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      ‘The Rose Maker’ Review: Purloined Blossoms for a Blue Lady

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      A boutique cultivator competing with industrial farms initiates a war of the roses in this gentle French comedy by Pierre Pinaud.The first flowers to grace the opening credits of this gentle French comedy are white roses in full bloom. Their petals are unblemished, and their milky hue seems luminous, a reminder that what appears to be white is a reflection of all colors. Horticulturists know it’s not easy to grow a perfect rose, and that principle will become the cornerstone of the plot in “The Rose Maker.” The film indicates its cinematic commitment with the perfection of these first roses — their almost shocking vibrancy complimented by a jovial Dean Martin tune. It’s easy for characters to say they grow such a flower, and another achievement entirely for filmmakers to find one to display onscreen.Narratively, these unparalleled blooms belong to Eve (Catherine Frot), a rose cultivator who has inherited her family’s prestigious farm. Yet despite Eve’s boutique care, industrial farms sell more roses and win more prizes, while Eve struggles to keep her small business afloat. Eve is prone to pessimism, but her faithful secretary, Véra (Olivia Côte), hires three pairs of helping hands to revitalize the farm. At first Eve protests, but soon she bonds with her amateur, even miscreant employees, enlisting them first in a heist to capture a rare rose, and then in the delicate efforts to grow fields descended from this stolen blossom.The director Pierre Pinaud doesn’t strain the high jinks for belly laughs, nor does he push for tears when it comes to forging the cross-class bonds between his characters. It’s a relaxed film, one that allows the audience to sit back and, if not smell the roses, then at least appreciate them. Just as they are for Eve, the flowers are this film’s raison d’être — a reminder that glimpsing beauty is reason enough.The Rose MakerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      Onstage, the French Election Is a Landslide Win for Cynicism

