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    Aya Nakamura, French-Malian Singer, Is Caught in Olympic Storm

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    In four months, France will host the Paris Olympics, but which France will show up? Torn between tradition and modernity, the country is in the midst of an identity crisis.The possible choice for the opening ceremony of Aya Nakamura, a superstar French-Malian singer whose slang-spiced lyrics stand at some distance from academic French, has ignited a furor tinged with issues of race and linguistic propriety and the politics of immigration. Right-wing critics say Ms. Nakamura’s music does not represent France, and the prospect of her performing has led to a barrage of racist insults online against her. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.The outcry has compounded a fight over an official poster unveiled this month: a pastel rendering of the city’s landmarks thronging with people in a busy style reminiscent of the “Where’s Waldo?” children’s books.Right-wing critics have attacked the image as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history in a sea of sugary, irreproachable blandness most evident in the removal of the cross atop the golden dome of the Invalides, the former military hospital where Napoleon is buried. An opinion essay in the right-wing Journal du Dimanche said “the malaise of a nation in the throes of deconstruction” was in full view.The rapid immersion of the Olympics in France’s culture wars has its roots in a meeting on Feb. 19 at the Élysée Palace between President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Nakamura, 28. Mr. Macron, doubling as the artistic director of the Olympics, asked if she would perform.The official poster of the Olympic Games in Paris has been attacked by right-wing critics as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history.Thierry Chesnot/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      A French Festival Focuses (Timidly) on English

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      The Avignon Festival’s new director wants to spotlight drama in a different language each year. This year’s first installment had some conventional choices.As soon as the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues took over at the Avignon Festival, France’s biggest theater event, he announced a symbolic move: Under his direction, there would be a special focus on a different language every year, starting, this summer, with English.There was wincing from some quarters: To many in France, English is already far too culturally dominant. In the end, they needn’t have worried. Of several dozen productions in the official lineup of this year’s festival, which runs through July 25, only six plays are predominantly in English.As a result, Avignon, which has long welcomed shows from a wide range of cultures, hasn’t felt much different this year. If anything, Rodrigues’s Anglo-Saxon choices seem a tad timid. Focusing on a language, rather than a country, could have opened the door to Anglophone theater from underrepresented regions. Instead, five productions came from British directors, two of whom, Tim Etchells and Alexander Zeldin, are already well-established in France.A few novelties are still to come, including work from London’s Royal Court Theater, which is largely unknown across the Channel. So far, however, the most intriguing discovery has been the sole American entry, “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” from Elevator Repair Service. This verbatim recreation of a 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., about race in the United States, is spare and meticulous. From tables on opposite sides of the stage, Greig Sargeant (Baldwin) and Ben Williams (Buckley) spar with effective solemnity.The fact that Elevator Repair Service is widely described as “experimental” in its home country may amuse some French festivalgoers: “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” is fairly buttoned-up by local standards. Only the short final scene, which sees Sargeant and April Matthis, as the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, break character and touch on racial dynamics in the making of a previous Elevator Repair Service production, feels truly biting.Catherine Dagenais-Savard in “Marguerite: The Fire,” which pays tribute to Marguerite Duplessis, who, in 1740, was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court.Christophe Raynaud de LageAnother North American production at Avignon is performed in French: “Marguerite: The Fire,” by the Québec-based Indigenous writer and director Émilie Monnet. It, too, touched on the history of racism by way of a little-known historical figure, Marguerite Duplessis. In 1740, Duplessis was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court, after she claimed she had been born a free woman.Together