THE TALKIES: You Know What I Like
Bowman, James
and sometimes I still get that impression of it. But it's never been anything as obvious as a gay hangout; one just notices it as one of the warps and weaves of the place. Lovely women are to be...
...For him writing was not a priority...
...And yet neither Moll nor Harry ever loses sight of the artistic end of it all, and Michel is gradually drawn into resuming a literary career he never even knew he had given up-a career which, we are led to suppose, will survive even the end of Harry's efforts to revive it...
...Jaoui, plays Castella, a bourgeois industrialist with no discernible culture who, on being dragged to the theatre one night by his vain, pretentious, and domineering wife (Christiane Millet), is moved to tears by the performance of an actress, Clara Devaux (Anne Alvaro), in the title role of Racine's Berenice...
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...The first and easiest to like is Rob Sitch's The Dish, a lovely little Australian film that manages to make the Apollo 11 moon launch not only fresh and interesting again after more than three decades, but better conveys the emotional kick of watching one of mankind's supreme achievements than anything else I've seen on the space program...
...Why did everything have to be analyzed and explained...
...But Harry is firmly persuaded of Michel's genius on the slender evidence of his only poem (though plainly derivative and adolescent, it is "one of the most beautiful things I've ever read," claims Harry, who "read it so often it sank in") and an unfinished science fiction story called "The Flying Monkeys...
...What are we meant to think of Michel's literary efforts...
...Can't they just enjoy them without having to justify their enjoyment-or having me justify it for them...
...I'm not completely sure, but I think it has something to do with the self-deprecating wit with which the little Australian town of Parkes is portrayed...
...Or does the fact that Harry, in a performance by Mr...
...For a FREE Pedestal, order Gv june.3D...
...Lopez that is beyond praise, obviously has several screws loose ultimately discredit his artistic along with his moral judgment...
...Castella or Rudi, the bumbling security guard in The Dish...
...The quality of The Taste of Others is easy to account for in comparison to that of Dominik Moll's With a Friend Like Harry...
...11I f NI . Yet so easy to grasp...
...Pardon me, then, if I seem for a moment to condescend, but the reason why we sophisticates sneer at the "know-what-I-like" school of criticism is that we assume a little culture is enough to teach us why we like a thing...
...Thus by virtue of what in Britain used to be called the number 11 bus rule ("You wait half an hour for a bus, then three come at once"), I can point in such a fashion not to one, not to two, but to three Movies of the Month this month, all of them displaying excellences more or less resistant to explanation...
...in the hope that others will feel the same way...
...I hasten to add that I have not actually seen Exit Wounds, but I have seen enough movies starring Steven Seagal to make an educated guess as to its quality...
...The defiant movie-goer who insists that he found much to enjoy in Showgirls or Battlefield Earth would at the very least have to acknowledge that in doing so he was part of a tiny minoritythough not, perhaps, quite so tiny as the minority of us who love and revere the works of Eric Rohmer or Abbas Kiarostami...
...But I've never left there feeling either hungry or insulted, and I can't say the same for many New York places with more stars...
...I always have the same thing (oysters followed by tarragon chicken) and that decision was after some trials and a few errors...
...don't know much about art, but I know what I like...
...Just because tastes change, or resist at their outer limits our attempts to explain them, they are not for that reason exempt from analysis, or from the judgment of the wise that they, or artistic manifestations of them, are "good" or "bad" or even (as they used to say) "correct" or "incorrect...
...Like Agnes Jaoui's film, Moll's tells the story of an otherwise uncultivated man who suddenly develops something that is, if not quite an artistic passion, at least a passion for an artist...
...So unanimous, indeed, is the sense of contempt for Castella among all the other characters-his wife, his would-be mistress, her supercilious friends, and even his driver and bodyguard-that we are naturally seduced into the same feeling our selves, until the film picks us up and shakes us, at last convincing us as well as Clara that we have misjudged him completely...
...There is a wonderful scene in which Michel's brother Eric (Michel Fau), without knowing of Harry's devotion to it, reads out to him the same poem almost helpless with laughter at the awfulness of it...
...So, my few beer-loving friends tell me, is the ale agenda...
...He hires Clara to teach him English and pursues her with offers of love and friendship that are an embarrassment to her...
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...In some cases one can only point and say, "Isn't that terrific...
...Most of us don't know much about art, but we know enough to know that that cliche is supposed to be THE TALKIES funny-like "some of my best friends are...
...We elitists are likely to model for ourselves the graph of taste as a bell curve with the truly abysmal and the truly wonderful as mirror images of diminutiveness while the vast, bulging majority in the middle stuff their faces with popcorn as they thrill to mediocrities like Hannibal or The Mexican or Exit Wounds...
...The dirty secret of the critical fraternity is that we know these are better questions than we are (usually) willing to let on-better, even, than those who ask them know, since the questions themselves imply feelings of guilt about not knowing why they enjoy what they enjoy...
...So, then, is Eric wrong...
...On the way south one summer to his tumbledown vacation cottage with his wife, Claire (Mathilde Seigner), and three daughters, Michel meets an old schoolmate, the eponymous Harry (Sergi Lopez), in the men's room at a highway rest-stop...
...But most of us know much better why we don't like things than why we do, and we can recognize the bits that are trite or banal or stupid more easily than we can take in an entire effect of the sublime...
...It's just that he doesn't entirely know how to like it...
...Pretty much by chance, because the town has the largest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, some of these ordinary and ridiculous The good stuff is more difficult to explain, even though we explain things for a living...
...The bill can be oddly steep, but that might be the wine list, which is pretty good...
...We who have more reasons for liking or not liking movies, songs, books, paintings, and so forth than we know what to do with are too apt to forget the ultimate mystery of taste, summed up in their usual lapidary way by the antique Romans in branding it non disputandum...