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      As the presidential vote approaches, theaters and comedy venues are addressing the campaign. Many shows reach a similar conclusion: Don’t trust politicians.PARIS — If elections are spectacles, France’s presidential campaign, caught between voter apathy and war in Europe, has so far struggled to connect with its audience. Yet on French stages, a number of artists are making hay out of the upcoming vote — and the picture is hardly flattering.Across comedy and drama, performers and directors of varied backgrounds seem to agree on one thing: The country’s politicians are uniformly terrible and their performances a little too close to theater to be trusted.Not that the political calendar is headline material in every playhouse. While many prestigious French theaters that receive public funding pride themselves on staging political works, they tend to refer to current events only obliquely. For highbrow theatergoers here, a lack of intellectual distance suggests a lack of taste. Shows actually addressing the presidential campaign are mostly found elsewhere, in smaller venues that rely on box-office revenues.Two of them, the Café de la Gare and the Théâtre des Deux Ânes, are comedy venues. On the nights I attended, they drew large, albeit different, crowds. While visitors to the Café de la Gare skewed younger, the silver-haired audience at the Théâtre des Deux Ânes, in the Pigalle district of Paris, appeared to include many regulars, who cheered for several comedians as soon as they appeared onstage.The jokes were dissimilar, too. At the Deux Ânes, the show “Elect Us” strings together five comic and musical acts, ranging from witty (Florence Brunold’s parody of a history lesson, with “Macron the First” as a Jupiterian king) to downright misogynistic. Every female politician mentioned throughout the performance was described as either an airhead or physically unattractive. Some of their male peers, on the other hand, were more gratifyingly characterized as “too smart” (Macron) or as a Casanova (the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour).Guillaume Meurice in “Meurice 2022” at the Café de la Gare.MagaliThe shows on offer at the Café de la Gare, on the other hand, tried to turn these tropes on their head. “We’ve Reached That Point!,” written by Jérémy Manesse and directed by Odile Huleux, envisions a television debate between two fictional contenders during the next presidential election, in 2027. One of them is a woman, well played by the deadpan Florence Savignat, who maintains a purposely bland persona to avoid personal attacks. In another show at the venue, “Meurice 2022,” the well-known comic Guillaume Meurice — a daily presence on a popular radio station, France Inter — plays a presidential candidate whose patronizing rhetoric is ultimately undermined by the feminist manager in charge of running his events, played by Julie Duquenoy.Still, despite their contrasting values, all these shows portray the French political class as far removed from the audience and its concerns. The historical left-right divide, which has been in flux since Macron won office as a centrist and far-right figures started gaining ground, often gave way onstage to an “us versus them” dynamic, with acts that riffed on the public’s perceived disdain for every presidential candidate.Meurice’s cartoonishly out-of-touch character, for instance, isn’t affiliated with any party. One recurring gag is that every time he mentions another politician, he describes that person as “a personal friend,” from far-left figures to Macron and Zemmour — the implication being that they all belong to the same social group. By way of parody, “Meurice 2022” also offers empty slogans like “The future is already tomorrow” and “Winning now.”From a comedy perspective, it works. Yet “Meurice 2022” speaks to a larger malaise in the country, which “We’ve Reached That Point!” makes even more explicit. The plot revolves around the improbable notion that the two 2027 contenders, unbeknown to them, have been given a newly discovered truth serum before the start of their live debate. When the serum kicks in, suddenly they find themselves blurting out their real feelings about the hot issues of the campaign.Manesse, a shrewd writer, inserts several coups de théâtre along the way, which makes for a genuinely entertaining play. Yet the premise remains that no politician could possibly be telling the truth.From left, Emmanuel Dechartre, Alexandra Ansidei, Christophe Barbier and Adrien Melin in “Elysée” at the Petit Montparnasse theater.Fabienne RappeneauWhen politicians are portrayed as liars, the age-old comparison between politics and theater is never far away — and in Paris, two plays about former French presidents are also leaning into it. “The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French,” directed by Léo Cohen-Paperman, shows Jacques Chirac, the French head of state from 1995 to 2007, as a deeply theatrical figure, as does “Élysée,” a play about the relationship between Chirac and his predecessor, François Mitterrand, who was elected president in 1981.Audience members looking for policy analysis will be disappointed. “Elysée,” directed by Jean-Claude Idée at the Petit Montparnasse theater, is mostly uninterested in Chirac’s and Mitterrand’s politics. The playwright, Hervé Bentégéat, focuses on what they have in common: a wandering eye, for starters, in some cringe-inducing scenes with the only woman in the cast, and the fact that they are “good comedians.” Cue the unlikely bargain they reportedly struck in 1981 to help the left-wing Mitterrand get elected — a cynical long-term calculation for Chirac, a right-wing figure.Julien Campani as Jacques Chirac in “The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French” at the Théâtre de Belleville.Simon Loiseau“The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French,” at the Théâtre de Belleville, is the more compelling show, despite some inconsistencies. It is the first installment in a planned series of presidential portraits, “Eight Kings.” (The president-as-king metaphor has a life of its own in France.) In the opening scene, which manages to be brilliantly funny while recapping Chirac’s life, Julien Campani and Clovis Fouin play overenthusiastic Chirac fans who have created a zany 24-hour theater production about his life. Cohen-Paperman then segues into far more traditional vignettes drawn from Chirac’s youth and career.Campani is impressively convincing in the title role, but “The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French” never really explores what Chirac achieved, or didn’t achieve, as a politician. Instead, it posits politics as a game of chess, with Chirac on the lookout for the next useful move.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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      in Television

