old concrete staircase in the thater’s entrance is gone, creating an open atmosphere with panoramic views.Josephine BruederThe closure was never intended to last this long. The initial plan was a partial renovation to bring the Théâtre de la Ville, which hadn’t had a significant upgrade since 1967, up to current security and technical standards. Difficulties quickly piled up, initially because of extensive lead and asbestos, then owing to the Covid pandemic. The total cost, first estimated at 26 million euros, or $27.5 million, ultimately rose to €40 million ($42 million).The result is a distinctly 21st-century update, which adds yet another layer to what was already an architectural mille-feuille. Inaugurated in 1862, the building was destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871 and rebuilt a few years later. It was then rebranded several times before the city of Paris chose to reimagine it in 1966. While the facade and roof remained, the Italian-style interior was gutted in favor of a more egalitarian, Brutalist-style auditorium, designed by Jean Perrottet and Valentin Fabre.The auditorium still feels familiar. While the seats are now a muted shade of sand instead of gray, its concrete underpinnings — dotted here and there with gold leaf — still hang over visitors in the hall. Behind the scenes, however, the stage machinery has been entirely updated. Even the mezzanines are now equipped with curtains and professional lighting, for smaller in situ performances.And Demarcy-Mota, Théâtre de la Ville’s director since 2008, is attempting to make up for lost time. In early October, the reopening was marked with a free 26-hour performance marathon, “The Great Vigil,” starring around 300 artists from the fields of dance, theater and music.“Marry Me in Bassiani,” a production created by the French dance troupe La(Horde) at Théâtre de la Ville.Aude AragoSome, like the choreographers Angelin Preljocaj and Lucinda Childs, were regulars long before the Théâtre de la Ville closed. Another frequent visitor, the flamenco star Israel Galvan, made a surprise appearance for a brilliant duet with the French harpsichordist Benjamin Alard.Others were making their Théâtre de la Ville debut, like the pianist Yi-Lin Wu, who set a meditative tone around 1 a.m. with a performance of Ravel’s shimmering “Gaspard de la Nuit.” There was something eerie about wandering the halls late into the night, encountering a highly theatrical statue of Bernhardt playing Phaedra, by a staircase, and climbing up to a newly opened studio, La Coupole, to watch “Ionesco Suite,” a five-play mash-up of the French dramatist’s works, directed by Demarcy-Mota — until well past 3 a.m.For many visitors at the opening, it was a joyful reunion with a playhouse that shaped much of the French dance scene in the last decades of the 20th century. At that time, the Théâtre de la Ville fiercely promoted avant-garde contemporary dance, and became known as the Parisian home of the Tanztheater luminary Pina Bausch, who visited each year.In her Théâtre de la Ville debut, the pianist Yi-Lin Wu set a meditative tone with a performance of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” Laurent PhilippeThis identity had begun to shift in the years before the Théâtre de la Ville closed, with a greater diversity of choreographic trends represented on its stage. Still, during its seven-year absence, other Parisian venues like the Grande Halle of La Villette have stepped up their dance offerings or reoriented their focus to favor more diverse voices and collectives, many of them steeped in street dance styles.So as the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt kicked its first season into gear this month, it was sometimes hard to discern what sets it apart from other theaters. High-profile choreographers are no longer identified with individual venues, the way Théâtre de la Ville once was with Bausch: Every programmer in town seems to want the same names.The collective La(Horde), which took over the stage after “The Great Vigil,” is one example. Less than a week before its run of “Marry Me In Bassiani,” a production the group created for a Georgian company, Iveroni Ensemble, La(Horde) was across the street at the Théâtre du Châtelet with its newest creation, “Age of Content.”There will be plenty more opportunities to see what Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt does with its revitalized venue as its season progresses. Demarcy-Mota, a theater director who splits his programming between dance, theater and a smattering of music events, said in his inauguration speech last month that he sees the stage as “a space for contradiction.”And the thrill of discovering new work in a theater known for groundbreaking performances could already be felt last week when La Coupole, the upstairs studio, hosted “En Addicto,” a one-man show inspired by a monthslong residency in a hospital wing devoted to addicts.Its director and performer, Thomas Quillardet, let the voices of staff and patients alike flow through him with just the right mix of empathy and levity. It brought to mind Demarcy-Mota’s commitment to sending Théâtre de la Ville artists to local hospitals during the pandemic, to share poems or mini-performances. It’s been a long wait, but these artists can finally come home. More

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      The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

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      Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More

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      in Movies

      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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      in Music

      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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      in Movies

      ‘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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      in Music

      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