with three other performers, Monnet pays tribute to Duplessis in a production that has high points — including evocative choral and dance numbers — but feels overly linear, its text well-meaning yet monotonous. Like “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” “Marguerite: The Fire” also unwittingly plays into a French national sport: deploring North American racism while struggling to recognize it closer to home.In the French portion of the lineup, meanwhile, some directors also got involved in the Anglo-Saxon focus by adapting the work of English-speaking authors. Pauline Bayle, a rising star who was appointed to lead the Montreuil Theater last year, boldly took on Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, the result, “Writing Life,” is strangely shapeless.The cast awkwardly veer between peppy contemporary digressions and bits and pieces lifted from Woolf’s works. One minute, they mention the threat of an imminent, pandemic-style lockdown, and engage in slightly forced interactions with three rows of audience members. The next, they grapple with Woolf’s intricate style, which comes across as bombastic by contrast.“Writing Life” at least came with English surtitles for non-French speakers — a welcome development for the Avignon Festival. While select productions already came with an English translation under the previous director, Olivier Py, Rodrigues has made it the default to appeal to more international visitors.The cast of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is wheeled into the venue, a former quarry, by bus.Christophe Raynaud de LageThere were a handful of exceptions, not least Philippe Quesne’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” accessible only to French speakers. It’s a shame, because the production marked the reopening of a legendary Avignon venue: the Boulbon quarry, a majestic natural spot outside the city. It was last used in 2016, not least because of its eye-watering running costs: Fire safety precautions alone ended up costing 600,000 euros, or $670,000, this year.“The Garden of Earthly Delights” proved a loving reintroduction to Boulbon. In it, members of an eccentric, hippie-adjacent community are wheeled into the quarry by bus. They carefully lay a giant egg down in the middle of the vast space, and perform amusingly absurd rituals around it. Some recreate poses from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch; others deliver wacky poems or monologues. Even if you spoke the language, it didn’t fully make sense, but it felt at home against Boulbon’s arid, otherworldly backdrop.For English-speaking visitors, however, one major part of Avignon remains difficult to access: the Fringe, known as “le Off.” With nearly 1,500 shows on offer in small and big venues all around the city, it dwarves the official lineup, but very few productions offer English versions or surtitles.If you look closely enough, though, there are some opportunities to hang with the French crowds at “le Off.” A handful of venues offer surtitles on select days, like the Théâtre des Doms with “Méduse.s,” a well-crafted feminist reinterpretation of the mythical figure of Medusa by the Belgian company La Gang.Some performers find other ways to bridge the gap with English speakers. On Mondays during the festival, the French writer and performer Maïmouna Coulibaly, who currently lives in Berlin, performs her one-woman show “Maïmouna – HPS” in English at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Michel. It’s a no-holds-barred exploration of her relationship to her body, including her traumatic circumcision as a child and her adult sex life. The back-and-forth between the two experiences induces a little whiplash, but Coulibaly brings galvanizing energy to the stage.Charlotte Avias and Camille Timmerman in “Punk.e.s,” which tells the story of the first all-female punk band, the Slits.Arnaud DufauAnd some French shows barely need translating. Justine Heynemann and Rachel Arditi’s “Punk.e.s,” at La Scala Provence, dives into the story of the first major all-female punk band, the Slits, with such chutzpah that, by the final musical number at a recent performance, quite a few audience members were on their feet.Charlotte Avias, especially, gives a manic pixie punk performance to remember as the Slits’ lead vocalist Ari Up, and Kim Verschueren, a powerful singer, finds shadowy nuance in the role of Tessa Pollitt. The set list — which cycles through the Beatles, the Clash and the Velvet Underground — could have used even more Slits songs, but “Punk.e.s” is a reminder that French artists have long taken inspiration from their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.There’s a way to go to before language differences don’t prove a barrier for theater. Still, the Avignon Festival is increasingly doing its part. More

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      in Movies