      ‘Lupin,’ Netflix’s French Heist Drama, Is the Victim of a Theft

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      Equipment valued at more than $300,000 was stolen from the set of the hit series during filming in a Paris suburb last week.“Lupin,” the hit French heist drama, was itself at the center of a heist last week when about 20 young men wearing balaclavas stole equipment valued at more than $300,000 from the set during filming in a Paris suburb, a Netflix spokeswoman said.The theft, which was reported by the international news service Agence France-Presse and the French newspaper Le Parisien, came just over a week after more than 200 antique props valued at more than $200,000 were stolen from vehicles during the filming of the fifth season of “The Crown” in England, according to the South Yorkshire Police and Netflix.Netflix said in a statement on Thursday that there was an “incident” during the filming of the third season of “Lupin” on Feb. 25.“Our cast and crew are safe and there were no injuries,” the statement said. “We have now resumed filming.”A Netflix spokeswoman said that equipment and other items worth about 300,000 euros, or $332,000, were stolen by men who showed up on the set and “attacked” with fireworks. Filming was paused for an afternoon, and the local police were investigating, she said.“Lupin” became a global phenomenon upon its release in January 2021 and is among Netflix’s most streamed non-English-language original shows. Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a debonair Parisian and the son of a Senegalese immigrant who idolizes Arsène Lupin, the “gentleman thief” and main character in a collection of stories by the French writer Maurice Leblanc starting in 1905.A spokesman for the police in Nanterre, the suburb outside Paris where the filming was taking place, said he could not comment on the case.In an earlier statement about the theft from “The Crown,” Netflix said that it hoped the items stolen from the set in Doncaster, in northern England, would be found and returned. The stolen items included a replica of a Fabergé egg, several sets of silver and gold candelabra, the face of a William IV grandfather clock, a 10-piece silver dressing-table set and crystal glassware, according to a report in the Antiques Trade Gazette.“The items stolen are not necessarily in the best condition and therefore of limited value for resale,” Alison Harvey, the set decorator for the fifth season of “The Crown,” told the Antiques Trade Gazette. “However, they are valuable as pieces to the U.K. film industry.”The South Yorkshire police said they had received a report of a theft in the late afternoon on Feb. 16. Three vehicles containing props had been “broken into” and “a number of items” were taken, they said. “Officers investigated the incident but all existing lines of inquiry have now been exhausted,” the police said in a brief statement.Matt Stevens More

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      in Movies

      French Female Directors Continue Hot Streak at Rendez-Vous Festival

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      The series returns in-person with an especially strong slate of work by Frenchwomen — fitting, given their run of honors at top festivals.Sex and the city, false identities and love triangles feature prominently in this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, an annual showcase of contemporary French filmmaking held by Film at Lincoln Center.Since last year’s virtual edition, female directors from France have been making headlines, with two major European festivals awarding their top prizes to Frenchwomen: Julia Ducournau took home the Cannes Palme d’Or for her gender-bending love story “Titane”; and Audrey Diwan nabbed Venice’s Golden Lion for “Happening,” about a young woman in the 1960s seeking an abortion. Even the master filmmaker Claire Denis received one of her only competitive awards when she won best director for “Fire” last month at Germany’s Berlinale.