Subterms
In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More
This strange, seductive film from 1970, directed by Paul Vecchiali, borrows the conventions of the serial-killer thriller and turns them inside out.Originally released in France in 1970, and now available in a new restoration, “The Strangler” is a strange, seductive film that takes the conventions of the serial-killer thriller and explodes them with baroque colors and convulsive camera movements. It’s like “Peeping Tom” meets one of Dario Argento’s giallo joints, but slathered in a coat of melancholic malaise.The titular lady-killer isn’t frantic and blood-starved; he’s a baby-faced young man, Émile (Jacques Perrin), who takes to the streets of Paris on the lookout for women he perceives as lonely and suicidal. For the most part, these women indeed meet Émile, their agent of mercy, halfway — a process the director, Paul Vecchiali, depicts as an eerie, enigmatic dance of death and desire.Born in 1930, Vecchiali belonged to the same generation as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Despite beginning his filmmaking career in the early ’60s, he was never associated with the “nouvelle vague” crowd. He came to prominence later in life, with the critical success of “The Strangler” playing a substantial role in his rise. With Diagonale, the production company he founded in 1976, he gained a reputation for transgressive themes and experimental methods — and up until his death in January of this year, he continued to work on the margins of the French film industry.Using a white knitted scarf as his weapon of choice, Émile stalks new victims as three individuals separately stay on his tail, each with a different pursuit: Simon, a burly detective (Julien Guiomar); a thief (Paul Barge) who swipes cash and jewelry from each corpse; and a woman, Anna (Eva Simonet), who seems to want to be a future victim.Contrary to what you might expect from such a lurid nightmare scenario, “The Strangler” is quite unlike the exploitative slasher fare from which it draws inspiration. The killer loses his will to kill; the investigators, their desire to solve the crimes. Vecchiali makes poetic — and tragic — what the true-crime junkie must experience after bingeing one too many episodes: the emptiness of all those pretty corpses.The StranglerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More
A new play by Alexander Zeldin recreates his mother’s winding, painful path to a life of her own.Minutes into “The Confessions,” a new production by the British playwright and director Alexander Zeldin, the main character, Alice, says demurely, “See, I’m not interesting. I have nothing of interest to tell.”How many women have said as much before sharing piercing experiences? Thankfully, Zeldin didn’t take the woman on whom Alice is based — his mother — at her word. Instead, in “The Confessions,” which runs through Oct. 14 at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, he recreates her winding, painful path to a life of her own. (The show transfers to the National Theater, in London, and to the Comédie de Gèneve, in Geneva, later this fall.)While Zeldin is best known for his “Inequalities” trilogy, which explored the damage that government austerity policies have inflicted on ordinary British people, he has increasingly turned to his own origins for inspiration. “A Death in the Family,” a French-language production he created in 2022, was partly inspired by the deaths of his father and grandmother. “The Confessions,” which is performed in English, is even more personal: In the final few scenes, Lilit Lesser plays a younger version of Zeldin, named Leander here.Not that Zeldin’s modus operandi has changed. Just as he interviewed social workers and homeless families for the “Inequalities” plays, according to an interview in the playbill, he recorded lengthy conversations with his mother as the source material for this production.“The Confessions” fits into an intriguing trend. Over the past few years, prominent male writers in France have been telling their mothers’ stories. In 2021, Édouard Louis published a short volume about his working-class mother, “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations.” The same year, the playwright Wajdi Mouawad, who is at the helm of the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, delved into his family’s exile from Lebanon from a similar point of view in “Mother.”Alexander Zeldin, known for his “Inequalities” trilogy, chose to draw on stories from his own family for “The Confessions.