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    French Cinema Celebrates Its Covid Recovery

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    The French movie industry has been celebrating statistics that show an increase in movie attendance.Ronald Chammah, who owns a pair of small cinemas on the Left Bank of Paris, remembers well the grim days in 2022, when he wondered whether the French passion for moviegoing — a pastime that France invented 130 years ago — had been irreparably diminished by pandemic lockdowns.But that was then. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Chammah was sitting in a packed Parisian cafe happily describing the Sunday in late November when he sold out screenings from a roster of Armenian art-house directors — Inna Mkhitaryan, Artavazd Pelechian, Sergueï Paradjanov — known mostly to hard-core film buffs.“That day, we broke the record for our theaters,” Mr. Chammah said with a note of astonishment. “It was full, all day long — sold out, sold out, sold out.”The global movie business had a disappointing 2024, thanks in part to Hollywood strikes. At the Oscars on Sunday, Sean Baker, winner of best director for “Anora,” used his acceptance speech to lament the pandemic-era loss of hundreds of American movie screens. “And we continue to lose them regularly,” Mr. Baker said. “If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture.”But in France, there has been a more celebratory feeling of late, with fresh statistics suggesting that its audiences are leading the way in returning to what are lovingly known as “les salles obscures” — the “dark rooms” of their movie theaters.That celebration was infused with a very French idea about citizens’ moral obligation to support the arts and to do so somewhere other than at home. The Institut Lumière, a film society based in Lyon, declared that last year’s French admissions numbers amounted to a triumph over both the pandemic era and the “invasive digital civilization” of scrolling and swiping.We 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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      Martial Solal, French Jazz Piano Virtuoso, Is Dead at 97

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      Mr. Solal, who also wrote music for films and symphony orchestras, was revered in Europe and hailed in the United States on his rare visits there.Martial Solal, Europe’s pre-eminent jazz pianist, who recorded dozens of startlingly original albums in a career of almost three quarters of a century and who wrote scores for numerous films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece “Breathless,” died on Thursday in Versailles, France. He was 97.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Rachida Dati, France’s minister of culture.Mr. Solal, who was born in Algeria, was 34 when he performed his first concert at the landmark Salle Gaveau concert hall in Paris, his adopted home, in 1962. He was 91 when he took the same stage in 2019 for his farewell concert.The two performances were bookends to an extraordinary career in which he recorded countless albums and wrote music for solo piano, big bands and symphonies, including four concertos for piano and orchestra, as well as the film scores.Although he was little known in the United States, the critic Francis Davis, writing in The New York Times in 2001, said that Mr. Solal “might be the greatest living European jazz pianist — and is at least the equal of any in the United States.”In 2010, John Fordham, the chief jazz critic of The Guardian, called him “France’s most famous living jazz artist.”Mr. Solal was admired as much for his technical virtuosity as for his exploratory improvisations. Critics compared him to the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, and his playing at times echoed (without imitating) the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. But he blazed his own path, combining spare melodic lines with lush chordal passages in a style the French newspaper Le Monde described as “cutting through his music with the precision of a goldsmith.”We 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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      ‘Les Misérables’ Returns Home

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      The most famous French musical has never been popular in Paris. A major new production hopes to change that, reworking it for a contemporary French audience.Globally, it’s the most famous French musical. One hundred and thirty million people have seen Jean Valjean face off against Javert, in 22 languages; its downtrodden characters have taken to the barricades in London’s West End nearly continuously since 1985.Everyone knows “Les Misérables.” Everyone — except the French.In a strange twist of fate, “Les Miz,” an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s sweeping novel about justice, poverty and the social reality of 19th-century France, has never been popular in the country of its birth. Despite being created by two Frenchmen, the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyricist Alain Boublil, it has only been performed in Paris twice since the 1980s. The 2012 film adaptation, starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, also performed poorly at the French box office.Now a major new stage production, set to open at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on Wednesday, aims to make “Les Misérables” a star at home, too — with the enthusiastic assent of its creators.During a recent rehearsal, in an impersonal industrial space in Romainville, a Paris suburb, Schönberg, 80, held his fist in the air as the nearly 40-strong cast belted out an impassioned French-language version of the finale, “Do You Hear the People Sing?”Claude-Michel Schönberg, left, and Alain Boublil, right, wrote the music and lyrics for the original French musical, which premiered in 1980. For this year’s revival, Schönberg updated the lyrics based on “the corrections that had been made over time internationally,” he said.Violette Franchi for The New York Times“Returning to France is important to us, because it’s our culture, our way of thinking,” Boublil, 83, said in an interview between rehearsals. “Even though we’ve both lived abroad for a long time, that hasn’t changed.”We 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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      ‘The Vegetarian’ Review: Putting a Nobel Prize Winner’s Work Onstage