“Fire,” a brooding melodrama, will be the opening-night film when Rendez-Vous make its return to in-person screenings on Thursday in New York. A pared-down pandemic production stocked with booming performances by Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon and Grégoire Colin, the film is Denis’s second collaboration with the screenwriter and novelist Christine Angot. Unlike their first effort, “Let the Sunshine In” (2018), a sly romantic comedy in which Binoche played an artist drifting through a succession of frustrating relationships, “Fire” is all Sturm und Drang. It focuses on the love lives of a late-middle-age couple with the kind of tempestuous passion befitting an adolescent affair. Though Denis obliquely weaves in broader social commentary with a subplot involving a troubled mixed-race son, the film’s shambolic qualities stoke the erotic follies at its core with transportive delirium.Anaïs Demoustier as the title character opposite Christophe Montenez in “Anais in Love.”Danielle McCarthy-Bole/Année ZéroAt Rendez-Vous, Denis is joined by other established French directors like Arnaud Desplechin (“Deception”), François Ozon (“Everything Went Fine”) and Christophe Honoré (“Guermantes”). But a newer generation of filmmakers is making a strong showing as well, and many of them are building on the great promise of the festival-winning streak for Gallic women.Three of the four feature debuts in the program are by women, including Constance Meyer’s “Robust,” a handsome-looking dramedy about an aging actor (Gérard Depardieu) who strikes up a friendship with his female bodyguard (Déborah Lukumuena). Though significantly less flamboyant, “Robust” takes cues from the 2012 interracial buddy blockbuster “Les Intouchables.”What may be the strongest debut in the lineup is Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love,” which would make a fine double feature with “The Worst Person in the World”; both are about impulsive 30-somethings who fall in love and lust at the clip of a pop song. “Anaïs,” a jaunty summer story full of droll chatter and sparkling countryside vistas, follows its capricious heroine as she enters into an affair with an older man, only to find herself more interested in his novelist wife.Films like “Anaïs in Love” that relish the frisky humor and whimsy of modern romance without moralizing guilt would seem to fit squarely in the sexually liberated tradition that many see as central to France’s artistic heritage. The debate between a younger generation of feminists spearheading the country’s #MeToo movement, which has been gaining momentum after a feeble start, and elite figures who denounce the movement as extreme and puritanical continues to cast a shadow over the French film industry. This year’s Rendez-Vous selection certainly straddles the old and the new — though conspicuously absent is the Rendez-Vous regular Jacques Doillon, whose strong, if thorny, new film, “Third Grade,” concerns the playground intrigue between two children, one of whom sexually harasses the other. Nevertheless, the program keeps in step with the national penchant for sexual audacity.Jade Springer as the daughter of divorcing parents in “Petite Solange.”Aurora FilmsMale directors have rarely had any qualms about examining the intimate lives of women, and Jacques Audiard’s “Paris, 13th District,” a punchy drama in slick black and white about the messy dating lives of young Parisians, continues that tendency. It’s a pleasant surprise, though the auteurist theory explanation for a film’s success (or failure) is particularly questionable here. Consider the compelling performances by the film’s lead actresses: Noémie Merlant plays a law student whose life is thrown into shambles when her classmates mistake her for a popular camgirl; and Lucie Zhang makes her auspicious debut as a first-generation Franco-Chinese immigrant, a punkish, bedraggled young woman with a self-sabotaging romantic streak. Complex and not necessarily likable without falling into the “messy woman” archetype of so many pop feminist characters, the women of “Paris, 13th District” must have benefited from the august scriptwriting team — Audiard, Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) and Léa Mysius — who temper the director’s penchant for vacuous stylization with grounded humor and pathos.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Gérard Depardieu, Friend of Putin, Denounces ‘Fratricidal War’

