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      Jean-Paul Belmondo, Magnetic Star of the French New Wave, Dies at 88

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      He was compared to Marlon Brando and James Dean for his acclaimed portrayals of tough, alienated characters, most memorably in Godard’s “Breathless.”Jean-Paul Belmondo, the rugged actor whose disdainful eyes, boxer’s nose, sensual lips and cynical outlook made him the idolized personification of youthful alienation in the French New Wave, most notably in his classic performance as an existential killer in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 88.His death was confirmed by the office of his lawyer, Michel Godest. No cause was given.Like Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and James Dean — three American actors to whom he was frequently compared — Mr. Belmondo established his reputation playing tough, unsentimental, even antisocial characters who were cut adrift from bourgeois society. Later, as one of France’s leading stars, he took more crowd-pleasing roles, but without entirely surrendering his magnetic brashness.Like Bogart, Mr. Belmondo brought craggy features and sometimes seething anger to the screen, a realistic counterpoint to more conventionally handsome romantic stars. Like Dean, he became one of the most widely imitated pop culture figures of his era. And like Brando, he was often dismissive of pretentiousness and self-importance among filmmakers.“No actor since James Dean has inspired quite such intense identification,” Eugene Archer wrote in The New York Times in 1965. “Dean evoked the rebellious adolescent impulse, as fierce as it was gratuitous, a violent outgrowth of the frustrations of the modern world. Belmondo is a later manifestation of youthful rejection — and more disturbing. His disengagement from a society his parents made is total. He accepts corruption with a cynical smile, not even bothering to struggle. He is out entirely for himself, to get whatever he can, while he can. The Belmondo type is capable of anything.”His leading role in “À bout de souffle” — released in the United States in 1961 as “Breathless” — was instantly recognized as trendsetting; subsequent imitators only cemented its importance. Mr. Belmondo’s mop of unruly hair, the way he peered at the world through a twisting web of cigarette smoke, and the way he obsessively massaged his thick, feminine lips with his thumb were so vivid and evocative that they quickly became global signposts of rebellion.Mr. Belmondo in “Breathless.” His on-screen mannerisms became global signposts of rebellion.Films-Around-The -WorldMr. Belmondo was 28 and Mr. Godard was 26 when “Breathless” was being made. The film was based on an idea by François Truffaut, another icon of the nouvelle vague, and began shooting in Paris without a script. Mr. Godard used a hand-held camera — except in the street scenes, when he would sometimes mount the camera on a borrowed wheelchair — and let everyone improvise. The resulting film was rough and ill-shaped, but it had a sense of emotional honesty and verisimilitude that made it electric. Many mainstream critics seemed unsure what to make of it.Bosley Crowther wrote in The Times: “It goes at its unattractive subject in an eccentric photographed style that sharply conveys the nervous tempo and the emotional erraticalness of the story it tells. And through the American actress, Jean Seberg, and a hypnotically ugly new young man by the name of Jean-Paul Belmondo, it projects two downright fearsome characters.”Many critics found Mr. Belmondo’s amoral antihero a little too strong. But others found in the role a raw truthfulness and a thematic boldness at odds with the bulk of what was coming out of Hollywood studios.Restless and a Little BoredMr. Belmondo followed up “Breathless” with a series of celebrated turns for other New Wave directors and was soon widely seen as the movement’s leading interpreter — although in later years he told interviewers that some of the most intellectually ambitious efforts he had been involved in had bored him.When he starred as a steelworker opposite Jeanne Moreau in Peter Brooks’ “Moderato Cantabile” (1960), he said the script, by the French novelist Marguerite Duras, was too intellectual for his taste. He frequently expressed ambivalence about working for esoteric directors like Mr. Brooks, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni.In other roles Mr. Belmondo was a Hungarian who gets romantically involved with a Provençal family in Claude Chabrol’s “À double tour” (1959) and a young country priest in “Leon Morin, Priest” (1962). He also helped his co-star, Sophia Loren, win an Academy Award in Vittorio De Sica’s “Two Women” (1961), a drama set during World War II in which he played a young Communist intellectual in mountainous central Italy.By the mid ’60s, though, he was chafing at playing the young antihero in film after film.“Lots of times, I’d be out with a chick and some kid would want to give me a bad time,” Mr. Belmondo told an interviewer. “I used to fight it out with them. It’s the same now. Everyone wants to say he’s flattened Belmondo.”The turning point for him came in Philippe De Broca’s “That Man From Rio,” a 1964 over-the-top spy thriller that played like a parody of James Bond. Audiences loved it, and they loved Mr. Belmondo in it. More important, Mr. Belmondo loved doing it. Although some critics who revered the more difficult work of the French New Wave derided Mr. Belmondo as a sell out, he told interviewers that this film remained his favorite.Mr. Belmondo in “That Man From Rio” (1964), an over-the-top spy thriller. It was a turning point for the actor, who had begun chafing at being typecast as a young antihero.Cohen Media GroupLater in his career Mr. Belmondo professed an unpretentious modesty, shrugging off his success, but at his box-office height in the 1960s, he was anything but modest. In an interview with the film critic Rex Reed in 1966, he all but sneered at American fans who were lining up to see his movies.“I do not blame them,” he said, puffing on a cigar and stretching out his long legs underneath a table at Harry’s Bar in Venice. “I am worth standing in line to see.”By this time there were rumors that despite having been married since 1955 to Elodie Constantin, a former ballerina, Mr. Belmondo was involved with other women. When Mr. Reed asked him about this, he shrugged that off, too.