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      After Han Kang won the Prize in Literature last month, a stage version of her novel “The Vegetarian” sold out its run at a struggling Paris theater.Other Paris theaters may be a little envious of the Odéon this fall. In a stroke of good luck, long before the Nobel committee met to decide its 2024 honorees, the playhouse had scheduled a new stage adaptation of a work by Han Kang, the South Korean novelist and surprise winner of this year’s Prize in Literature.Now, Parisians are flocking en masse to “La Vegetariana,” an Italian-language version of Han’s “The Vegetarian,” directed by Daria Deflorian. The sold out run, through Nov. 16 at the Ateliers Berthier, the Odéon’s second stage, is a welcome opportunity to dive into Han’s surreal style, by way of a thoughtful, if at times muted, production.“La Vegetariana” is tightly focused on the novel’s central characters. Yeong-hye, whose sudden conversion to vegetarianism bewilders everyone around her, is watched closely by her nameless husband, sister and brother-in-law. In the novel, each of the three narrates a section. Here, too, they introduce Yeong-hye and comment on her directly to the audience in long monologues.In that sense, Deflorian, who coadapted the novel with Francesca Marciano and also appears in the role of the sister, treats the source material with reverence. Onstage, Yeong-hye remains an enigmatic figure, speaking as little as she does on the page. Initially afraid of meat, she later stops eating altogether. She requires no food, she says at one point, because she believes she is morphing into a tree.Unfortunately, without directorial intervention, an impenetrable heroine can also make for dull theater. As Yeong-hye, Monica Piseddu wanders the near-empty stage like a sleepwalker, dressed in an oversize T-shirt. While each scene is announced through projections with the abruptness of a movie script (“Couple’s House. Inside at Night.”), the shadowy lighting traps the characters in a kind of perpetual twilight, with gray walls as their cheerless background.Deflorian, left, in the role of the unnamed sister of Yeong-hye, played by Monica Piseddu.Andrea PizzalisWe 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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      The Curious Case of Nora Holt, a Pioneer of Black Classical Music and Jazz

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      “Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt,” read the 1974 obituary in The Amsterdam News.And fabulous she was: A pioneer of the Black classical music scene in Chicago, Holt also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in Paris. Born into the middle-class, she moved back and forth between worlds: concert artist and blues singer, newspaper columnist and club hostess, erudite scholar and scandalous socialite.This fluidity led to friendships with two women who represented distinct versions of fame for Black women in the early 20th century: Josephine Baker, the working-class dancer from St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris; and the composer Florence Price, who transformed Chicago’s classical music scene, rising to national fame with her symphonies.Holt’s life didn’t follow familiar narratives. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story, like Baker’s; nor was it, like Price’s, a cathartic breakthrough for Black musicians in the white world of classical music. Instead, she had a kind of mutability, frequently changing her name and her place in culture, collapsing ideas about respectability and sexual liberation.Music was the through line in Holt’s life. She first made her name in classical music. For young, middle-class Black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical music could open doors to salon culture, church leadership, jobs teaching music and civic engagement.In 1918, Holt, a pianist, became the first Black person in the United States, female or male, to earn a master’s degree in music, from Chicago Musical College. She also worked in the male-dominated fields of music criticism, scholarship and composition. Her music journalism, public lectures, recitals and community organizing became a blueprint for other Black women seeking to become leaders in Chicago’s classical musical scene.“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” she wrote to a male colleague after founding a magazine, Music and Poetry, in 1921. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”We 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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      ‘La Haine’ Is Back (as a Musical This Time)

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      Mathieu Kassovitz has turned his cult 1995 movie into a stage musical. The France it represents is different — though much hasn’t changed.Watching the musical “La Haine” is a bit like looking at a beloved’s face under water: It’s familiar, but distorted.Almost three decades after Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic film became a political sensation and cult hit in France, the actor and director has transformed it into a stage show that opens at the Seine Musicale in Paris on Oct. 10 before touring the country.The musical tells the same haunting story of three close friends from Paris’s neglected suburban projects who, in the aftermath of a lethal confrontation with the police, go on a rambling journey into the capital with a gun and a thirst for vengeance.The same young men take center stage — the angry white character of Vinz, originally played by Vincent Cassel; the wise Black boxer Hubert; and the joker Saïd, of North-African descent — and repeat many of the movie’s lines, which became classics in French culture. A clock counts down the same way throughout, rushing toward the same terrible end.The most significant differences, of course, are the song and dance numbers, produced by some of the biggest names in French music, including the rapper Youssoupha and the pop star Matthieu Chedid, who goes by M. Although the film was saturated with hip-hop culture, it featured very little actual music. The soundtrack was urban percussion — roaring motorcycles and hissing trains.“I’m very curious to see how people react to it, because it’s close enough to the original movie so that people can feel comfortable. And far enough so people don’t feel betrayed,” Kassovitz, now 57, said in an interview during a rehearsal break, two weeks before opening night. “I’m dancing on a thin line.”We 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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      Festival d’Automne in Paris Honors Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie

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      A retrospective in Paris honors Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, whose theater works have examined the region’s troubles for decades.The theater-makers Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué have grown accustomed to life in exile. In 2013, the duo, who are creative as well as life partners, left their home country of Lebanon, to settle in Berlin — out of “fatigue,” Majdalanie said recently.The corruption and the frequent crises that rocked the Middle Eastern country had become too draining, she added. “When you see the same problems repeating themselves over and over again, you need distance to find peace,” she said.The move worked — until the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel last year. Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza had a devastating knock-on effect on its relations with Lebanon, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.Majdalanie and Mroué, who have long investigated Middle Eastern conflicts onstage, were critical of Israel’s retaliation. That made life uncomfortable in Germany, where many artists who find fault with Israel have, since Oct. 7, faced an increasingly hostile environment and accusations of antisemitism.“Lebanon was home, then Berlin was home for a decade,” Majdalanie said. “Now, every day, we ask ourselves: Where to go now? Because we don’t know where home is anymore.”For the next three months, they will have a temporary refuge in France. Through December, the Festival d’Automne à Paris, a long-running multidisciplinary event, is hosting a retrospective that showcases Majdalanie and Mroué’s longstanding commitment to grappling with contested political narratives.We 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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      Travis Scott Released From Custody After Confrontation at a Paris Hotel

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      The star rapper had been accused on Friday of assaulting a security guard at a luxury hotel in Paris. No charges were filed against him, according to prosecutors.The rapper Travis Scott was released from police custody on Saturday, a day after he was detained following a confrontation with a security guard at a Paris hotel, prosecutors said.Scott, 33, whose birth name is Jacques Bermon Webster II, had been detained on Friday after prosecutors said he had assaulted a security guard at the George V, a luxury hotel in the city’s Eighth Arrondissement. No charges were filed against him, according to the prosecutor’s office.The office said in a statement on Saturday that “the case opened on the grounds of assault was dropped as the offense was not sufficiently substantiated.”Scott, a multiplatinum rapper, was visiting the city for the Summer Olympics when the confrontation took place.The prosecutor’s office said, “The security guard had intervened to separate the rapper from his bodyguard.” Additional details about the confrontation were unavailable.Scott had posted photos on social media from the crowd of the men’s U.S. basketball team during their game against Serbia on Thursday.In June, Scott was arrested in Miami Beach, Fla., after causing a disturbance on a docked yacht, according to the police. He was released after paying a $650 bond for charges of trespassing and disorderly intoxication after the police responded to reports of people fighting on the vessel.Hours later, Scott began selling T-shirts that featured his mug shot, with a caption that read “It’s Miami,” which he was quoted as saying in the police report.The future of Scott’s career was cast in doubt after 10 of his fans died and hundreds were injured during a crowd crush at the rapper’s concert, which was part of the Astroworld music festival in Houston in 2021.A grand jury later declined to indict Scott and settlements were reached in multiple lawsuits stemming from the deaths.Aurelien Breeden More

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      Travis Scott Is Accused of Assaulting a Security Guard in Paris

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      The rapper, who was in France for the Olympics, was taken into police custody at the George V hotel, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.The star rapper Travis Scott was detained on Friday in Paris, where he was visiting for the Summer Olympics, after a conflict with a security guard at a luxury hotel, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.The prosecutor’s office said Mr. Scott, 33, whose real name is Jacques Bermon Webster II, had assaulted a security guard at the George V hotel, in the city’s Eighth Arrondissement.“The security guard had intervened to separate the rapper from his bodyguard,” the office said in a statement.There are no known charges against Mr. Scott. It was unclear later Friday whether he was still in custody. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had referred the case to the judicial police.Representatives for Mr. Scott said in a statement, “We are in direct communication with the local Parisian authorities to swiftly resolve this matter and will provide updates when appropriate.”Mr. Scott, a multiplatinum artist in the United States with a string of No. 1 albums, was arrested this summer in Miami Beach, Fla., after what the police called a disturbance on a yacht. He was charged with trespassing and disorderly intoxication. His lawyer said at the time that he had been “briefly detained due to a misunderstanding.”On Thursday night, Mr. Scott had posted on Instagram from the crowd of the men’s basketball game between the United States and Serbia, snapping photos of the American stars LeBron James and Stephen Curry.In 2021, 10 fans died as a result of a crowd crush at Mr. Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, his hometown. A grand jury declined to indict Mr. Scott and others who oversaw the festival, and settlements have been reached in the lawsuits over the deaths.Aurelien Breeden More