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      “Stop the weapons and negotiate,” the French actor and staunch Russia ally told a news agency.For the past decade, the French actor Gérard Depardieu has been one of the closest Western celebrities to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.In 2013, the movie star became a Russian citizen to avoid taxes in France. In a letter to Russian state television at the time, Mr. Depardieu said, “I love your president, Vladimir Putin, very much and it’s mutual.” Mr. Putin awarded Mr. Depardieu Russian citizenship at a special dinner that year.As tensions between Russia and Ukraine were growing last month, Mr. Depardieu even went on French television to say, “Leave Vladimir alone.”Now, Mr. Depardieu has taken a surprising step toward ruining that cherished friendship when, on Tuesday, the actor denounced the war in Ukraine in an interview with Agence France-Presse, the French news service. “Russia and Ukraine have always been brother countries,” Mr. Depardieu said. “I am against this fratricidal war,” he added. “I say, ‘Stop the weapons and negotiate.’”Best known for 1990s movies including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Green Card,” Mr. Depardieu later posted part of his statement on Instagram. His agent did not respond to an interview request.Mr. Depardieu’s comments are unlikely to change many Ukrainians’ views of the actor. In 2015, the Ukrainian government included Mr. Depardieu on a list of cultural figures who were a threat to the country’s security. It did not state a reason, but Ukrainian newspapers linked the decision to comments Mr. Depardieu had made questioning Ukraine’s independence. In 2014, at the Baltic Pearl movie festival in Latvia, Mr. Depardieu told reporters that he loved both Russia and “Ukraine, which is part of Russia.”The French tax exile is not the only famous actor to have taken Russian citizenship: Steven Seagal, the American-born star of action movies like “Under Siege,” was naturalized in 2016. On Thursday, Mr. Seagal’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request to discuss the actor’s views on the war in Ukraine.In recent years, Mr. Depardieu has been in the news for controversies aside from his Russia connections. In 2018, French prosecutors investigated rape allegations against him, but dropped the case the following year because of a lack of evidence. More

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      Jean-Jacques Beineix, ‘Cinema du Look’ Director, Dies at 75