“Listen, I am only 32 years old,” he said. “I’m not dead. And please remember, I am French. I am happily married this year, but next year? Who knows?”A year later the marriage had ended in divorce. Mr. Belmondo had three children with Ms. Constantin. The eldest, Patricia, died in a fire in 1994, but their younger daughter, Florence, and a son, Paul, survive him.The divorce was rumored to have resulted from a romance by Mr. Belmondo with one of his co-stars, Ursula Andress. He and Ms. Andress did have a long-term public relationship after the divorce. He was later romantically involved with another actress, Laura Antonelli. But not until 2002, when he was 70 years old, did he marry again, to 24-year-old Nathalie Tardivel. That marriage ended in divorce six years later. They had a daughter, Stella, who also survives him.A Left Bank BoyhoodJean-Paul Belmondo was born on April 9, 1933, in the middle-class Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. His family moved to the city’s Left Bank when he was a boy, and he grew up in the neighborhoods around Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. His father, Paul Belmondo, who was born in Algiers to a family of Italian origin, was a highly regarded sculptor. He later told interviewers that his son had been a tempestuous boy who had gotten into frequent scraps and did poorly in school.The boy’s mother, Madeline Rainaud-Richard, pushed him to do better, but he resisted, Mr. Belmondo later recalled. Finally, he dropped out of school altogether as a teenager. At 16, he became an enthusiastic amateur boxer (although his famous smashed nose came not from an organized bout but from a playground dust-up), giving it up only when he turned to acting.“I stopped when the face I saw in the mirror began to change,” he said.For several years, until he was 20, his parents paid for acting lessons at a private conservatory. After a six-month military tour in Algeria, he returned to Paris in 1953 and was accepted into the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, where he studied for three years. The school, a conservative one, didn’t know what to do with the insolent young man who sauntered onto the stage in a Molière play with his hands in his pockets.When, at his graduation, in 1956, Mr. Belmondo was awarded only an honorable mention by his teachers, the other students hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him from the theater as he flashed an obscene gesture at the judges.Mr. Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s 1969 movie “Mississippi Mermaid.” Film DeskFor all his flamboyance and occasional fistfights, Mr. Belmondo was said to be a consummate professional on the set. Although in later years he continued to work now and then with the great directors of the New Wave — most notably with Truffaut in “Mississippi Mermaid” (1969) — most of his energies went into mainstream favorites. Many of his films after the mid-1960s were made by his own production company.More and more Mr. Belmondo became known for popular adventures, usually comic thrillers. And he became famous for elaborate stunts in which he took great pride in performing himself. He hung from skyscrapers, leapt across speeding trains, drove cars off hillsides. Co-stars said he seemed all but fearless. While shooting one scene in South America, he was warned that a river, into which he was about to plunge for a scene, was filled with poisonous snakes and piranha. Mr. Belmondo grabbed a chunk of corned beef and slung it into the murky water. When nothing happened, he jumped in and filmed the scene.He said he had decided, “What the hell, if they’re not going to chew on that, they’re not going to eat me.”Finally, an injury during the filming of “Hold-Up” in 1985, when he was 52, forced him to leave the stunts to the stunt men.Hollywood Was Not for HimThroughout, the Belmondo cult endured, though more in France than around the world. His French fans knew him by his nickname, Bebel (pronounced bay-BELL).No matter the scene, no matter the co-stars, whatever mayhem was breaking out onscreen, Mr. Belmondo was always able to affect a calm, cool remove, as though he was more amused than aroused by the activity swirling around him. He brought a touch of comedy to his action roles and a hint of danger to his comic roles; one could well imagine him playing the reluctant, wisecracking hero in American action series of the 1980s like “Die Hard.”Mr. Belmondo never made the transition to Hollywood, largely because he didn’t want to. “Why complicate my life?” he said. “I am too stupid to learn the language and it would only be a disaster.”Mr. Belmondo in 2007. By choice he never made the transition to Hollywood. Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 1989 he was awarded the Cesar Award for best actor, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his performance in Claude Lelouch’s “Itineraire d’un enfant gate,” playing a middle-aged industrialist who fakes his death and then sails the world.By this time he had slowed his frenetic pace, making only nine movies in the 1980s, compared to 41 in 1960s and 16 in the 1970s. He cut back even more in the ’90s, when he made only six films, but this was due in part to a belated career shift. Mr. Belmondo had not appeared in a live production since 1959 when he returned to the theater in 1987. Particularly well-regarded was his sold-out run as “Cyrano de Bergerac” in Paris in 1990.A stroke in 2001, however, forced him to stop working. Not until eight years later was be back before the cameras, shooting “Un homme et son chien” (“A Man and His Dog).” Released in 2009, it tells the story of an older gentleman who, accompanied by his loyal dog, suddenly finds himself without a home.Late in life, when he was a little thicker and much grayer, Mr. Belmondo liked to affect some of the self-effacing modesty that was noticeably absent when he was at his peak in the 1960s.When an interviewers asked him to explain his enduring popularity, especially with women, Mr. Belmondo responded with his usual casual shrug.“Hell, everyone knows that an ugly guy with a good line gets the chicks,” he said.Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      In Paris, Brexit Takes to the Stage