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin states in the playbill that he, like Louis, was inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, and “The Confessions” openly reckons with the harm that patriarchal norms have inflicted upon women. The expectations of others keep thwarting Alice, an initially shy girl from Australia who inherited her father’s love of painting. Her art studies are deemed a failure, and her mother encourages a quick marriage to a stilted sailor. Alice eventually finds the courage to divorce and pursue her dreams, but then a prominent art historian corners her in an artist’s studio and rapes her.The scope of “The Confessions” has led Zeldin to take a step back from his usual naturalistic style. The sets are less true to life, and two actors play Alice at different ages. The older Alice, Amelda Brown, acts as a discreet witness, often sitting in the orchestra seats along with the audience and wistfully closing and reopening the stage curtains between some scenes.The younger Alice, Eryn Jean Norvill, first appears on a stage within the stage, where the character and her friends hide behind curtains as naval cadets chase them. An early scene with her father, who clearly wishes to support his daughter yet fails to help her, skillfully exemplifies how young working-class women are encouraged not to “get above themselves,” as Alice’s mother reminds her.The storytelling then settles into an efficient pattern, going from episode to episode in Alice’s life, with Norvill subtly manifesting the character’s changes — skittish, then increasingly self-reliant. Yet it takes the traumatic encounter with the art historian for “The Confessions” to move into a higher gear.Eryn Jean Norvill plays the role of the younger Alice, a character based on Zeldin’s mother.Christophe Raynaud de LageArrestingly, Zeldin doesn’t show us what happens. We see the man following Alice into the bathroom with the tacit approval of the artist hosting them, and a long silence ensues before she staggers out of the room, looking dazed.It’s more chilling than any literal depiction of violence could be, and the unusual form of reparation Alice then seeks elevates “The Confessions” further. While Alice’s well-meaning friends in the art world advise her to simply move on, she asks to stay alone with her aggressor at a party. Then she orders him to undress and get into a bath with her.Movingly, the scene is played by Brown, the older Alice, as her younger counterpart looks on. Suddenly vulnerable, forced to recognize the humanity of the woman in front of him, the man grows flustered, then cries softly.“Mom, I had no idea,” someone says from the audience after that encounter. It’s the younger Zeldin, also acknowledging what his mother went through — an event that led her to leave Australia for Europe, where she met Zeldin’s father, a Jewish refugee. Brian Lipson beautifully embodies his kind awkwardness, up until his death when Zeldin was 15, but the focus remains on Alice — a woman whose “ordinary” life was anything but.And there is hope in seeing Zeldin, like Louis and Mouawad before him, look back on his mother’s experiences with such care and empathy. “I feel like forgiveness is near,” the older Alice says at the end. The first step may be for men to listen, as Zeldin did. More
Over 230 pieces went under the hammer, including sculptures by Rodin. The French actor — now dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct — once played the artist in a movie.The near-entirety of an art collection belonging to Gérard Depardieu, the prolific French actor whose career was clouded in recent years by accusations of sexual assault and harassment, was sold at a two-day Paris auction this week that brought in 4 million euros, including fees, or about $4.2 million.Over 230 items went under the hammer on Tuesday and Wednesday at a sale organized at the Hôtel Drouot by the Ader auction house, including paintings by Alexander Calder and sculptures by Auguste Rodin, whom Depardieu played in the 1988 movie “Camille Claudel.”About 100 people crammed into the auction room on Tuesday night for the sale of the collection’s most prominent items, including a small oil painting of a flower vase by Odile Redon, which sold for €50,000, and the three small Rodin sculptures, which sold for €15,000 to €65,000.The star of the night seemed to be a 4.5-foot enlargement of “Walking Man,” a bronze sculpture originally made by Germaine Richier in 1945. The enlargement, which used to dominate Depardieu’s living room, was hammered up to €510,000 — but the auction house said in a statement Wednesday that the actor decided at the last minute not to sell the sculpture, and withdrew the lot.“This is a serious collection,” David Nordmann, one of the two auctioneers at Ader in charge of the sale, said in an interview. “This is not the collection of a celebrity who bought artwork just to show off.”