      A Global Hit, ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ Finally Lands in New York

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      The splashy show, an example par excellence of what makes modern French musicals distinctive, begins a run at Lincoln Center.When Americans are asked to name French musicals, their go-to is “Les Misérables,” which opened in Paris in 1980 before an extensively retooled English version went on to conquer the world a few years later.That, or some of the films that Jacques Demy directed in the 1960s, like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”Usually not mentioned on our shores are the wildly popular homegrown stage musicals that appeared in France in the late 1990s. But now the most famous of them, “Notre Dame de Paris,” is having its New York premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, and will run there through July 24.One of its creators has issues with the terminology used to describe his work, though.“I don’t think of ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ as musical theater,” the composer Richard Cocciante said by video from Rome, where he was preparing for a concert tour in Italy. “For me it’s a people’s opera. That’s because it’s entirely sung-through. We don’t call the numbers arias, though: ‘Belle’ or ‘Le temps des cathédrales’ stand alone as songs,” he added, mentioning two of the show’s many sweeping ballads and its biggest hits.The show, a spectacle with a cast of 30, made its debut in Paris in 1998.Alessandro DobiciBased, like “Les Misérables,” on an epic 19th-century novel by Victor Hugo (which also inspired the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” to name just one of many adaptations), “Notre Dame de Paris” successfully exploited a distinctively French approach to modern stage musicals.The lyricist Luc Plamondon already had a successful career writing for artists both in his native Quebec (a certain belter released an album of his songs, “Dion chante Plamondon,” in 1992) and in France, where he wrote the lyrics for the musical “Starmania” in the late 1970s. (That perennial favorite is returning to the Paris stage in November.)Looking for another long-form project two decades later, Plamondon thought that “Notre Dame de Paris” would be a fitting source and called up Cocciante, who happened to have a tape of odds-and-ends melodies laying around.“The first song began with him singing ‘Time … da-da-da,’” Plamondon, 80, hummed on the phone. He had been thinking of the scene in the 1956 film adaptation in which Anthony Quinn, as the hunchback, Quasimodo, begs Gina Lollobrigida’s Esmeralda, the object of all the men’s attentions, for water. “He’s chained to the wheel and he goes ‘Belle … belle …’” Plamondon continued, quoting the French word for beautiful. “That gave me the idea to replace ‘time’ with ‘belle’ in the song.”And they were off. “From then on it gushed out of both us,” Cocciante, 76, said. “We wrote ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ in a kind of trance.”Hélène Ségara as Esmeralda in the original 1998 production of “Notre Dame de Paris.”Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty ImagesIn the French answer to a backers’ audition, he played the score on the piano and sang all the parts for the producer Charles Talar, who signed on and booked a run at the Palais des Congrès in Paris for the fall of 1998.It was fitting for Talar to get that venue, which is not a traditional theater but a cavernous concert hall, because he came from the music industry: He wanted to release an album first, then build on it to sell the stage show. It’s an approach Andrew Lloyd Webber successfully used for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” but overall it’s not common in the United States and Britain, where a show precedes its recording.“He assumed he could activate the networks he had built and use some of the same strategies he used to sell records,” Nicolas Talar said on Zoom, recalling his father’s game plan. (Charles Talar died in 2020.) “The idea was to familiarize audiences with the music before the show started. The specificity of French musicals is that we promote them the way we would promote a pop record. If one or two songs become popular, you’re the star of the moment, you get on television and people want to see you,” he added. “The only way to hear ‘Belle’ live was to see the musical.”That song, a trio for the three men in love with Esmeralda, was released in the spring of 1998, months before the show’s opening, and went on to become the biggest-selling single of the year in France.