Review: Jeune et Jolie

You will know from your attendance at Political Correctness 101 that films about prostitution must portray the men as creeps, abusers and preferably violent with it, while the prostitute must be portrayed as a victim of deception, drugs, economic injustice, male violence or, and this is risky, as a plucky single mother making a living the only way she can (before realising the error of her ways, cleaning up and getting a job as an out-reach worker). Prostitution is about providing men with sex, and that means eeeuuuugh! men! and even more eeeeuuuugh! hetero-sex. The central question the film-maker must address is why the heroine would do anything so icky and degrading as, you know, have sex. With men. Who aren't hot. Because disgusting. And Patriarchy. And Girls Are Victims. Of Everything.

So now let's proceed to the film review. Jeune et Joli is a film about a 17-year old girl, Isabelle, who looks a lot like Marine Vacth, who sets up as a part-time prostitute in her Year 13. She loses her virginity to a fit-looking but shallow German boy during the summer holiday, and then, prompted by a) a slightly creepy guy who approaches her after school and gives her his number, and b) what must by now be the annual TV documentary about undergraduates and prostitution, sets up online as a call-girl. Her clients are variously creepy, old, fat and middle-aged, and okay and middle-aged. She charges 300 euros an hour, which certain websites in this country will confirm is pretty much what a girl who looked like Marine Vacth could charge. This bit puzzled the critics: she puts the money in a zip-case in her wardrobe and doesn't spend a euro. (That is Ozon cutting off cliched explanations.

The old guy dies on her mid-act. She scarpers from the hotel. The Police catch up and break the news to her mother, whose reactions are a study in female solipsism, but not more so than we would expect. Anyone Blaming The Family is pushing it.

There's some attempt towards the end at psychological explanation with the legally-compulsory therapist. I found these unconvincing, and I think we are supposed to: again, it's Ozon cutting us off from cliched explanations.

There's also some attempt to suggest that charging 300 euros an hour improves her sense of worth and social confidence, which is most convincing as she walks through a house party full of teenagers doing drunken teenage-y things, and smiles at it all with the air of someone who Knows Way Better. I could buy that as the reaction of a teenage girl in that situation, and therefore as writerly accuracy, but not as authorial assertion. Otherwise Ozon is offering us prostitution as self-development, and I'm going to guess he doesn't believe that any more than I do.

All the critics mention Belle du Jour Of course they do. Ozon even does a visual quote from Bunuel's film to mis-direct them.

(Intentionally misleading visual quote)

But of course they shouldn't. What they should mention is Bonjour Tristesse another novel / film about an amoral young woman. Written in the 1950's it couldn't make its heroine a hooker, so she simply causes a middle-aged lover of her father to commit suicide by bad driving so she and Daddy can go back to being empty hedonists. Real cute kid huh? Oh, and nobody asked why she did that because they were all grown up enough to know why.

Ozon is assuming that we are all grown-up enough to know why Isabelle did it. Teenage girl, hot, and because for Isabelle there's no oxytocin to create spurious bonding and confusing emotions. She did it because she could: the motive of the powerful at all times and everywhere. And that's what breaks every rule you learned in PC 101.

The final bit has Charlotte Rampling as Dead Guy's wife meeting Isabelle to exorcise demons by visiting the room he died in. I wondered about that scene for a while. I kept expecting Rampling to put a knife through Vacth. But no. Instead, she's the only person who actually seems to understand anything about Isabelle. And certainly the only one who shows her any kindness. But then, Rampling's character is a grown-up woman who only exists in movies. She's the real fantasy figure, not Isabelle.

Flip the PC police the bird. Go see it

Shadows in the City Fog

It's been foggy everywhere, and Wednesday it lasted in the City until lunchtime. At a certain spot in Spitalfields Market, everyone was looking in the Gherkin / Heron Tower direction at this...

... easily the most beautiful sight I've seen since moving to Bishopsgate. That's the Heron Tower on the right, and on the left is the shadow of the Gherkin cast in the fog. The Gherkin is in front of its shadow and about half the size. Everyone had their phones out to snap it. Click to enlarge it's worth it.