“The Walking Man” by Germaine Richier, which once stood in Depardieu’s living room.Adagp, ParisNordmann had previously worked with Depardieu when the actor sold off the contents of a Parisian fine dining restaurant that he owned. The two men stayed in touch and discussed the sale his art collection. Depardieu gave the go-ahead in early 2023, and let the auctioneer pick the pieces and set the prices.“He loved to collect,” Nordmann said, recalling how Depardieu spent hours telling him about Matisse’s superiority to Picasso the first time he entered the actor’s home. But “at some point,” he added, “he reached the end of that process.”He has also faced a growing number of sexual abuse accusations. In interviews in April with Mediapart, an investigative news site, 13 women — actresses, makeup artists and production staff — accused Depardieu of making inappropriate sexual comments or gestures during the shooting of films released between 2004 and 2022. Two other women made similar accusations against him in interviews this summer with France Inter, a radio station. Depardieu declined to be interviewed for this article, but has always denied any criminal behavior.The turmoil in his personal life might have factored into his decision to sell, Nordmann said, “but not in the sense that he is trying to prove a point” or distract from the accusations.“He wants to move on,” he said.Some items sold at prices much higher than expected, including a 1928 portrait by Christian Jacques Bérard that sold for €55,000 euros, 11 times the low estimate, and a monochromatic ink composition by Jean Arp that sold for €20,000. But most pieces sold within the estimated range.The collection, which skews heavily toward postwar abstraction and contemporary art, includes widely recognizable names — a Duchamp collage; several pieces by Miró. Depardieu appears to have favored rugged compositions, bold colors, thick brushstrokes and raw materials, in keeping with his larger-than-life personality, Nordmann said.He refused to lend pieces for shows, Nordmann said, including the Richier sculpture, which was recently requested for a show at the Centre Pompidou.Depardieu in the Netflix TV show “Marseille.” The actor has appeared in over 250 movies.Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe sale did not include any Depardieu memorabilia. But it attracted unusually large crowds, both during the sale and beforehand, as thousands of curious visitors crowded the Hôtel Drouot to get a peek at the actor’s collection before it was snapped up.Depardieu is one of France’s most prominent and prolific lead actors, an internationally recognized figure who has played in the last 50 years in more than 250 movies, including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and in TV shows like “Marseille.”Over the past decade, though, Depardieu’s popularity has waned as personal scandals overtook his acting career. He became a Russian citizen in 2013 to avoid taxes in France, and has expressed a strong friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, although last year he denounced the invasion of Ukraine.But the accusations of sexual abuse against Depardieu have been more damaging. He has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations.But Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault in a case involving Charlotte Arnould, a French actress who has accused him of sexually assaulting her in Paris in 2018, when she was 22, during informal rehearsals for a theater production. Prosecutors had initially dropped that investigation in 2019, citing of a lack of incriminating evidence, but it was reopened in 2020.The French movie industry has grappled with several high-profile accusations of sexual abuse in recent years and taken steps to address them. But mixed reactions to the #MeToo movement in France — which has also given a warm reception to artists accused of abuse — exposed sharp cultural divides between France and the United States.Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle More
The long-contested, now beloved French singer’s home is open to the public, with everything exactly as it was on the day he died in 1991.Jester, troubadour, agent provocateur, Serge Gainsbourg rhymed his way through life in a fog of Gitanes smoke, making music of every genre. Jane Birkin, his great love, was a “baby alone in Babylon.” Asked once on a TV show how he would like to die, Gainsbourg shot back: “I would like to die alive.”Now, 32 years after his death in Paris at age 62, Gainsbourg feels very much alive at the Maison Gainsbourg, his Left Bank home that opened to the public last week, along with a museum nearby. Nothing has moved — not the Steinway piano, the Gitanes pack, the Zippo lighter, the empty bottle of Château Pétrus, the typewriter or the framed spiders.All the walls are draped in black fabric. Gainsbourg preferred black, he once said, “because in psychiatric hospitals the walls are all white.”This eerie exercise in preservation — giving the impression that Gainsbourg has sidled out moments earlier — is the act of love of his daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, now a renowned actress, singer and movie director. “To stop time on March 2, 1991, was a way to refuse the fact that my father was dead,” she said in an interview. “I would go to the house from time to time, and mope and hurt and brood from terrible loss.”The Maison Gainsbourg is sold out to visitors through the end of the year, although occasional sales of newly-released tickets are promised before then.