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      His first feature, “Diva,” a visually unusual tale, is credited with starting a new, style-focused genre of filmmaking in France.Jean-Jacques Beineix, a French film director whose debut feature, the eye-popping, droll thriller “Diva,” was much acclaimed, especially outside of France, in the early 1980s and is often credited with starting a genre of French filmmaking known as the cinéma du look, died on Jan. 13 at his home in Paris. He was 75.His family announced his death to Agence France-Presse, saying Mr. Beineix (pronounced Beh-nix) died after a long illness. Unifrance, the organization that promotes French film, issued a statement praising “his innovative, intensely visual, iconic cinema.”In “Diva,” a fan surreptitiously tapes the performance of a renowned American soprano who has forbidden any recordings of her singing, setting off a chain of complications, including blackmail. One unusual aspect of the film was that the title character was played by a real-life opera singer, Wilhelmenia Fernandez. But the most unusual thing about the movie, for that time, was its look, full of color, references to other films and odd camera angles.“Everything is seen through glass, in mirrors or as reflected from the surfaces of mud puddles,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1982, when the movie, which had opened in France the year before, played in New York. “If a scene isn’t shot from a low angle, it’s shot from a chandelier.”Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was also struck by the visual bravura.“It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky,” she wrote of the film, “but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.”Its style was also sometimes called the new New Wave.“In contrast to the old New Wavers,” Manohla Dargis of The Times explained in 2007, when a new print of “Diva” was shown at Film Forum, “who sought to interrogate the relationship between the real and the image, the new New Wavers seized on the unreality of cinema, underscoring its falsity, its theatricality, its surface.”Luc Besson and Leos Carax were among the other directors often included in the genre, although that was not always a compliment; some critics faulted the films for emphasizing style over substance. Certainly Mr. Beineix’s subsequent movies — he made only a few more features — were greeted with mixed reviews at best.The best known of those was “Betty Blue” (1986), a drama about an obsessive love affair. Sheila Benson, in The Los Angeles Times, named it one of the year’s 10 best.“Beineix’s power is to draw us to the center of this tempestuous love affair, to feel its magnetic pull as strongly as we sense its imminent doom,” she wrote.But Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, said that the film “has a shallow, sunny prettiness and little more.” Its two leads, Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade, spent quite a bit of the film unclothed.“If either of them made it through the filming without catching a bad cold, it’s a miracle,” Ms. Maslin wrote.Mr. Beineix accepted that his films might inspire ridicule as well as praise.“That’s the risk you take,” he told The Gazette of Montreal in 2001. “But if an artist doesn’t take risks, what’s left? There has to be at least a minimum of provocation in art. That’s what films should do.”Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle in the 1986 film “Betty Blue,” which divided critics. The Los Angeles Times named it one of its top 10 of the year, but The New York Times described it as having a “shallow, sunny prettiness.”Cinema Libre StudioJean-Jacques Beineix was born on Oct. 8, 1946, in Paris. He loved movies from an early age, he said, but didn’t immediately pursue a career in filmmaking.“I was never the kind of cinephile who belonged to any club,” he told The International Herald Tribune in 2006. “I didn’t get down on my knees at the Cahiers du Cinema altar” — a reference to the famed film magazine.Instead, after earning a degree in philosophy and then studying medicine for several years, he took a leap of faith.“I finally left the university when I was 24,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1982, “to take a job as an assistant film director at the lowest level. I brought coffee to people and enjoyed every minute of it because I didn’t have to study anymore.”Throughout the 1970s, he worked his way up from second assistant director (including on the 1972 Jerry Lewis film “The Day the Clown Cried”) to first assistant director on films by Claude Zidi, Claude Berri and others. He gained valuable experience, but by the end of the 1970s was beginning to chafe at being an understudy.“I was seeing things done one way, and I wanted them to be done differently,” he told The Tribune.So he made “Diva,” though the film was not an instant success — largely, he thought, because it could not be easily pigeonholed. Critics in France didn’t like it, and promoters didn’t know how to promote it.A film still from “Diva.” Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was struck by the visual bravura, describing it as “genuinely sparkling.”Rialto Pictures“Eventually, though, word of mouth turned everything around,” he said. And foreign audiences began discovering the movie. At the 1981 Festival of Festivals in Toronto it finished second in the audience voting for the event’s most popular film, behind “Chariots of Fire.”His follow-up, “The Moon in the Gutter,” did not fare as well. It was booed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and flopped.Mr. Beineix’s films after “Betty Blue” included “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” in 1992. The cast included the revered actor and singer Yves Montand, who died of a heart attack in November 1991 near the end of the filming. Mr. Beineix felt that people blamed him for the death. Shortly afterward, both his mother and his press agent, a close friend, also died. He didn’t make another feature film for almost a decade.“It’s like you’ve been punched and punched and punched,” he told the film website Nitrate Online in 2001. “It built up, and suddenly I couldn’t make a picture.”His return to filmmaking, with the comic thriller “Mortal Transfer” in 2001, was not successful.Mr. Beineix’s survivors include his wife, Agnes, and a daughter, Frida. More

