“You can’t compare yourself to God.”

“Am I not God’s image in your eyes?  Is it not to me that you owe your taste for a certain kind of perfection?”

This exchange of words does not take place except in the imagination of Dr. Paul Courreges, the main figure in the Francois Mauriac novel The Desert of Love (1925), which exchange is between Courreges and the woman he has long been passionate about (and it ain’t his wife): Maria Cross.  Doubtless Maria is the kind of woman to see “God’s image” in a man she falls for, but Courreges, it turns out, is not that man.  Yet the doctor still loves Maria, whereas she gradually falls for Courreges’s son Raymond.  What the novel directs us to is, on the one hand, the deep secularization of French society and, on the other, “the desert of love” one encounters after connections are made with the desired person.

Very little is working out for these characters, and not a one of them adheres, as Mauriac did, to any particular religion.  The Desert of Love is very solemn and even tragic, though with Christian overtones.  Although God is seldom mentioned in the book, when He is, the references are not only sobering but also encouraging.  Example: “There could be no hope for either of them, for father or for son, unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself Who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning, bitter tide.”

To think that God would summon from a person a burning, bitter tide!  I was prompted to use the word “encouraging” for a reason.

Cover of The Desert of Love

The France wherein jihadists have slaughtered innocents is the France of the 2008 film, Skirt Day—a scathing picture indeed.

Here, Sonia, a public high school teacher who often wears skirts, is trying to teach a drama course to wild, disrespectful immigrant kids from Muslim backgrounds.  (They hate skirts.)  Astonished to find that a thuggish African boy has a pistol in his possession, Sonia grabs it and is badly bullied for her trouble.  Now in shock—and feeling vindictive—she unintentionally shoots the boy in the leg and takes the students hostage, though only with the aim of delivering this day’s school lesson.  A police detective, Labouret, is sent to investigate and remedy the situation.  Sonia’s estranged husband, too, arrives at the school, enraged at the principal who has long failed to adequately help Sonia with discipline problems.

The film tells us that Muslim boys have learned to be misogynistic, and even misogynistic criminals.  They also use the word “kike.”  French society here is choking on its racial-ethnic insanity but, what is more, it witnesses the awful weakening of the institutions of school and marriage—and of French customs.  The result is that people feel deracinated and fretful.  Labouret, for example, understands that his marriage is at an end.  Personal angst is running high.

The director-writer is Jean-Paul Lilienfeld (talented), the actress who plays Sonia is Isabelle Adjani (talented—and superlative here).  The film’s climax is not that good, but everything else is dramatically skillful and unspeakably provocative, with a sprinkling of bitter humor.  Skirt Day may be the most politically honest and disturbing French artwork since The Camp of the Saints.

(In French with English subtitles)

La journée de la jupe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)