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesThe contents of Gainsbourg’s apartment are left as they were on the day he died in 1991.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesSerge Gainsbourg was the son of Russian Jews who fled their homeland after the 1917 revolution and settled in Paris. As a teenager he wore the Yellow Star that the Nazis and the collaborationist French Vichy government imposed on Jews. He and his family survived World War II in hiding.If, as he followed his pianist father into a postwar life of Paris cabarets, Gainsbourg quickly showed contempt for pieties, moralizing and conformism, he had good reason: He knew well, having been marked for death as a Jew, the limits of the French Republic’s motto of liberty, equality and fraternity.His house, which is already sold out to visitors through the end of the year, although occasional sales of newly-released tickets are promised before then, is dark and cluttered, a lair. In a whisper, Ms. Gainsbourg, 52, accompanies visitors through an intimate audio guide delivered via headphones. We learn that she was not allowed to play the Steinway, only an upright piano. The large collection of police badges arrayed on a table were coaxed from cops her father invited in. Antique dolls on a bed upstairs terrified her. When her head first brushed the crystal ball hanging from the chandelier in her father’s bedroom, she knew she had grown.“To stop time on March 2, 1991, was a way to refuse the fact that my father was dead,” said Charlotte Gainsbourg. Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis, until they split in 1980, was the home of Gainsbourg and Birkin, Charlotte’s parents, whose erotic lovemaking duet “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus” was a groundbreaking hit in 1969. It was banned in Britain and Italy, and Gainsbourg attributed its success to the Vatican, which called the song “obscene.” An earlier recording with another of Gainsbourg’s loves, Brigitte Bardot, was played once on French radio before Bardot’s then husband, Gunter Sachs, threatened a law suit. It was finally released in 1986.If the song was explicit, it also bore the imprint of Gainsbourg’s lyricism. “You are the wave, me the naked island,” Birkin murmurs.Gainsbourg was a bard who never shied away from the Eros and violence that, through melancholy eyes, he saw at the heart of life, and serenaded with what the French newspaper Le Monde once called “an imperious languor.” A haunted troublemaker who drank and smoked his way to an early death, he trod a fine line between provocation and outright taboo, offering a relentless invitation to confront hypocrisies.“To be an artist you need a lot of sincerity, which comes at a very high price,” Gainsbourg said toward the end of his life.“I can’t imagine my father surviving our current times,” Ms. Gainsbourg said. “Perhaps he would have adapted. But our culture is scary. Everything is calculated, pondered, and you run the risk of being canceled at any moment and no long being able to express yourself. That is what is frightening for an artist.”Gainsbourg was hated by French conservatives for daring, in 1979, to turn La Marseillaise, the national anthem, into a reggae hit, “Aux Armes Et Caetera.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMs. Gainsbourg said she wasn’t allowed to play her father’s piano; she had to play an upright model.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesAs it happened, I moved to the Rue de Verneuil, where Gainsbourg lived, in the summer of 1991, a few months after his death, for my first tour as a Paris correspondent. I watched in some wonder as adoring declarations (interspersed here and there with antisemitic bile) formed a canvas of graffiti across the length of his home.Soon the Gainsbourg spell had me. I listened to the songs, filled with dark irony and fatalism, that had made him such a disruptive force in French society over the preceding decades.He was the haggard minstrel of shameless lovemaking attuned to the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. He was the subversive with a permanent stubble, hated by French conservatives for daring, in 1979, to turn La Marseillaise, the national anthem, into a reggae hit, “Aux