“There was this miracle — I don’t know how else to describe it — of ‘Belle,’” said Daniel Lavoie, 73, who played the archdeacon Frollo in the original production and is back in the cassock for the New York run. “It was almost 5 minutes, which was inconceivable on the radio at the time because they didn’t play anything longer than 3 minutes. I remember that at our first TV appearance we were asked to do the song again. We knew then we were onto something.”Another number, “Le temps des cathédrales,” was almost as popular — many Americans might have discovered it on the 2015 Josh Groban album “Stages” — cementing the status of “Notre Dame” as the It show that year. And unlike in the United States, where stage personalities don’t tend to make a dent on the Billboard Hot 100, it turned the cast members Garou, Patrick Fiori and Hélène Ségara into pop stars. (Lavoie already had an established career as a singer by then.)“Notre Dame” was so huge that other producers followed in Talar’s footsteps, most prominently Dove Attia, who was behind the popular “Les Dix Commandements” (2000), “Le Roi Soleil” (2005) and “Mozart, l’opéra rock” (2009). That last was among the few to actually, er, rock, which may partly help explain why those shows have not had much of an impact in English-speaking countries, where the tolerance for a high ratio of power ballads seems to be lower than in France, Russia or South Korea.A decisive move by the “Notre Dame” team was to have the cast sing live to recorded tracks, which are still used in productions worldwide, though the New York engagement will supplement them with a full orchestra. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Lavoie said in English, before reverting back to French. “‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was conceived as a show outside of time.”“Notre Dame” has been translated into eight languages and performed in 23 countries, though its producers now prefer presenting it in the original French, which is how its cast of 30 will perform it in New York (with English supertitles). Still, this and similar musicals have faced an uphill battle to win over reviewers at home.“Musical theater doesn’t get much critical support in France,” said Laurent Valière, the producer and host of the weekly program “42e Rue” on French public radio as well as the author of a book about musicals. “The press pans it — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not.” (Full disclosure: I have been a guest commentator on the show.)The French hit factory seems to have hit a snag in recent years as it strains to find successors to the blockbusters of the 2000s. There are oddities like the biomusical “Bernadette de Lourdes,” which is based on the true story of a young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary and plays in Lourdes, the town where it all happened. In a different vein is “Résiste,” a jukebox musical based on France Gall’s pop songbook that benefited from a live band playing the original arrangements and contributions from the rising choreographer Marion Motin.Still, “Notre Dame de Paris” endures. “Another distinctive trait is that no matter where it’s playing, it’s staged the same way,” said Nicolas Talar, who is now producing the show and copresenting it in New York. (He also has producing credits on Broadway’s “Funny Girl” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)“Sometimes we wonder if the show has become outdated, but the themes are evergreen and the music was intentionally arranged to sound timeless, so we keep postponing making changes,” he added. “So far audiences haven’t complained and the show is doing well, so we’re staying the course.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Don Carlo’ or ‘Don Carlos’? Verdi Comes to the Met in French

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      On Monday, the company performs the much-revised masterpiece for the first time in its original language.For the first 80 or so years of its life, Verdi’s “Don Carlos” was a problem opera on the margins of the repertory. Audiences saw it only sporadically; almost everyone who wrote about it described an uneven “transitional” work, a troubled experiment on the eve of the composer’s final masterpieces: “Aida,” “Otello” and “Falstaff.”Today, this sprawling, packed epic — based on the tumults of 16th-century Spain under Philip II as filtered through two different plays — is part of every opera lover’s basic nutrition. The Metropolitan Opera has a lot to do with that: In 1950, Rudolf Bing made the bold choice to revive the work for the opening night of his first season as general manager. The Met was the first house in the world to make “Don Carlos” standard repertory.And yet the company has never performed its original words. That changes on Monday, when Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads a new David McVicar staging of the opera, sung at last to the French libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle. What took so long?The answer starts with the opera’s complex history. Paris, when Verdi went there in 1866 with his nearly finished score, was Europe’s cultural capital, and required the longest, grandest operas. Verdi — accustomed to writing three-hour works and now given the chance at a four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza — overshot the mark. The general rehearsal on Feb. 24, 1867, clocked in at five hours, 13 minutes.The general rehearsal for the premiere of “Don Carlos” in Paris in 1867 lasted more than five hours, forcing cuts to be made under pressure.