I Guess I've Always Wanted...

aka (MGTOW Ramblings With A Conclusion, Even)

And I keep forgetting: I don't do oxytocin, vasopressin, endorphins and all that other feel-good bonding stuff. If you spent a month in my hormonal soup you would come out asking "For the sake of God and all his Angels, is there ever one moment of your life when you ever feel just plain good? Or even frikkin' okay?" That would be a big NO. Sex is just never going to be fireworks and mystical union.

What I've been dancing round is the possibility that I may never have an intimate relationship again, and that because I would prefer to be single than be accompanied by a woman who makes me look old. Vanity, sure. It's also a hard-headed recognition that whatever the frak "intimacy" means to you, it means nothing of the sort, and indeed nothing of any sort, to me because it requires hormones I don't make or respond to. And those I do make are associated with frakked-up co-dependent feelings I need to avoid the same way I need to avoid booze and drugs.

That's a bunch of decisions there. That's a bunch of consequences as well, some of them a little hard to take. How much easier it would be to quote a line like "that sound you hear at fifty-five is the door slamming shut on your sex life" or to bemoan my lack of fame, power and wealth. Or to say something pious about "a man who reaches my age should / shouldn't (insert whatever here)". Lamenting my logistical situation is really just excusify-ing.

I never did feel desire. The attraction I did feel was for all the wrong reasons. I managed to have sex on a cocktail of testosterone, booze and neurotic emotion. All those have more or less passed, and thank god, in most cases (I could take back the testosterone though).

I'm never going to stop looking at women and I'm never going to stop flirting with the bangable ones either. And I suppose if I ever met one who wants what I got - delightfully witty, flattering, insincere and very good company for a night - then I would be quite happy to spend that time. But put a lot of effort into it? I don't think so. Maybe put a little more effort into it than I do? Okay. I could do that.

On the other hand, these songs have always been special to me...



and of course



You know why those guitar solos are so right for that song? Because although the singer is saying that though they will give up on love, because "time and time again the chance for love has passed me by / and all I know of love is how to live without it... I'l say goodbye to love", they will not give up on life and living. That's what those two defiant, soaring solos are there to prove, that there is a way of living a life of passion and emotion even if it doesn't involve conventional "love".

October / November 2013 Review

I missed a month. I had a cold. Actually I had two colds. One on the first long weekend I took off, and one on the second. Since the second, in November, I have been taking Zinc, Vitamin D, 2xDay Nurse first thing to help keep the coughing down and until the last week, Night Nurse to sleep.

I've seen Zizek's The Pervert's Guide To Ideology and the documentary Cutie and The Boxer at the ICA; Hannah Arednt, Fifth Estate, Blue Jasmine, Muscle Shoals, Seduced and Abandoned and the Curzons; and Thanks For Sharing, Machete Kills, Captain Phillips, and The Counsellor at the local Cineworld. Also Wayne McGregor's Atoms and Hofesh Schecter's latest at Sadler's Wells. I read several volumes of the amazing Transmetropolitan, The Theory That Would Not Die, Antifragile, The Signal And The Noise, Tokyo Vice, Information Is Beautiful and Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography. I also took another lap round Kendig's A Guide to Plane Algebraic Curves and the fun bits around Hirzbruch-Riemman-Roch in Gathmann's lecture notes on Algebraic Geometry.

My training has been erratic, so I've switched to doing two sets and more but shorter sessions. Plus each week I have to increase the weight on something I'm doing, or add in a new exercise. So over the two months I've reached 132lbs on dead-lift, comfortably, just hit 165 lbs bench-press without a spot, and have reduced the support I use for pull-ups to... no, that's embarrassing. And added Turkish get-ups. As ever, call me when you're my age and doing those weights.

 

Sis and I dined at Picture in November - if I had money I would seriously book a seat at the bar twice a week at least - and had our annual visit to Rules in October, where we dined on Bambi - Roe Deer, and very nice it was too. I went to a farewell supper at Floridita for Renata, who's now left the Third Space to go travelling for a while.