Armes Et Caetera.” Paramilitary veterans forced Gainsbourg to cancel a concert in Strasbourg in 1980, a foretaste of the rise of the French extreme right.He was the Jew who in “Yellow Star,” from the 1975 album “Rock Around the Bunker,” mocks his executioner-inflicted badge as a prize (“I’ve won the Yellow Star”), or perhaps a sheriff’s emblem, before concluding: “Difficult for a Jew, the law of struggle for life.” He was the outsider with an uncanny eye and level gravelly delivery; as another outsider, I had much to learn.A single song, “Le Poinçonneur des Lilas” (or the ticket-puncher at the Porte des Lilas Metro station), released in 1958, propelled Gainsbourg to fame. Described by the writer Boris Vian as “the essence itself of musical and lyrical art,” it evokes the desperate life of the “man you meet but don’t look at” in a place where there is no sun. He makes “holes, little holes, always little holes, holes for second class, holes for first class,” and dreams at last of holding a gun to “make myself a little hole” that will land him forever in a big one.A life of struggle, and sometimes a fight for survival itself, was the world that Gainsbourg first knew with his immigrant parents. He would never forget it. In myriad genres — rock, reggae, Afro-Cuban, pop, funk — he went on to explore themes of love and loss, often with deadpan humor. He in turn influenced countless musicians, from hip-hop to indie.Ms. Gainsbourg told me she was long overwhelmed by her father’s legacy and the question of what to do with his house. She thought about enlarging it in 2008 with the help of the architect Jean Nouvel, but the project was expensive and she retreated. In some ways doing anything was still “unbearable.” Then, in 2013, her half sister, Kate Barry, Birkin’s daughter from an earlier relationship, died in a fall from her 4th-floor Paris apartment. Ms. Gainsbourg fled to New York.Only now has Ms. Gainsbourg felt ready to open the house and the museum, which contains letters, school reports and a wide range of mementos from her father’s life — even if she is still in mourning for her mother, who died in July.“I know that she is very happy I did this, even if perhaps she no longer felt at home here,” Ms. Gainsbourg said of Birkin, who continued to work closely with her father even after their separation.Gainsbourg near the end of his life in his apartment on the Rue de Verneuil.Jerome Prebois/Sygma, via Getty ImagesHer mother always pushed her to become an artist, Ms. Gainsbourg said. When she was 12, she recorded “Lemon Incest” with her father at a studio in New York. “The love we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest, the most dizzying,” she sings in a high-pitched, tremulous whisper.A video accompanying the song, a melody from Chopin with a disco beat, showed father and daughter on a wide bed, he shirtless in jeans, she in a shirt and underwear.“It took me 20 minutes to record and I sang as well as I could because I knew it was his declaration of love,” she told me. “The most important thing is that I say this is the love we will never make together.”I asked if it would be possible to record today. “Probably not: It would be seen as shameful disrespect to people who have suffered incest. Certainly, but that does not change the fact I am very proud the song exists, and that I sang it. I was always respected by my father. Are we going to condemn Nabokov, or any art that shocks?”In the cluttered house, cigarette butts are piled in an ashtray. They made me think of Gainsbourg’s “God Smokes Havanas,” recorded in 1980 with Catherine Deneuve.In it, Gainsbourg sings (in an inadequate translation of the beautiful French):God is a smoker of HavanasHe told me himselfSmoke carries you to paradiseI know it, my love. More
She was a lithe beauty of 1960s European film, a famous musical collaborator and lover of Serge Gainsbourg, and the namesake of elegant Hermès handbags.Jane Birkin, who helped define chic female sexuality of the 1970s as an actress in arty and erotic European movies and in her relationship — equal parts romantic and artistic — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris. Ms. Birkin, who later became known for inspiring one of the best known lines of luxury handbags, was 76.Her death was confirmed by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called her “a French icon” in a message on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been found dead at her home but that the cause was not immediately known.The child of a famously beautiful actress and a socially connected British naval officer, Ms. Birkin led a life guided by many happy accidents.While she was on a flight in 1984, a plastic bag in which she was keeping her possessions broke, leading her to complain aloud that Hermès did not make a bag that could