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesBut performance start times were inflexible at 7:30 p.m., and the last trains for the suburbs left at 12:35 a.m. People needed time to get to the station. This meant a lot of cutting under pressure.One legacy of Napoleon’s civil service reforms: Parisian functionaries were trained never to throw away a piece of paper. So when scholars got serious about “Don Carlos” a century later, they could reconstruct that cut music from handwritten orchestra parts, draft librettos, rehearsal reports and the like. (Andrew Porter, the longtime music critic of The New Yorker, was the unofficial leader of this brigade.)Some of that music is significant and beautiful, and has been restored in some modern productions. But in his time, Verdi went in the opposite direction: cutting still more music, tweaking some of it and eventually producing a thorough (and much shorter) revision. The upshot: five or even more iterations of “Don Carlos” for performers to choose among today, and infinite chances for confusion in discussing them.Simplification may help: There are essentially two versions. The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois. The Met is including Act I, as it has done since 1979. For the other acts, it plans on a mixture: mostly the revisions of 1884, but with selected restorations from 1867. For instance, the opera is set to end with a quiet reprise of the monks’ chant, which was changed in 1884 to a fortissimo outburst.It has to be emphasized, because many still assume otherwise: All these versions are in French. There is no Italian version of “Don Carlos,” only an Italian translation, just as there was for “Carmen” or “Mignon” when those were done at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In that era, the idea of opera as drama was taken seriously, and intelligibility was essential.Jussi Bjorling and Delia Rigal starred when the Met opened its 1950-51 season with a landmark production of the opera.Sedge LeBlang/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesThe only exception: Italians singing in Italian were heard everywhere, just as today American pop music is enjoyed worldwide in English. That’s why the Met opened its doors with Gounod’s “Faust” in Italian and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” had its London premiere in Italian. But why did “Don Carlos” hang on so long beyond those as a quasi-Italian work? Because it was not a hit in Paris, and vanished from the repertory there within two years. Verdi hoped to relaunch it with his revision, but it was not wanted; Paris had fallen in love with “Aida” in the meantime. At La Scala, “Don Carlos” was more successful. It stayed at the fringes of the Italian repertory, and spread exclusively from there.Translations, though necessary in a world that wanted to understand what was being sung, are never as good as original texts; it’s just too hard to find words that convey the right thought and fit the notes decently and elegantly. The “Don Carlos” translation (by Achille de Lauzières, supplemented by Angelo Zanardini for the 1884 revisions) has the further problem of sounding ornate and old-fashioned compared with the French.Porter used to make this point by juxtaposing Élisabeth’s reminiscence of Fontainebleau, “mon coeur est plein de votre image,” with Elisabetta’s “ver voi schiude il pensiero i vanni.” The French he translated as “my heart is full of your image”; the Italian, as something like “t’ward thee my thought unfurls its pinions.” An open-and-shut case for the superiority of the original.Or is it? The same type of comparison could make us prefer the French text of “La Traviata,” and nobody wants to hear that argument, because it wouldn’t be “the original.” What we see here is not so much the problem of translation as the fact that Italian libretto-writing in the 1860s still followed a highly inflected poetic code built over centuries, while French texts had become simpler and more straightforward — more modern, if you like. The translators could easily have written “pieno ho il cor dell’immagin vostra.” It fits the poetic meter, and is also faithful to the French; it just isn’t the way they wanted to write. (Yet.)Jonas Kaufmann sang Don Carlos when the Paris Opera performed the work in French in 2017.Agathe Poupeney/Paris Opera BalletAnd there is another undiscussed problem, having to do with the way meter shapes melody. The technical details would take too long to explain, but it’s obvious at a glance that the rhythms of “Grow old along with me” and “Do not go gentle into that good night” are not