Plus work gave us a team-building trip up and down from the London Eye pier to Canary Wharf and back on one of those whizzy boats, followed by some time up the Shard, though the visibility was not so good: that was the annual jolly.

All I can really remember is coughing, clearing my nose, and not wanting to leave the house for the last two or three weekends. I didn't even go training the on the last couple of Sundays. Hence the increased weekly schedule. One reason to do these things is to remind myself that it wasn't all a loss. I'm making good progress with the Riemann-Roch essay, though it's hard getting consistent time to work on it, as Saturdays really are just turning into serious days of rest. Until I do the ironing in the evening. Also I do appreciate how much more rested I feel the next morning after returning straight home from work and watching some Burn Notice.

And now it's sodding December. Xmas. The gym is closing for a week for refurbishment before the holiday. I have already arranged massages and osteopathy.

Music For Being Lost In The City

Another collection of songs with a theme, in this case, London: Soho gets referenced in Pinball, Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty, Belsize Park by Marillion, while Kit Hain never says which city, but since she was London-based, let's assume the Great Wen was her model, and She's Gone is for me forever associated with the sight and smell of roasted chestnuts in winter by Tottenham Court Road underground station. And let's not forget that immortal verse: "Think I'll spend eternity in the city / Let the carbon and monoxide wash my / Thoughts away / And pretty bodies help dissolve the memories / But they can never be / What she was to me". (Today, that's called ONEitis and is a certified psychiatric disorder, but back then it was the natural state of any young man having a hard time with love.)

All of the songs have a mid-tempo beat, three have a saxophone solo, and again for all I know they all feature D minor suspended 6th. All of them are about being in but not of the city, suspended in an emotional state that isn't love or sorrow or despair or anger, but something between all those. These are songs about lost people. Kayleigh, which is a guilty pleasure, is mid-80's, while the others are from the early 1970's.

I Just Heard This Awesome Track - Smallpools, Dreaming

You know how it goes. Someone's mix on 8Tracks is halfway through, and you look up and say "What's this track? These guys are good." These guys are frikkin' awesome... give it a listen.

Being Mature, Shame Traps and Being A Mensch

Over at The Rawness, they asked over several parts "What is maturity?" And all of them walked straight into the trap. They accepted that the concept had moral freight that could be shame-dumped on transgressors. I say, faced with any concept that gets used to shame people? Screw it. Stop using it and replace it with solid descriptives instead. Who cares what someone else trying to con you into behaving in such-a-way call "mature"? 

You have respect for your body, and so exercise and eat well; you have respect for your mind, and so read challenging non-fiction, and avoids junk culture; you have respect for your soul and emotions, and so choose your friends and acquaintances well - avoiding users, vampires, dis-respectors and other vexatious and turing people; you pay your fair and due taxes, and you pay your due bills; you work in the private sector or in law enforcement, fire-fighting, the military or medicine; you are considerate to the similarly well-behaved, and co-operate with those who bear you no ill-will. Mostly you don't do stuff for free, though you do "give" if you can. You have strong boundaries, and above all, you do not enter into any contract with high exit costs (cf marriage and almost all large outsourcing contracts). 

You do all that, and you will not care if anybody calls you "immature". 

I would add, but this is optional, that you don't identify yourself with the values, traditions and social and religious practices of your family, friends, employer, society or economy. Sure, go along with it to get done what you need to get done, but belief? I don't hide behind religion, culture or any other of Mommy's conceptual skirts to defend what I do or how I feel.

Do all this and you will come across as polite, considerate and co-operative - to those whose behaviour and attitude qualify them. You won't let others spill your feelings all over you, and you won't trouble others with yours either. You are going to come across as pretty darn self-contained and distant, though among friends you will be just the opposite. You will be the guy who, well, when someone falls sick in front of you, you will call for an ambulance and stay with them until it gets there, and then get on with your day.

If you're that guy, do you care what someone else out to shame you counts as "mature"? Thought so.