fit all her things. The man sitting next to her happened to be Jean-Louis Dumas, then the head designer of Hermès (and later its chief executive). The company released the Birkin bag line the same year — in just the large size she had requested.Standard Birkin bags now sell for $10,000, and the difficulties of obtaining one — given a complex manufacturing process and a deliberately rationed supply to boutiques — have given the bag the cachet of exclusivity.Her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg began just as fortuitously, in 1968. She was in her early 20s, her first marriage having fallen apart, when, without particular renown as an actress and without speaking a word of French, she managed to be cast in a French movie, “Slogan,” starring Mr. Gainsbourg.The two fell in love, but Ms. Birkin did not see a way to remain long in France. Then, dining out one night, she had a chance encounter with the French director Jacques Deray, got hired to act in a movie of his, stayed in the country and solidified her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg.She lived in France for the rest of her life, and her engagement with Mr. Gainsbourg and his music proved equally enduring.The most notable product of their collaboration and romance was their 1969 hit recording of Mr. Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”).In the song, a duet, Mr. Gainsbourg speaks of sex in a low, conversational voice as Ms. Birkin confesses her love in suggestive murmurs and moans and the high-pitched singing of an ingénue.The song was condemned by the Vatican and banned in several countries and by the B.B.C. television network. But it sold millions of copies.Nearly 50 years later, in 2018, Ms. Birkin was still singing music by Mr. Gainsbourg, by then on a world tour of orchestral versions of his songs.“If I am singing in Argentina in two weeks’ time,” she told The Guardian, “it is because of ‘Je t’aime.’”Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to Judy Campbell, an actress who gained renown for performing for British troops with Noël Coward during World War II, and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy.In 2021, her father’s exploits during World War II were recounted in “A Dangerous Enterprise,” a book by Tim Spicer, a former British military officer. Commander Birkin’s duties included navigating boats on moonless nights across the English Channel to bring to safety Allied spies, stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of war who had found themselves in France.Ms. Birkin, at 18, married the British composer John Barry, known for arranging the trademark theme to James Bond movies, and they had a daughter, Kate. At 20, Ms. Birkin appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hit 1966 movie, “Blow Up,” an erotic tale of a London fashion photographer. She played a fashion model — the credits listed her as only The Blonde — and gained some attention for a risqué nude scene.Ms. Birkin with the English actor David Hemmings in a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow-Up,” released in 1966.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images“Had it all worked out with John Barry, I would never have been curious to know what was going on anywhere else,” Ms. Birkin told The Guardian in 2017. “I would have just gone on being his wife. I would have been delighted. But because he went off with someone else, and I was left with Kate, I had to find a job quite fast.”That led to her audition for “Slogan.”The movie that kept her in France was “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. (It found unexpected renewed popularity in the United States in 2021.) A sun-soaked film of sex and jealousy with many shots of scantily clad actors, the movie proved to be an effective showcase for Ms. Birkin’s long-limbed beauty.Her romance with Mr. Gainsbourg captivated the French public. She was the young doe-eyed expat, he the aging but still virile artistic genius. The relationship lasted for more than a decade, ending when she left him in the early 1980s for the French film director Jacques Doillon. Mr. Gainsbourg died in 1991 at 62.Though Ms. Birkin would later speak self-deprecatingly about her role as Mr. Gainsbourg’s muse, she embraced becoming “the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame,” as The New York Times labeled her in 2018.She described to The Times connections between the music he wrote for her and work by classical composers like Chopin and Brahms.“I would have thought that he was probably France’s most modern writer,” she said. “He invented a new language, he cut words in two like Cole Porter.”Ms. Birkin and Mr. Gainsbourg with her daughters Charlotte, left, and Kate Barry in 1972. Charlotte became a singer and actress. Kate became a photographer who died in 2013.