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      “Exit,” a new musical production, uses the political drama both as a metaphor and as a backdrop for a cross-continental love triangle.PARIS — Brexit, Britain’s protracted disentanglement from the European Union, was always bound to appear onstage. It didn’t take long for productions to reference it in London or in Edinburgh. With “Exit,” a new show at the Théâtre de la Huchette here, the political drama has now reached French theaters — in the form of an effervescent mini-musical.There are sung poll numbers, trips across the English Channel, and plenty of French and British stereotypes. Yet “Exit,” which was co-written by Stéphane Laporte and Gaétan Borg, doesn’t dwell on politics. Instead, Brexit provides a backdrop and a metaphor for the play’s cross-border love triangle and journey of self-discovery.It is a mighty premiere for a tiny theater. The Théâtre de la Huchette boasts only 85 seats, and because of Covid rules, it can currently be only 65 percent full. (The restriction is tentatively set to be lifted next week.) It is best known for its cult, long-running productions of two absurdist plays by Eugène Ionesco, “The Lesson” and “The Bald Soprano.” Both have run for over six decades, with the pandemic the longest interruption in the theater’s history.Since 1981, however, La Huchette has also presented a third production after its Ionesco double bill. There is a touch of absurdity to “Exit,” too, most notably in the story line that brings the three main characters together.All of them work in the video game industry. A French couple, Sybille and Antoine, co-founded a company called Anachronia, which makes intentionally dumb games like “Marie-Antoinette and the Danton Sheep” (in which the French queen is tasked with knocking off sheep) and “Marie Curie Super Radium,” with the famed scientist fighting the Nazis.Then, when Sybille goes looking for a designer for a new project, she finds Mark, an aloof, sarcastic Englishman. The twists and turns designed to bring them together are hardly subtle. Sybille’s enthusiastic yet half-baked pitch would be unlikely to convince a seasoned professional, yet that’s where “Exit” really shines.Pangos and Savary in “Exit.” Her character is French. His is English.Fabienne RappeneauEach game gets old-fashioned, two-dimensional credits on a screen above the cast, and the actors don campy wigs and costumes to demonstrate it, complete with musical numbers. “Trouba-Dance,” Sybille’s Eleanor of Aquitaine-inspired dance game, is an especially uproarious example, and Harold Savary (Mark) brings deadpan game character impressions to the table.The story is set in the run-up to the Brexit vote in 2016, but the political context is mostly mentioned in passing, as a way to signal how much time has passed as well as the cultural differences between Sybille’s French and British suitors. It does make for a few entertaining scenes, as when Antoine and Mark square off with mutual insults and each concludes that the other’s culture remains his “favorite monster.”Laporte and Borg’s songs, with music by Didier Bailly, are less consistent when it comes to character arcs. Antoine (played by the endearing Simon Heulle, a bright presence) is initially depicted as a goofy nerd, but his insistence that Anachronia must produce only inane games — the company’s tagline at one point is described as “Anachronia: 100 percent laziness” — grows somewhat ludicrous.Mark’s character is also seemingly bent to accommodate the plot. Near the end, after he and Sibylle admit their love for each other, he swiftly becomes controlling — a trait that isn’t really foreshadowed. “I just want to be your savior,” he tells Sibylle.The goal is clearly to set up the denouement, Sibylle’s decision to be “alone, standing and without fear,” as the final song puts it. This conclusion is meant to be uplifting, but given the all-male writing and directing team, it feels dictated by empowerment as a generic goal, rather than arriving organically. It’s not exactly a feminist statement for a female character to find self-revelation through a man, only for him to become a pantomime villain, thus justifying a solo ending.That’s a shame, because Marina Pangos carries much of “Exit” with her assured, vivacious performance as Sibylle, down to her interactions with the audience. Every time the character is on the Eurostar, she sits in La Huchette’s tiny auditorium, which stands in for a train car, and addresses audience members as fellow passengers, all with superb comic timing.Leïla Anis in her play “The Monstrous Ones” at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe.Xavier CantatWhile “Exit” was part of the wave of premieres after theaters were allowed to reopen in France last month, other productions are returning to a second life onstage. “The Monstrous Ones” (“Les Monstrueuses”), a play Leïla Anis first published in 2017, found an audience even while theaters were closed. Between January and March, Anis took it to high schools, where artists were allowed to perform.It was revived at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis this month, and it is an eye-catching achievement. Anis performs the lead role and plays four different characters, all women from different generations within the same family, linked by difficult experiences of motherhood.Ella, the sole 21st-century character, learns at the start that she is pregnant and, after losing consciousness, finds herself in a psychiatric hospital, grappling with family memories. She becomes Jeanne, her great-grandmother, who loses her daughter Rosa after divorce; Rosa, who undergoes an illegal abortion; and Zeïna, from another side of the family, who hemorrhages during the delivery of her son in Yemen.There is at times too much back story packed into this one-hour show, to the point that Ella’s growth as a character remains limited. But Anis, who was named an associate playwright with the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in 2020, paints a vivid, often poetic picture of the women’s shared trauma, both in her writing and onstage.Her ability to physically transform from scene to scene — one minute a nearly feral presence with hair over her face, the next a shy young mother-to-be — is a rare gift, and the director of “The Monstrous Ones,” her frequent collaborator Karim Hammiche, makes way for her to explore it freely.Hammiche joins her onstage for a few scenes, as Ella’s doctor during her hospital stay, but this is very much Anis’s show. For French high school students, it offered an opportunity to explore a darker, rarely discussed side of being a mother. Now, at long last, productions like “The Monstrous Ones” are playing in theaters again.Exit. Directed by Patrick Alluin. Théâtre de la Huchette, through Aug. 28.The Monstrous Ones. Directed by Karim Hammiche. Théâtre Gérard Philipe. Further performances to be announced. 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      South African Opera Star Says She Was Mistreated by French Police

