Though overlong, the French film Populaire (2013) is an entertaining homage to American movie comedies of the Fifties, taking place in 1959.  Deborah Francois plays an appallingly incompetent secretary who nevertheless has an amazing knack for typing, while Romain Duris enacts her boss, an insurance man, intent on coaching her in ten-finger (instead of two-finger) typing for several lauded speed-typing contests.  Eventually romance blooms, for, after all, the boss is a young man essentially deprived of love and the secretary is a small-town girl in Lisieux who has no beau and is probably a virgin.

Populaire is a seriocomic Doris & Rock-like movie with brief mild nudity thrown in.  It understands that an item like Pillow Talk contains strong hints of sexual desire while it readily respects the mores of the time.  The same respect exists in this current film directed by Regis Roinsard even as sexual desire is realistically more than hinted at.  Really, the movie is in love with pop culture, nostalgically so.  Even the pink typewriter necessarily becomes a pop culture element.  The film is not as funny as the Fifties’ American comedies (even Hawks’s Monkey Business) but it is rich and buoyant.  It has a fine cast too, although Duris does not even come close to declaring his love for the typist convincingly.

No bete noire is Populaire.

English: Screenshot from Linux software KTouch. An image of the Home Row keys for touch typing. Suomi: Kymmensormijärjestelmän sormien paikat. ???????: ??????????????? ?????? ????? ?????? ????????????? ????????? KTouch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After seeing Judd Apatow‘s The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) again, I was surprised to discover how frequently boring it actually is (e.g., the nightclub sequence).  It tries to be engaging through highly sexual talk and very daring sight gags.  With the latter it sometimes succeeds, as in the speed-dating footage.  The successes that are there manage to be funny, but to me the movie in toto is not funny enough, and is overlong.  Worse, it is insanely and relentlessly adolescent.  Er. . . boredom, anyone?

The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, a 1969 novel by Gordon M. Williams, is about the cold and violent impulses of the plebes in rural England.  It inspired the making of the Peckinpah film, Straw Dogs, a good picture but not very faithful to Williams’s novel.  As in the film, even so, an American man married to an English wife is forced to violate his humanitarian conscience when some Brit bullies besiege his home.  They demand that the “Yank” turn over to them a man even more morally repulsive—he murders little girls—than they are.  But the man is puny and not in his right mind, and George, the Yank, refuses to yield to the chaps, whose scorn is decidedly for a child-killer and an American.

The novel is also about what being a man means apropos of having a wife—specifically, a very flawed one.

Close to being a mere potboiler, Siege is nevertheless splendidly exciting and sharply uncompromising.  With its palatable plot, it itself would make a good movie.

In the French novel The Loved and the Unloved (1952), or Galigai, by Francois Mauriac, Madame Agathe (or Galigai) hopes that by exerting her will she will cause a young man, Nicholas Plassac, to enter a romantic liaison with her.  But Agathe is physically repelling and the efforts do not work.  Mauriac has written that, for his part, Nicholas has an “idol” he must be separated from, this being not Agathe but Gilles Salone, a fellow with whom Nicholas maintains a strong friendship.

Themes in the book include the limited power of amatory love and friendship, and when sacrifice is less than moral.  It is shown that idols go, like life itself, and there is the idea of divine love at dead ends.  About a particular character in the book, Mauriac writes, “It was as though he had agreed with somebody to meet him there,” the “somebody” being God.

Though not perfect, The Loved and the Unloved is a probing novel which certainly should be read more than once, as I have done.  In its translation by Gerard Hopkins, it was penned with lovely and clever clarity:  “that living silence of the night which is the very peace of God”. . . “She could feel in her flesh what such a night must mean to two young creatures pressing together under the tulip-tree, two creatures whose happiness she was about to sully.”  Mauriac was a writer, all right.

Books and stories.