going to generate the same kind of tune. Verdi had a lifetime of experience imagining melodies for lines of seven, eight or 10 syllables — but not nine syllables, which traditional Italian poetry did not use, and French did.A very clear example comes in that somber chant of the monks, heard at the beginning of Act II and recalled in the last act. The instrumental statements make perfectly clear what Verdi thought the rhythm was, and the Italian translation — supplied in “ottonario” (eight-syllable) meter — allows it to be sung that way. But in the original French an extra syllable has to be tucked in, irregularly and somewhat awkwardly, in every second bar. The same problem affects the tenor aria, and again the translators provide the familiar verse-form from Verdi’s comfort zone, instead of the “novenario” he had to set in Paris.This, however, is devil’s advocacy. Yes, the opera is better overall in French — but it is a subtle superiority. It shows up not in obvious “gotcha” errors, but in the accumulation of many moments when the dramatic situation is precise in the original and fuzzy in the translation, where the phrases breathe naturally as Verdi wrote them and have to be rearranged or interrupted in Italian. It probably affects the singers more than the listeners, but the cumulative impact can be profound.An example: King Philip and the Grand Inquisitor are discussing, with exquisite caution, the inflammatory behavior of Philip’s son Carlos. What punishment for his rebellion? asks the priest. “Tout — ou rien,” replies the king: “all — or nothing.” In Italian, to preserve those three lonely notes, he answers instead “mezzo estrem” (“extreme measures”). He means the choice between putting his own son to death or allowing him to flee. God himself, observes the holy man, once chose the former.It is all chilling in either language. But the Italian is blunt, and the French is sharp. Multiply that by a hundred, and you have more than reason enough for the Met’s big change after a century of translation. It’s time.Will Crutchfield, the artistic director of Teatro Nuovo, has conducted “Don Carlos” in both Italian and French. More

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      in Movies

      Wes Anderson’s Dream of France, and the Paris I Remember

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      With “The French Dispatch,” the director’s latest, yet another American artist falls under the country’s spell. The Times’s Paris bureau chief recalls when the same thing happened to him.PARIS — At the premiere on Sunday before the release of his latest movie, “The French Dispatch,” Wes Anderson stood onstage in a rumpled, brownish suit and told the crowd packed into a Champs-Élysées theater, “I have a French air about me.” He had, he said, “spent my whole life feeling I am in a French movie.”Now this artful Texan and sometime Parisian with a tousled Left-Bank look has made a film so French that not a Gallic cliché is omitted. The trees are pollarded, the shutters are largely drawn, the police tend toward Inspector Clouseau look-alikes. The streets of the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé — roughly translated as Boredom-on-the-World-Weary — are dotted with rats beneath steeply pitched zinc roofs, and, of course, the talk is of love and art and gastronomic pleasure.Ennui (a word that conveys a peculiarly French sense of tedium mixed with spleen) is home to The French Dispatch, an English-language magazine whose avowed inspiration is The New Yorker. In Anderson’s telling, the fictional publication existed between 1925 and 1975 under the editorship of a certain Arthur Howitzer, Jr., who keeps as close an eye on his journalists’ expense reports as on any redundant phrase in their copy. Howitzer is loosely modeled on Harold Ross and William Shawn, the co-founder and longtime editor of the magazine that “The French Dispatch” relocates from Manhattan.The movie, however, is scarcely about journalism, apart from the occasional musing of a reporter named Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand and inspired by Mavis Gallant and Lillian Ross) who covers a mock-up of the May 1968 student uprising. “I should maintain journalistic neutrality,” she says. “If it exists.”Rather, Anderson’s nostalgia-laced film is about an old subject: the American writer in Paris. It evokes how French sensuality and style and beauty and surly realism — so completely distinct from can-do American optimism and the functional drabness of Main Street U.S.A. — can facilitate artistic reinvention and afford the space to dream.I arrived in Paris in 1975, just as The French Dispatch was ending its life, and later began work for a fortnightly American magazine called The Paris Metro, whose brief but passionate life extended from 1976 to 1978. The tone was more Village Voice than The French Dispatch, and it was a thrilling way to start in journalism. I explored