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      Pretty Yende, an acclaimed soprano, says she was forced to submit to a body search at a Paris airport. “I felt stripped of my human dignity,” she said.The South African soprano Pretty Yende expected her visit this week to France, where she is starring in a production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” to be relatively uneventful.But when she arrived at Paris’s main airport on Monday, Yende was taken aback. The French authorities told her she did not have the proper documents to enter the country. They took her for questioning and forced her to submit to a body search that she described as invasive.“I felt stripped of my human dignity,” Yende said in an email. “It was absolutely uncomfortable.”Yende took to social media to share her experience, saying she was “stripped and searched like a criminal offender” during the ordeal, which lasted more than two hours. While she was not asked to remove her clothes, she says, the police told her, without explanation, to take off her shoes and kept her in a cold, dark room. She suggested that she had been singled out because she is Black.“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me,” Yende wrote on Facebook, adding that she feared for her life.Yende’s account was shared widely online, with fans and artists expressing outrage and calling the incident an example of racism and discrimination in French society.The French authorities disputed Yende’s portrayal of the incident, saying they acted in accordance with standard procedures. The police say Yende was forced to submit to a pat-down but say it was carried out in a professional manner by a female officer. They acknowledge her cellphone was taken away; she was given access to a landline phone while she was being held at the airport.“We made the usual checks,” the National Police said in a statement. “We did what we do with any passenger facing the same problems.”The police said Yende, who landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris around 3 p.m. Monday on a flight from Milan, did not have a valid visa to enter France. Yende presented a provisional residence permit from Italy, where she lives, but the French authorities said she needed a separate one-time visa. Yende and her lawyer say she had all the documents required by law to gain entry.The authorities eventually issued Yende a visa and allowed her to go around 6 p.m., after speaking with managers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where she was to perform on Tuesday.The South African embassy in France said it was aware of the incident and had raised it with the French authorities.“Notwithstanding these unfortunate events, we are pleased that Ms. Yende is continuing with her scheduled performances in Paris,” said Lihle Mancoba, a spokeswoman for the embassy.Yende, 36, is a renowned figure in opera, a charismatic coloratura soprano who has performed on many of the world’s leading stages, including the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Born in a small town in South Africa, she has won wide acclaim in an industry historically dominated by white performers. Since last week, she has been singing the role of Amina in “La Sonnambula” at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.Yende received an enthusiastic ovation for her performance on Tuesday night, her fourth time in the role this month. But she said her experience at the airport was never far from her mind.“It was very, very hard for me,” she said in an email after the performance. “I was shaking and couldn’t focus.” More

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      'Arab Divas' at the Arab World Institute: Singers Who Took Center Stage

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      A multimedia exhibition in Paris offers a rich flashback to a period between the 1920s and the 1970s when many female performers took center stage.PARIS — The diva sings of love and unmitigated lust. Dressed in a scarlet evening gown with her hair pulled high, she cries out to her beloved, longs for a night of undying passion and yearns for the sun not to rise.The vocalist in the 1969 concert video is Umm Kulthum: the Arab world’s greatest 20th-century performer, possibly the best-known Egyptian woman since Cleopatra and the star of the exhibition “Divas” at the Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris. The show, which runs through Sept. 26, is a richly illustrated flashback to the period between the 1920s and the 1970s. It portrays unveiled and openly voluptuous women performing on stage and screen without fear of censorship or religious condemnation, and feminists, political activists and pioneering impresarios facing down the patriarchy.Costumes worn by the Lebanese singer Sabah in the 1970s, on display at the Arab World Institute.Alice SidoliBesides costumes and jewelry, passports and posters, album covers and high-heeled shoes, visitors get to watch footage of female performers wiggling their hips in mesmerizing moves and posing on the beach in hot pants. The overall picture contrasts sharply with present-day Western perceptions of the Arab world as a place where women are veiled from top to toe and silenced by all-powerful men.“The exhibition knocks down a fair number of clichés and preconceived ideas about this part of the world. Women actually occupied center stage, embodied modernity and were not at all absent from history,” said Élodie Bouffard, the exhibition’s co-curator. “They sang, acted, made people cry, broke hearts and showed off their bodies just as Western actresses did at the time.”“These images are still very present in the minds of younger generations,” she added. “They don’t just represent the past.”The institute’s president, Jack Lang, who was France’s culture minister in the 1980s and early 1990s, recalled in an interview that when he was a boy visiting Cairo, he sneaked into a theater where Umm Kulthum was performing, and was “stunned, absolutely breathtaken.” He later heard another singer, Fayrouz (the exhibition’s other major diva), while touring in Lebanon as a young actor, he said, then gave her a medal as culture minister in 1988.A poster from the 1968 movie “Bint El-Hares” (“The Guard’s Daughter”), which starred Fayrouz, center. The poster is included in the Paris show.Abboudi Bou JawdeThese women were not just exceptional vocalists, Lang noted: Some participated in their country’s struggle for independence from the colonial powers, Britain and France, and joined in a wave of nationalism that swept across the Arab world. “The emergence of these divas coincided more or less with a time of collective emancipation,” Lang explained. “The music sung by them is an extraordinary expression of freedom.”The exhibition opens in pre-World War II Cairo, the artistic and intellectual hub of the Arab world, where concert halls and cabarets proliferated, many of them established by women, the exhibition co-curator Hanna Boghanim said. Women also had a significant role in the film industry, she added, working as “directors, producers, actresses, costume makers, talent scouts.”Many of these women came from very humble backgrounds, including Umm Kulthum, who is introduced in a velvet-curtained enclosure in the show. Born in a