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin released “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her first album of her own songs written in English, in 2021. “The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France,” the music writer Ben Cardew wrote in a review for Pitchfork.Ms. Birkin also continued to act, including in films by Agnès Varda and plays by Patrice Chéreau. She was also popular in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights as well as for her British accent when speaking French, which the French found endearing.“The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a message on Twitter on Sunday. “We will never forget her songs, her laughs and her incomparable accent.”Ms. Birkin in 2021 at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Hermès put her name on a line of exclusive handbags.Stephane Cardinale/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin had a mild stroke in 2021 and had recently canceled a series of concerts because of health issues.She is survived by two daughters, one with Mr. Gainsbourg and the other with Mr. Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, each of whom has, like their mother, inspired designers and followers of fashion. Her other daughter, Kate Barry, a photographer, died at 46 in 2013 in a fall from a window of her fourth-floor Paris apartment.Ms. Birkin discovered that her romantic separation from Mr. Gainsbourg did not dim their collaboration. He kept writing new songs intended for her until he died.After their breakup, “you could talk back to him for once,” she told The Guardian. “You were not just his creation any more.”Guy Trebay More
Anya Firestone leads what she calls “cou-tours” around Paris: Tours tailored to the clients’ interests, be they dinosaurs, drag queens or booze.On a recent morning at the Louvre, Anya Firestone handed out bottles of Evian. “Because ‘the art of drinking’ begins with hydration,” she said.Ms. Firestone, 34, a museum guide-conférencière (tour guide) and art integration strategist, wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of olive martinis, pink Manolo Blahniks, the Mini Bar clutch by Charlotte Olympia and a Marni dress printed with likenesses of Venus. She escorted Matt Stanley, her client, and his Parisian date, Salomé Bes, 30, past the long lines at the museum’s entrance and toward the Code of Hammurabi. The set of ancient Babylonian laws included “an eye for an eye,” she explained, and it also dealt with issues of alcoholic beverages, like watered-down wine and the peoples’ “right to beer,” as she pithily put it.“Pretty impressive!” said Mr. Stanley, the chief executive of a memory care community near Austin, Texas. Mr. Stanley, 43, had hired Ms. Firestone to design a two-day visit around alcohol.“You’re going to see that drinking and art had the same upbringing and moved in the same direction — from a religious context with prayers and libations to decadence and debauchery,” said Ms. Firestone, who calls her custom tours “cou-tours,” a play on couture.Ms. Firestone speaks before “The Romans in their Decadence” by Thomas Couture at the Musée d’Orsay. “I don’t describe myself as American,” she said. “I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesLast fall, Ms. Firestone starred in “The Real Girlfriends of Paris,” a reality show broadcast on Bravo that followed six 20- and 30-something American women as they navigated work, life and l’amour. She said that the opportunity to put her business, called Maison Firestone, on public view was the main reason she had done the show. But Ms. Firestone had also liked the idea of elevating the oft-scorned TV genre with art and culture. (Not to mention some pun- and Yiddish-inflected wit.) “By the way,” she said, “I don’t describe myself as American. I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”Ms. Firestone was raised in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood Manhattan; her parents were actors. She first moved to Paris in 2010 after college at George Washington University, for an artist residency, during which she wrote poetry and sculpted oversize macarons. (People thought they were colorful hamburgers,” she said, explaining that the confection had not become popular yet.) She worked briefly as an au pair, channeling Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp, she said. But Ms. Firestone likened her current plot to the TV shows “Emily in Paris” — “Love her chutzpah, less her bucket hats,” she said of the protagonist — and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” After a master’s degree in French cultural studies from Columbia Global Center in Paris, she spent a few years traveling between New York and Paris, offering custom tours and writing about art and brand intersections for Highsnobiety. Maison Firestone — which also designs themed events with luxury brands — followed from that interest in “art as branding,” she said.Ms. Firestone often dresses according to her tour theme. In this case, she carried a “Mini Bar” clutch by Charlotte Olympia.