the redevelopment of the Les Halles wholesale food market — then a gaping hole in the center of the city — and wrote about a suburban warehouse disco that was drawing a chic crowd all the way from St. Germain-des-Prés.The whiff of garlic, sauvignon blanc and Gauloises was still strong on the early-morning subway and there was still a horse butcher on every other block. At The Paris Metro, we all thought we were living a charmed life, however straitened our individual circumstances might be. Heck, Parisians, whatever their sophistication, needed tough, raw American journalism to see their city and culture anew. The magazine was a popular success that might have benefited from Howitzer’s attention to expense accounts.I discovered that, despite appearances, I was born an outsider. France was liberating, just as the movies of Godard, Renoir, Truffaut and Varda clearly were for Anderson. They were guides to unimagined possibility, so different in pacing and theme and structure from much of Hollywood.“I have stolen many things from your cinema,” Anderson told the Paris audience at the premiere.Theft may be a tribute, just as cultural difference may be a stimulant. The French phrase “Bof, c’est normal” — “bof” is an untranslatable French verbal shrug — fascinated me, so, at The Paris Metro, I wrote about the French reluctance to be shocked by any human antics, all waved away as “normal.” A short story called “A Slit Skirt” about a vagrant exploring the underside of Paris found its way into print but is probably best forgotten. Still, it reflected a young man’s urge to create, with Paris as the perfect backdrop.If good cheap food and wine were everywhere in those late ’70s days, beauty also overflowed: the wide bright sky on the banks of the Seine, the low-slung bridges with their subtle fulcrums, the golden domes and verdigris statuary, the streets that beckoned and the boulevards that summoned, the overflowing markets and the islands pointing their prows at the river. Paris seemed unreasonably generous.This French generosity is alluded to in “The French Dispatch” with a wistful longing by Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright and loosely modeled on James Baldwin and A.J. Liebling), who appears in the fourth and last of the short episodes that make up the movie. He started, as he tells Howitzer, in “fires and murders,” but has moved on to the intrigues of gastronomy. He embarks on an investigation of the table of the chief of the municipal police, whose chef, Mr. Nescaffier (Steve Park), has earned a certain renown with his Blasé city park pigeon hash, among other delicacies.Journalism can be lonely, but Wright describes how invariably, on some French street, he would find “a table set for me” with its bottle of wine — “my solitary feast, my comrade.” France has modernized, of course, but it has also resisted the brand-obsessed homogenization of Anglophone countries. The comfort of that table, and the solicitous service tended to it, remain something accessible across France, as distinct as the unctuous yet mineral perfection of a Gillardeau oyster.Nescaffier, the chef, is poisoned as the police chief tries to free his kidnapped son. On his recovery, in a wonderful scene, he describes with rapture the flavor of the toxic salts in the radishes — milky, peppery, spicy, not entirely unpleasant. “A new flavor! A rare thing at my age!” he explains, with corpses strewn about.Whether the highly stylized, risibly mannered goings-on in Ennui-sur-Blasé are a mocking pastiche of what Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin and countless others found in the movable feast of France, or a Francophile director’s loving paean to that tradition, is one of those riddles that Anderson likes to play with. “I offer the film to France with admiration and respect and a little envy,” he said. Perhaps that was a clue.France clearly has an emotional hold on the director. It was the French epicure Brillat-Savarin who noted: “I have drawn the following inference, that the limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed.” In food, as in love. When, in the second story of the movie, the imprisoned painter Moses Rosenthaler (played by Benicio del Toro) makes love to his prison guard and model, identified only as Simone (Léa Seydoux), he murmurs to her “I love you.”“I don’t love you,” she says.“Already?”That French realism never goes away.I was reminded of the scene in Godard’s “La Chinoise,” in which two young Maoist revolutionaries — these are students with real heft and serious beliefs — are also lovers. A scene consists of the young man saying “Je t’aime” and the young woman saying “Je ne t’aime plus.” Some things just sound better in French, but, OK, if you insist on a translation: “I love you,” “I no longer love you.”Yes, Anderson has stolen things, but immersed in the cornucopia of France, how could he or any other American artist do otherwise? More