village in the Nile Delta, she first performed disguised as a boy, singing religious songs that bewitched the crowds. Eventually, she came into her own, as a woman and as a voice, and became famous for her improvisational style. Her songs sometimes went on for more than an hour.Her story is told through photographs, album and magazine covers, videos, and bright-colored costumes created for the 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum,” directed by the Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.An installation at the Arab World Institute featuring stills and video from Shirin Neshat’s 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum.” Alice SidoliThere are no loans from the Umm Kulthum museum in Cairo, the curators said; they were too complicated and expensive to organize. Nor are there loans from Fayrouz, who is still alive, despite requests made via the family and entourage of the reclusive vocalist. Her section contains posters, album and magazine covers, photographs and other paraphernalia, some compiled by a dedicated fan.By contrast, the section on the half-Algerian, half-Lebanese diva Warda is full of her personal possessions: sunglasses, medals, earrings, passports, an oud instrument, a brown leather suitcase and an Agatha Christie crime novel. Born in the Paris suburbs, Warda made her debut as a child in her father’s cabaret in the city’s Latin Quarter and became a successful recording artist before moving to Algeria in 1962, the year the country gained independence from France. There, she married an army officer who stopped her from singing. Her career took off when she moved to Egypt a decade later.The exhibition gets racier as it goes along, culminating with the last wave of 20th-century Arab divas, including the Egyptian-born Dalida, who became a superstar in France. Interspersed among displays of sequined evening gowns, stilettos and powder compacts are video monitors that show a woman singing from a hot tub and rows of others lifting their legs in skimpy outfits worthy of the Folies Bergère.In the decades since, the place of female performers in Arab countries has changed. Islamist movements and migration from rural areas have made parts of society more conservative about women’s dress and public behavior. That has led to assumptions in the West that Arab women are veiled and constrained today, as opposed to the decades when the divas reigned. The Egyptian-born performer Dalida in Giza in 1959. She became a superstar in France.D.R. Orlando ProductionsTo Coline Houssais, the author of “Music of the Arab World: An Anthology of 100 Artists,” these then-versus-now perceptions, which the exhibition risked encouraging, were misguided.“There are two visions of the Arab world,” she said in an interview. “One is: ‘They’re barbarians, they’re Islamists.’ The other is: ‘Everything used to be so good before. It was a golden age.’”“The Arab world’s development is measured using ultra-Western criteria, such as whether women smoke or not, or whether they wear short skirts,” she said. There were “more important factors, to do with equality: the number of women who work, women’s civil rights,” she added.Despite the coronavirus epidemic, the show is a hit with Parisian museumgoers, and visitors to the exhibition appeared to validate Houssais’s assessment. On a recent afternoon, onlookers seemed intrigued by the story of these stars of yesterday, who bucked contemporary stereotypes about Muslim women in France.“It’s really very interesting to find out about the emancipation of women in these societies and to see the contrast with today, even in terms of hairstyles,” said Camille Hurel, 23, a visitor to the show. “These were strong personalities who were known all around the world.”“Nowadays, I have the feeling that there isn’t as much freedom of expression,” she added.Randa Mirza and Waël Kodeih’s installation, “The Last Dance” (2020), featured in the Paris show, brings together the two D.J.s with vintage footage, converted to a hologram.Thierry RambaudHoussais said that, in fact, the Arab world today was mostly populated with people under 30, a generation “glued to social media, completely open to the world, and leading their own private revolutions against their families and their communities.”The notions of family, community and religion were fading, and these societies were in the middle of a major “recomposition,” she noted.“There are still 1,000 places in the Arab world where you can wear a bikini, snort coke and listen to American music,” she added. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The French’ Review: A Candid Look at the French Open

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      This documentary by William Klein relies on the unspoken or spontaneous moments to tell the tale of the 1981 Open, off court and on.Bjorn Borg won the French Open in 1981. It was his 11th, and final, victory in a Grand Slam tournament — and the sixth time he won this particular event. An ordinary filmmaker constructing a documentary on the Open that year would likely structure its narrative around the implacable, cool Swedish player’s road to glory there.But the American-born photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who spent most of his career working in or from France, is no ordinary filmmaker or photographer. And he was the first director invited by the event to capture the French Open for a feature film. He and his crew took a fly-on-the-wall approach that captures, among other things, what professional tennis looked like before corporatization fully warped it into the glossy commodity it is today. This exceptional 1982 film is getting its U.S. debut this week.In the backstage areas of Roland Garros in Paris, tennis hardly seems a glamorous profession. There’s a lot of waiting around, one-on-one physical therapy, obligatory meet-and-greets, and more. On-court rivals Chris Evert and Virginia Ruzici unite in amusement over Ilie Nastase’s clowning. The future French champion Yannick Noah contends with a sprained ankle. There’s not narration and not much in the way of formal interviews. One of the most trenchant scenes focuses on Paul Cohen, coach of the player Harold Solomon, as he analyzes his charge’s loss in real time. Arthur Ashe and Patrice Hagelauer are seen and overheard watching Noah play Guillermo Vilas.The tedium of various rainouts is chronicled faithfully. Klein and company also catch John McEnroe complaining of having to play in wet weather and sniping at an umpire for good measure. Hana Mandilkova’s near-bemusement at winning the women’s singles is also memorable. Klein weaves all these moments into a story one could call spectacularly earthbound.The FrenchNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      in Theater