...black/Jewish etc.-and would never be guilty of using it ourselves otherwise than ironically...
...Most were driven into fits by the exercise...
...Harry asks...
...a touch that seemed right for some reason...
...Harry has no words to defend his own taste, but the horrible extent of his nonverbal commitment to it commands a certain respect...
...There is undoubtedly something of the mindlessness of the fashion-following herd in movie popularity statistics...
...But the good stuff is more difficult to explain, even for us, even though we explain things for a living...
...The Bose Acoustic Wave music system is quite advanced...
...At first, Michel doesn't know whether to be flattered or annoyed, and he is flabbergasted when Harry responds to the breakdown of the family station wagon by buying them a new and expensive SUV Soon, Harry's determination to solve every problem, even where Michel had been unaware of having any problems, takes an alarming turn and we begin to feel that we are watching a Hitchcock film of a script by Harold Pinter...
...Before the ultimate mysteries, we may all be as ignorant as Harry or Mr...
...Michel seems embarrassed by the question...
...Those of us who for professional reasons or out of mere vanity set some store by our critical honor try to be a little more sensitive to the presence of triteness, banality, or stupidity...
...Do you still write...
...The waiters and waitresses read you your rights about the odd special, without making an operetta out of it, or making you want to say "Hi...
...2001 iiiik...
...At a certain level, indeed, such judgments are almost definitive...
...But I knew what I liked...
...I'm Christopher and I'm damn well going to be your customer tonight" Details.The Cafe Loup has its own matchboxes, which are proper boxes with a sliding drawer and wooden matches...
...Jean-Pierre Bacri, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mlle...
...I7H THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 95 people, led by the widower Cliff Buxton (Sam Neill) and the rather stuffy but ultimately decent NASA representative, Al Burnett (Patrick Warburton), become part of an enterprise whose greatness they are perhaps uniquely well-situated to appreciate...
...Certainly this is true, I think, ofAgnes Jaoui's The Taste of Others, which creates a thrill not unlike that of The Dish by putting its technical virtues in the service of a compelling vision of how to live one's life...
...He doesn't, he says...
...At the same time, we are right to resist the extreme relativism of this point of view...
...Moll's hero is a young man called Michel Pape (Laurent Lucas) who makes a modest living in Paris teaching French to the Japanese...
...The boxes are illustrated with a nice shadowhand silhouette of a wolf, and they used to-I can't check this at the moment have the phone number with a letter prefix instead of a numeral one...
...I once found myself sharing the bar with the great restaurant critic Seymour Britchkey, who lives in the 'hood...
...Perhaps there is something in this kind of idiot pride in being human that is analogous to the dumb admiration created in us by a really good movie...
...The men's room is alarmingly small, but it does have a fine pen-and-ink drawing of a big wolf lifing its leg-I can't stand cutesy men's room art with the lupine injunction to respect elders, stay hungry, and stick with the pack...
...Moll deliberately leaves all such questions unresolved...
...And so do we, even though the most we are entitled to in the way of proprietary pride is to be able to say that we paid our taxes in the 1960s...
...Perhaps they You Know What I Like BY JAMES BOWMAN G G 94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 didn't like them but only went because everyone else was going...
...I can't remember if he was eating or not...
...The mystery of taste is also the mystery of how it can be communicated and, above all, of what we are willing to do for it...
...After ten years of reviewing movies, I felt as if I knew nothing at all about them...
...It is safe, I think, to assume that the throngs who recently pushed each of these movies up to number one at the box office had little idea about why they liked them...
...Or so it seemed to me at the unforgettable conclusion of With Friends Like Harry...
...Meanwhile the audience gets to join in as the even more ordinary and ridiculous townspeople-standing for humanity in general, who make a brief guest appearance on bits of film and videotape dating from 1969-watch from the sidelines and feel remarkably proud of themselves...
...I too have a tendency to mark my territory and, even though NewYork has a more bewitching range of bars and restaurants than any other city on earth, I have often taxied many blocks or got others to do the same, in order to be reassured that I wasn't wrong the first time and that some verities still hold...
...These are ordinary and often rather ridiculous people in a sleepy little sheep-station of an Australian town who, with that peculiarly Australian charm of theirs, know approximately how ordinary and rather ridiculous they are...
...96 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001...
...Does the film mean to take Michel's art as seriously as Harry does...
...Oddly, he doesn't remember Harry at all, but Harry remembers him-so well, indeed, that he can still recite from memory a poem that Michel once wrote for the school magazine...
...I won't say that the Loup is a gourmet experience either...
...In some cases one can only point and say "Isn't that terrific...
...in the hope that others will feel the same way...
...How does it do this...
...When I was a teacher of teenage pop-music addicts, I used to make them pick a song that they liked and then tell the class why they liked it...
...Why couldn't they just like it...
...His sensitivities, both to art and to people, are real if mostly inarticulate, and his dumb appreciation before the cultural idols in the film becomes an analogue of our own when we see how we have been duped by our own readiness to be dismissive of humble but unmistakable human worth...
...Maybe that's why most of us are easy: A film maker gives us a few good jokes or thrilling special effects and we're his...
...Here is the prototype of the man who doesn't know anything about art but who knows what he likes...
...Lone wolves, nonetheless, are welcome (I mean in the bar itself, not the loo...
...Nowadays, people say the same thing to me about the movies...
...Lovely women are to be found there in sufficient profusion and often enough-I don't know why this is a good sign, but it is-either sitting alone or in groups...
...Being the sort of guy whose motto is "solve every problem," he sets out to clear away any and every obstacle to Michel's return to his literary vocation...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 4