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      in Music

      A ‘High Priestess of Satanic Art’? This Organist Can Only Laugh.

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      For more than a decade, Anna von Hausswolff has been bringing the sound of pipe organs to rock fans. But Roman Catholic extremists have tried to stop her playing shows in churches.When Anna von Hausswolff, an acclaimed Swedish songwriter and organist, first heard that a conservative Roman Catholic website was calling her a satanist and demanding a concert boycott, she and her team laughed it off.“We thought it was hilarious,” von Hausswolff, 35, recalled in a recent interview. “The whole day we were laughing,”The site, Riposte Catholique, was firing its readers up ahead of a concert of von Hausswolff’s epic pipe organ music at a church in Nantes, a city in the west of France. Some of her fans were goths, the site said, and her songs were “more a black Mass than music for a church.” A music blogger had called her “the high priestess” of “satanic harmonies,” the site noted, and conservative Roman Catholic groups noticed that, on the track “Pills,” she sings, “I made love with the devil.”“We said, ‘This is such a great P.R. campaign,’” Von Hausswolff said. “I mean, ‘the High Priestess of satanic art.’ Wow!”But as soon as she arrived at the church in Nantes, the joking stopped. Outside were about 30 young men, most wearing black jackets and hoodies, protesting the show, Von Hausswolff said. The concert’s promoter told her that some men had just broken into the venue, trying to find her.Soon, there were 100 people blocking the church’s entrance. Von Hausswolff sat in the richly painted church, staring up at the organ that she’d hoped to play, listening to protesters chanting and banging on the doors outside as her fans shouted back at them.“There was a primal part of me that told me I was not safe,” she said. “I wanted to get out.” She canceled the show.In recent years, disagreements between conservatives and liberals over issues like gay marriage and abortion have become increasingly heated in parts of Europe. Von Hausswolff’s experience is an example of another tension point in the continent’s culture wars: In some countries, a small minority of Roman Catholics regularly protests art it considers blasphemous.Initially, when the campaign against her was just online, Anna von Hausswolff laughed off the accusations of Satanism. Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesCéline Béraud, an academic who studies the sociology of catholicism in France, said in a telephone interview that extremists had staged protests against artworks and plays in the country for the past 20 years. “It comes from a well organized minority who’re very good at getting attention in the media,” Béraud said.One of their regular targets is Hellfest, a rock music festival held every year close to Nantes. In 2015, a group of protesters broke into the site and set fire to some of the festival’s stage sets. Since then, protesters have regularly doused the festival site’s fields with holy water. Hellfest’s communications manager, Eric Perrin, said in an email that staff members recently found 50 gold pendants depicting the Virgin Mary scattered around the site. Since playing a real pipe organ in concert almost always means playing in church, von Hausswolff’s tour problems didn’t end when she left Nantes — even though some French bishops had issued statements of support. In Paris, she was scheduled to play the grand organ at St.-Eustache, a church widely considered a jewel of the French Renaissance, but after its priest was deluged with complaints, she instead performed a secret show at a Protestant church near the Arc de Triomphe.In December, protestors gathered outside a von Hausswolff concert in Brussels. “That was fine,” Von Hausswolff said. “They weren’t screaming or banging on doors.”Laurie Dieffembacq/Belga, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLater, in Brussels, about 100 people protested outside her show at a Dominican church, taking a more peaceful approach than their French counterparts and moving away from its doors when asked by police. At Nijmegen, the Netherlands, just two protesters appeared, standing quietly outside while holding signs with the message “Satan is not welcome.”Von Hausswolff is not someone you would expect to cause such a stir. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, and said her childhood was “very creative.” (Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and performance artist.)As a teenager, she sang in a church choir, and dreamed of becoming a musician, but ended up training as an architect. Her music career only took off in 2009 when, age 23, she released a demo of piano songs called “Singing from the Grave” that quickly found a fan base in Sweden thanks to her soaring vocals. She was frequently compared to the English pop star Kate Bush.After an organ builder told her she could make beautiful pipe organ music, she gave it a go, she recalled, trying out the organ in Gothenburg’s vast Annedal Church. “When I reached the lowest note, I couldn’t believe my ears,” Von Hausswolff said. “I felt it through my whole body.”She’s since explored what the instrument can do across five albums, sometimes pairing it with a rock band and at other times performing solo. Her most recent, released this month, is a live album recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Hans Davidsson, an organist who helps von Hausswolff probe the instrument’s capabilities, said that she “explores the organ with open ears, eyes and senses,” and had developed her “own musical language.” Her music was inspiring to many classical organists like him, he added. “It’s fortunate for us that she chose the organ,” he said.In the interview, von Hausswolff, who was wearing Christmas leggings covered in cartoon reindeer in Santa hats, denied she was a satanist. Von Hausswolff declined to say what her 2009 track “Pills” — in which she sings of satanic lovemaking — was about, since songs should be left open to interpretation, she said. But, she added, “If you’re asking me if I literally had sex with the devil, the answer is, ‘No.’”“I’m there to present my pipe organ art so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people,” Von Hausswolff said of her work.Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesAs much as she was happy to joke about the accusations, the incidents last month had left a mark. She still felt scared by the French and Belgian protests, she said, and was also worried that churches might think twice about letting her play their organs, so as to avoid complaints.“I’m not a good Christian and never will be,” said von Hausswolff, adding that she saw herself as agnostic. “But I’m there to present my pipe organ art, so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people.”She was already planning more church tours, she said. As long as she was welcome, she added, “I will go there, and I will play my music.” More