      Free of Protesters, Paris Theaters Reopen With Little Imagination

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      After more than two months of occupation by arts workers, the Odéon Theater returned to business with a prepandemic production that feels out of step with the current moment.PARIS — When the Odéon Theater reopened to audiences here with a staging of “The Glass Menagerie” at the end of May, its familiar columns looked somewhat naked. For two-and-a-half months, they had been adorned with large protest signs made by the arts workers occupying the theater. Shortly before they left, one sign read: “Reopening: The Great Comedy.”Inside occupied theaters around France, the situation grew increasingly tense in May after the government announced plans to allow performances to resume. On the one hand, a key goal of the protesters — the return of cultural life — was met. On the other, the occupations had morphed by then into a larger social movement with demands beyond the arts, including the withdrawal of coming changes to unemployment benefits.That set protesters on a collision course with frustrated theater administrators. Yet as fast as they had spread in early March, the occupations stopped. Students at the Colline and T2G theaters left during the first week of June, while some elsewhere were forced out. The Odéon’s occupiers moved to a friendlier Paris venue, the Centquatre.While watching “The Glass Menagerie,” though, it was hard to forget them. The Odéon didn’t help its case by reopening with a prepandemic, star-led production that felt worlds away from everything that has happened over the past year.With the prominent director Ivo van Hove in the driver’s seat, “The Glass Menagerie” premiered shortly before the first French lockdown in March 2020. Its main selling point was the presence of Isabelle Huppert, taking the role of Amanda Wingfield, the former Southern belle teetering on the edge of reality, for the first time.Huppert with Justine Bachelet as her daughter in “The Glass Menagerie.”Jan VersweyveldIt was a work in progress when I saw it then, but it now looks as aimless as Amanda herself. The drab sets, by Jan Versweyveld, trap the cast inside brown walls decorated with the silhouette of Mr. Wingfield, Amanda’s absent husband, who abandoned the family years before.The play’s characters are appropriately miserable in that décor, yet the actors often appear to be playing from different scores, in part because Huppert is an idiosyncratic stage presence these days. As Amanda, she is restless, even funny, as she repeatedly attempts to keep her son, Tom, from leaving by clinging to his legs. Van Hove feeds her over-the-top moments, including a scene in which she appears to masturbate on the kitchen counter while reminiscing about her youth.Yet the performance often makes the production seem overly conscious of her aura, of her sheer Huppert-ness, to the point that her partners adjust to her energy when she is onstage.The best scenes actually come when Laura, Amanda’s fragile daughter, is left alone with Jim, her old high-school crush. Cyril Gueï makes a kind, gentle Jim, and van Hove’s choice of a Black actor for the role reinforces the racial dynamics implicit in Amanda’s rose-tinted vision of the Old South. Gueï’s connection with Justine Bachelet’s Laura is genuine enough that for a second, a happy denouement seems within reach.Laura, played as touchingly muted by Bachelet, briefly comes alive before resigning herself. Van Hove has given her a classic French song to sing as she gives Jim her glass unicorn as an adieu: Barbara’s 1970 “L’Aigle Noir” (“The Black Eagle”), about a traumatic childhood memory that feels exactly right for Laura’s character.While capacity remained limited until this week to 35 percent of seats, a number of other theaters here rushed to reopen as soon as it became possible. At the tiny À La Folie Theater, the actress and director Laetitia Lebacq debuted a rare production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 play, “The Respectful Whore,” which is set, like “The Glass Menagerie,” in the American South.Laetitia Lebacq and Bertrand Skol in “The Respectful Whore,” directed by Lebacq at the tiny À La Folie Theater.Instant en suspendWhile Sartre wrote a number of plays, they have mostly fallen out of fashion on the French stage. It’s a shame, because “The Respectful Whore,” while occasionally over-explanatory, sets up its central conflict in a compact, efficient manner. It takes place entirely at the home of a prostitute, Lizzie, who is caught up in a case of blatant racial discrimination. Two Black men are accused of raping her as a way of exculpating the white son of a senator, who shot one of them.Lizzie herself is overtly racist, yet refuses to falsely testify that she was raped — until the senator and his son force her hand. Lebacq navigates the role of Lizzie without smoothing over her contradictions and occasional foolishness, and Baudouin Jackson brings pathos to the resignation one of the nameless accused in the face of normalized racism. Philippe Godin, as the smooth-talking senator, and Bertrand Skol, who plays his repressed son, also make an excellent case for Sartre’s character development.As summer nears, some venues have also turned to alfresco theater to draw audiences. At the Théâtre de la Tempête, Thomas Quillardet brought two shows adapted from movies by the Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Éric Rohmer. He was renowned for the quality of his dialogue, and both “Where Hearts Meet” (inspired by two films, 1984’s “Full Moon in Paris” and 1986’s “The Green Ray”) and “The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque” flow and fizz like good champagne.Florent Cheippe and Anne-Laure Tondu in “Where Hearts Meet,” directed by Thomas Quillardet at the Théâtre de la Tempête.Pierre Grosbois“The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque,” based on the 1993 film of the same name and performed in a park just behind the venue, also stands out for its political relevance. This story of a small-town mayor whose plans to build a multimedia library run into opposition from green activists might unfold similarly today, down to its left-wing divisions on climate issues. It even features a song praising the joys of working from home — three decades before Covid-19 made that a widespread necessity.Plays like this are a reminder of what we’ve gained as cultural institutions reopen in France, yet the experience remains in some ways bittersweet. For over two months, from March to May, occupiers essentially reclaimed venues, like the Odéon, that usually play host to a small subset of the French population.According to the latest large-scale study of cultural habits in the country, in 2018, only 12 percent of France’s working class had attended a theater performance in the previous year. The audience for prestige productions such as van Hove’s “Glass Menagerie,” especially, is hardly representative of French society at large.After a year of upheaval, more imaginative offerings would have been welcome. What if directors around the country had given occupiers a chance to hold their own on the stages they spent so much time around? It’s not the social revolution protesters were gunning for, but it might have been a start.From left, Nans Laborde Jourdàa, Florent Cheippe, Malvina Plégat and Clémentine Baert in “The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque” at the Théâtre de la Tempête.Pierre GrosboisThe Glass Menagerie. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe. Further performances planned in Tokyo, Athens and Amsterdam from September through November.The Respectful Whore. Directed by Laetitia Lebacq. A La Folie Théâtre, through June 20.Where Hearts Meet / The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque. Directed by Thomas Quillardet. Théâtre de la Tempête, through June 20. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Paris Calligrammes’ Review: Recalling the 1960s With Fondness and Passion

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      The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger takes us on an unhurried journey through her past.The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is not nearly as well distributed in the United States as it ought to be, is not generally known for sentimentality. Her long, searching films are elaborately costumed and visionary not-quite allegories of queer radical feminism. Representative titles include “Madame X: An Absolute Ruler” (1982), “The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1984) and “Joan of Arc of Mongolia” (1992). She can’t be blamed for getting at least a little wistful, though, in her new “Paris Calligrammes,” an autobiographical documentary. It’s about Paris, after all — her Paris, first experienced in the early 1960s.After the film opens with footage that Ottinger shot in the Paris of today, we’re swept back in time, aurally and visually: Notably by the singers Juliette Gréco and Jacques Dutronc, and a clip from Marcel Carné’s immortal 1945 “Les Enfants du Paradis.” But “Paris Calligrammes” consistently mixes what’s familiar to the Francophile with much that isn’t. The movie takes its title from a bookshop Ottinger frequented as a young woman. She had been enchanted by French culture growing up in occupied Germany, and sought out a connection home once she landed in the City of Lights to study. The bookstore Calligrammes, run by the German-born Fritz Picard, served German expatriates. It was a place where, Ottinger puts it, “The Dadaists encountered the Situationists.” It became a formative aesthetic home for the young artist.Ottinger’s account of a reading at the store by Walter Mehling is one of the movie’s high points. The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed. She created three different narrations, those in French and English read by the actors Fanny Ardant and Jenny Agutter, and one in German, read by Ottinger herself. This U.S. release features the Agutter narration. This reading is as crucial in conveying the mood of Ottinger’s story as the film’s unhurried pace is.We see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret and Nico, but also now-obscure figures including Raymond Duncan, the dancer Isadora Duncan’s eccentric brother, who stalked the Paris streets in a toga and philosophized at the famed cafe Les Deux Magots. Ottinger’s account of the riot-provoking 1960s Paris premiere of Jean Genet’s play “The Screens” emphasizes how that production’s use of costuming and makeup influenced Ottinger’s own future film aesthetic.Ottinger also remembers alienation: Her account of a strike in May 1968 is less-than utopian. And she is pointed when recalling how when the activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was agitating in Paris, it wasn’t just the right wing that dismissed him with the categorization “a German Jew.”When she ends the movie by putting Édith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” on the soundtrack, you may think Ottinger has finally succumbed to the sentimentality she’s kept mostly in check. But wait. Just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, “Paris Calligrammes” has a mid-credits stinger — this one about Piaf’s dedication of the song.Paris CalligrammesNot rated. In English, German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema. More

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      in Music

      Eddy de Pretto Is the Proud Sound of a New France

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      Born in the Paris suburbs, the singer has made waves with two albums that draw as much from ’60s chanson as contemporary hip-hop.Eddy de Pretto is now 27, and these days he sings on some of the largest stages in France — or he did, when the stages were open. When he was 21, he performed for a smaller audience: the tourists on the bateaux-mouches, the Paris sightseeing cruises that ply millions of people up and down the Seine.“It was a pretty crazy job. I was on the singing cruises, the ones where they serve you dinner,” de Pretto said in a recent video interview from Paris. From the little stage in the boat’s dining room, he recalled, he’d serenade tourists with syrupy Charles Trenet standards, to total indifference. “They were eating, looking out at the Eiffel Tower. They didn’t even realize someone was singing — they thought it was a soundtrack.”“But those three years on the bateaux-mouches were so completely typical of what it’s like to make a career,” he added. “It was totally formative to sing every night in front of people who didn’t give a damn at all.”Those lonely nights on the cruise ship are the origin of “À Tous Les Bâtards” (“To All the Bastards”), de Pretto’s second album, released in France last month. “I was waiting patiently to take the throne/And they’d sing my songs like I sang ‘La Vie en Rose,’” he belts on the first single, “Bateaux-Mouches,” whose started-from-the-bottom lyrics recall many a hip-hop boast. But name-checking both Rihanna and Édith Piaf as your lodestars? That’s rarer.De Pretto burst to fame in 2018 with his triple-platinum album “Cure,” and its blend of urban beats and chanson poetics was not its only uncommon attribute. There was his voice: big and vibrant, with every syllable articulated for the back of the house. There was his look: hoodies and tracksuits, a three-day beard, and a strawberry-blond tonsure like a medieval monk’s. And there was his biography: a young gay man, uninhibited and unperturbed, from the suburbs that Parisians still typecast as a cultural backwater.De Pretto started out singing on the tourist barges that ply the River Seine. “It was totally formative to sing every night in front of people who didn’t give a damn at all,” he said.