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesAt the Ritz, Ms. Firestone wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of a martini.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesAt “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” a white marble statue from Hellenistic Greece, better known as “Niké,” for example, Ms. Firestone noted that the figure’s wings had inspired the sportswear empire’s Swoosh logo.Ms. Firestone’s clients used to find her only by word of mouth, but now about half of them, including Mr. Stanley, come to her via the Bravo show and Instagram. The majority are visiting France from the United States; the cost of a tour starts at $2,400 for one or two people for one day.Her angle is to take “art off the wall to show its intersection with things that people already enjoy and consume,” Ms. Firestone said, be it champagne or Schiaparelli or N.F.T.s. Recent and upcoming tours have been designed for drag queens, the crypto team at a venture capital firm, “Eloise-like” little girls with a fondness for dinosaurs, and a man who is blind.The female statue is a Roman copy of a Greek statue of a maenad, at the Louvre.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesWorking her way through Dionysian art and decorative works, Louis XIV’s stemware, and the occasional Bravo fan (“I just want to say that I loved the show!”), Ms. Firestone directed Mr. Stanley and Ms. Bes into the museum’s largest room, where the Mona Lisa hangs on a wall across from “The Wedding Feast at Cana,” an immense piece by the 16th-century artist Paolo Veronese that depicts Jesus Christ turning water into wine. “You can see wine tastings happening all over the painting,” she said.After lunch at the Ritz, which naturally featured cocktails and champagne, the itinerary called for the Musée d’Orsay. “The Louvre was a former palace, this is a former train station,” Ms. Firestone said. She likes companion visits to the two museums, which, she said, help to show how art entered modernity by breaking from the monarchy, the church and the academy and spilling into the cafes of Paris.“L’Absinthe” by Edgar Degas pictured what she called a “tapped out” woman with a glass of the infamous green spirit on a table before her. Nearby was a painting by Édouard Manet of the same woman (the actress Ellen Andrée), titled “Plum Brandy.” Ms. Firestone prompted her clients to ponder the difference. “She’s not nearly so sad or so schnockered here, right? She seems OK.”The tour naturally included Louis XIV’s stemware at the Louvre.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesParis, she said, had by then been transformed by Napoleon III’s urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, bringing with it grand department stores like Le Bon Marché and Samaritaine.Ms. Firestone and Mr. Stanley met the next day at Samaritaine, where she had arranged for a cognac tasting and some shopping in the private apartments with a stylist. “Bonjour. How y’all doin’?” Mr. Stanley said, greeting the staff. “I’m not an aristocrat — I’m just a cowboy!” He chose a pair of drawstring trousers by Maison Margiela.Afterward, in a taxi, Ms. Firestone pointed at a Prada ad featuring Scarlett Johansson. “I think they’re referencing that Man Ray photo of Kiki de Montparnasse,” she said. “We like a good art-brand ref.” She Googled the Man Ray photograph on her phone and held it up for Mr. Stanley to see, who said he felt like he had gotten a master class.“Who doesn’t love their hand held in Paris?” Ms. Firestone said. More
4:30 p.m.
Go from a royal garden to the mosque
Cross to the city’s left bank via Sully Bridge, taking in views from the small triangular garden at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis, the quieter of the two islands on the Seine. From Oberkampf, this half-hour walk will take you to the Jardin des Plantes, a vast botanical park that started as a royal medicinal garden in the 17th century. Stroll through, with the National Museum of Natural History in the background, and visit the gardens’ four oversize greenhouses (€7). Exit via the west gates to find the Grand Mosque of Paris. Inaugurated in the wake of World War I, in part to commemorate the sacrifices of colonized Muslims who fought for France, it features a patio with a hand-sculpted cedar wood door adorned with Quran verses in calligraphy, built by highly skilled North African craftsmen (visit, €3). Pause for a glass of mint tea (€2) in the courtyard or get a good scrubbing or massage at the ornate, sizeable hammam (from €30, women only). More