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      in Movies

      Philippe Gaulier on the Art of Clowning and Sacha Baron Cohen

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      The French master teacher Philippe Gaulier has worked with stars like Sacha Baron Cohen. But at 78, are his methods, which include insults, outdated?ÉTAMPES, France — It’s unlikely anyone alive has made more clowns cry than Philippe Gaulier.In a supposedly more sensitive era, hundreds of people regularly travel from all around the world to a small town an hour outside of Paris to study clowning with Gaulier, a gruff 78-year-old éminence grise known for his blunt, flamboyantly negative feedback. Wearing a pink tie, beret and stern look over a bushy white beard on a recent tour of the school, he looked the part of the guru — a mischievous one. He pointed at a large photo of himself teaching in China and joked he was “Clown Chairman Mao.”In his office, sitting across from his wife, Michiko Miyazaki Gaulier, a former student who is now a colleague, he made no apologies for his pugnacious style, saying students who are not funny have a choice: “You have to change or leave the school. You are boring. If you want to stay boring all your life, you will never be a clown.”Gaulier has been teaching clowns for about half a century, but his stature has grown in recent years, becoming an influential and divisive figure of considerable mystique, the Dumbledore of round red noses. The primary reason for his raised profile is the success of Sacha Baron Cohen, a former student who praised Gaulier on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2016 and described receiving bad reviews from him in a 2021 appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”“I was always interested in comedy, but it was Gaulier who helped me understand how to be funny,” Baron Cohen wrote in the preface to Gaulier’s book “The Tormentor.”Clowns remain a staple of the circus, but the reach of the ancient art is much wider these days, with a growing theatrical scene as well as performers crossing over into other forms. The alumni network at Gaulier’s school, where many make lifelong connections, is expansive — spanning film and theater (Emma Thompson, Kathryn Hunter), circus and live comedy, with students like the Los Angeles comedian Dr. Brown becoming gurus themselves. Another protégé, Zach Zucker, is the host of Stamptown, a popular showcase of cutting-edge comics in Brooklyn, its name inspired by the town of Gaulier’s school. “He has become the name to drop,” Geoff Sobelle, an acclaimed performer and former student, said about Gaulier’s reputation among clowns.In a two-hour interview last month, Gaulier, speaking in English, came off less like a teacher than a very funny insult comic, teasing and trash-talking, tossing jabs at everyone from Slava Polunin, the Tony-nominated Russian clown (“For children who has problem to sleep, can be good”) to the legendary mime Marcel Marceau (“He’s a maniac with his gestures”). Asked if someone can be funny who didn’t make him laugh, he said it was possible, before turning back to me, gesturing at my clothes: “It’s possible that you with your glasses, your hair, that you are funny,” he said, before the punchline. “And someone really well-dressed is, too. The opposite of you.”He’s allergic to anything that smacks of pretension, which inevitably inspires one of his favorite expressions: “of my balls,” as in Slava is a “poetic clown of my balls.”Compared with other clowning teachers, Gaulier said he does not emphasize technique or physical virtuosity. His pedagogy aims for something more intangible, nurturing a childlike spirit, a sense of play onstage. The most important quality in a clown is keeping things light and present, and, as he said with the utmost respect, stupid. Finding “your idiot,” as he calls it, is the essence of clowning, which, unlike comic acting, requires a performer to stick with the same character. “A clown is a special kind of idiot, absolutely different and innocent,” he said. “A marvelous idiot.”Gaulier “helped me understand how to be funny,” Sacha Baron Cohen has written.Cedrine Scheidig for The New York TimesGaulier said he could put a red nose on anyone and tell how they played as a 7-year-old. Students, who do in fact do exercises in red noses, describe this in gushing terms.“He liberated me,” said René Bazinet, a highly respected German-Canadian clown who has worked for years with Cirque du Soleil. “In my first year, I had to read a poem, and he kept stopping me, saying, ‘Why are you clearing your throat? Say the poem. Why are you doing this? Why that?’ And one moment, my brain just opened up. His way of attacking the falseness was a relief to me. I was becoming an idiot.”This process can sometimes sound like a masochistic cleansing ritual. “He just insults his students all day long until they start laughing and their ego gets out of the way,” Bazinet said. “You are taking your ego to the slaughterhouse.”Former students inevitably have stories of bruising feedback, usually told with the affection of grizzled war veterans. Kendall Cornell, who leads an all-female clown troupe, Clowns Ex Machina, recalled a lot of tears, but also a “mind-blowing” experience that taught her things she didn’t learn in other classes. There’s even a Facebook group that collects insults called “Philippe Gaulier Hit Me With a Stick.”The criticisms include “You sound like overcooked spaghetti in a pressure cooker” and “You are a very good clown for my grandmother.” He frequently focuses on the eyes. “If you are funny,” he told me, “you have funny eyes.”Gaulier is even stingy with compliments for his most successful alumni. Asked about Baron Cohen as a student, he said: “Nice boy. Tall.” Pressed for more, he added, “He’s a guy who when he understands something, he’s going to sell it. That’s enough.”When he was 8, Gaulier, who grew up in Paris near a circus, was kicked out of school for punching his gymnastics teacher. Seven decades later, he has no regrets. “He was a bastard,” he said, explaining that the instructor made students march like in the army. “I hate the military. Teachers, too.”His ambition was to be a tragic actor, but every time he tried to do serious work in drama school, he said with resignation, everyone laughed. This led him to a class with the renowned mime and master teacher Jacques Lecoq, whose pioneering training was rooted in clowning, improvisation and mask work. Gaulier became a performer who, with his partner, Pierre Byland, had a hit clown show, during which he broke 200 plates every night.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More