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesHe was born in 1993 in Créteil, to the capital’s southeast. His father was a driver, and his mother a medical technician who revered an earlier generation of French singer-songwriters. “We lived in public housing, and my mother listened to a lot of Barbara, Brassens, Brel, Charles Aznavour,” he said. “She listened to it all the time, and really loud, too. Loud enough to hear it over the vacuum cleaner.”De Pretto said he played sports as a child, badly enough that his mother enrolled him in acting classes. The stage suited him. He landed a few small TV and movie roles. But his theatrical tendencies were not in harmony with the macho culture of the Paris suburbs.That tension inspired his breakout single, “Kid,” a mid-tempo ballad about parents and their effeminate sons. “You’ll be manly, my kid,” de Pretto sings over spare piano chords and digital hi-hats, though the song’s video shows him struggling to heed the call. Shirtless and sweat-soaked in the gym, de Pretto looks far too rangy to lift the massive barbells, trapped between family expectations and his true nature.“Every single word of ‘Kid’ is so wonderful,” said the singer Jane Birkin, who performed a duet with de Pretto in 2018. “He faced up to quite a lot of teasing, getting through in quite a tough neighborhood, with tough friends. And I should think he made himself respected — I wouldn’t mess around with him. And, at the same, time he has great fragility and great poignancy.”“Kid” was an instant hit in France, and seemed to come out of nowhere. De Pretto’s weighty voice sounded like a ’60s throwback, but he sang over spare, menacing, bass-heavy beats. The slangy lyrics had the vibrancy of the suburbs, but they were as poetic as they were acidic, with that French fixation on what de Pretto calls “the weight of the word.”For his first big TV appearance, in 2017, he performed with nothing but his own iPhone for accompaniment. The album cover of “Cure” had the same Gen-Z nonchalance: mirror selfie, phone in hand, leg hoisted on the kitchen table. A critic for the French newspaper Libération said astringently — but not without cause — that it looked like a late-night drunk pic sent to a Grindr hookup.Indeed, there was also de Pretto’s subject matter: furtive glances in the locker room, sloppy after-parties in darkened basements, grim evenings trawling the apps. On his spiky single “Fête de Trop” (“One Party Too Many”), he details the malaise of yet another evening getting high and “slipping my tongue into the salivating mouths” of “tonight’s boys.” “Jungle de la Chope” (“The Hookup Jungle”) delves into the “insipid conquests” of casual sex, safe or otherwise.Some gay musicians treat their homosexuality as a nonissue; others want to make it a mark of distinction. What made de Pretto’s debut so thrilling was that he did neither. He assumed his identity to the hilt, and thereby made it nothing special. “I’m writing from my point of view as a gay man,” he said. “But the songs are not a defense of being gay. I mean, yes, I’m gay, and I’m casting an eye on society.”De Pretto said his albums were about “breaking these fantasies and these received ideas of what happens in the suburbs,” and confounding a “stereotypical view of being gay.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesHe has, however, recorded one sideways pride anthem. “Grave” (“A Big Deal”) is a funny, filthy encouragement to anxious gay youth — think Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” for teens whose first view of same-sex intimacy comes through streaming video. It’s a catalog aria of gay rites of passage that, de Pretto sings, are “not a big deal”: scoping out classmates in gym class, fantasizing about your best friend, and many more not printable in a family newspaper. “Not living it: That’s a big deal!” goes the refrain.“If I had to compare him to anyone, it would be Christine and the Queens, although Eddy hasn’t exploded internationally,” said Romain Burrel, the editor of the French gay magazine Têtu. “Christine really opened the way for questions of gender and sexual orientation,” he said. “But Eddy is very, very French. There’s been a globalization of music, but when you listen to Eddy de Pretto, you’re in the 11th Arrondissement.”Musically, “À Tous Les Bâtards” sounds a lot like “Cure”: the same big voice, the same minimal beats. But de Pretto’s writing has become less angry, more confessional. “Désolé Caroline” (“Sorry Caroline”), its second single, sounds at first like a breakup song, addressed from a young gay man to the straight girl he cannot love. (In the interview, De Pretto described this kind of romantic rejection with the charming franglais verb “friendzoné.”)Then again, this “Caroline” — whom the singer wants to get out of “my veins” — may not be an actual girl. She may be a personification of cocaine: a double meaning he underlines in the music video, which features de Pretto in a white parka singing amid flurries of snow.“I love playing with these double meanings,” de Pretto said, “because it opens up the field of possibilities.” He certainly leaves the field open at the end of “À Tous Les Bâtards,” in the ingeniously smutty ballad “La Zone.” Here suburbs and sexuality become interchangeable, as de Pretto entreats us in a smooth falsetto to risk visiting … well, a certain area often considered dirty, or dangerous.“La zone,” in French slang, denotes a rough suburban neighborhood, the sort of place you might go to score drugs. But as de Pretto croons of the “dark pleasures” of a place where “some men are afraid to go,” we realize the particular zone he’s inviting you to is more anatomical than geographical. (Birkin said this song reminded her of “Sonnet du Trou de Cul,” a poem by Verlaine and Rimbaud written in 1871. “It’s a wonder people don’t talk about it more!” she added.)The Paris suburbs have birthed so many of France’s best singers and actors and artists, not to mention the reigning world champions of soccer. And yet western Europe’s largest and most diverse city still treats the towns outside its ring road as inaccessible places. “That was the whole project of the first and, I hope, this second album: breaking these fantasies and these ideas everyone has of what happens in the suburbs,” de Pretto said. “And of a pretty stereotypical view of being gay.”“That’s the job of an artist,” he said, “to find points of view that haven’t been found yet.” More