Discover French cinema : Boudu saved from drowning

For the first post in my new "Discover French cinema" series, I attack straight on with a movie which is certainly not the easiest, or the most watchable I could have selected. To start with "Boudu saved from drowning" is to start with an absolute monument of French cinema. The French title is now an integral part of the French language, an expression we use to mock slightly eccentric people. Released in 1932, and adapted from a play, directed by Jean Renoir and starring Michel Simon, both heavyweights in French cinema, it is what is considered one of Jean Renoir's masterpieces. Jean Renoir himself is a controversial figure in French cinema (he was renown for his large porn collection and his strange sexual practices), and it is sometimes suggested that he had more than a little of Boudu's character in him. One of the controversies surrounding the film is the change of ending from the play to the movie, radically twisting the meaning of the play. Its author, Rene Fauchois, even threatened to remove his name from the credits. 

In fact, it is so famous in France, that I have to admit that I have always assumed, and I'm sure a lot of French are in the same case, that I had already seen it. Until recently, I hadn't.  

Boudu is a tramp, who one day, after losing his only companion, his dog, in a park, decides to end it all by jumping in the river Seine. He is saved by Mr Lestingois, a bookseller, who invites him home to recover. Mr Lestingois, amused by the antics of the decidedly unrefined Boudu, takes the man under his wing, and tries to convert the marginal Boudu to the ideal of the Parisian Bourgeois etiquette, with mixed, and most of the time hilarious results. Not short of a few laugh out loud comedy moments, "Boudu saved from drowning" is, however, much more than a rags-to-riches, simple feel-good comedy. There is a very, very dark undercurrent running throughout the movie.

This is, first of all, a 30s movie, a fact that should not be forgotten. That includes the rampant sexism of the times, the house maid is also Mr Lestingois' mistress, while the wife spends most of her time just looking good, being moody and concerned about the house's decoration, and the man, Mr Lestingois, is thoroughly bored of his repetitive life (I feel sorry for him, having to juggle a good looking wife and a young mistress). So when Boudu, the rebel, the iconoclast, the anarchist, but also the lost soul invades his life, he sees him as a nice little project, one that can drag him out of the boredom of his daily life. While Boudu's behaviour shocks the women, Mr Lestingois seems very amused by it all. Saving Boudu, educating him, making him a stand up man becomes his hobby. It would be fair to ask,however, who is really saved here? Boudu? or Mr Lestingois?

It is fair to say that for a movie dating from l'age d'or of cinema, the characters are far more complex than they originally appear.

Mr Lestingois, despite living the typical Parisian Bourgeois life, aspires to a more exciting life. He wants to remain inconspicuous, mostly so he can carry on his affair with his live-in mistress, but the bookseller's interest in philosophical books from the French revolution era hints at an unsettled and angry man. Boudu is genuinely a mystery. It is very difficult to comprehend Boudu's character. Is he a simple man? Is he an idiot savant? An evil genius? At times charming, at times disgusting and at times genuinely frightening, we are not given a definite answer. Despite being hidden behind the sheer brilliance of Michel Simon's physical comedy, the complexity of the man pervades the entire movie.

And the movie itself is a mystery. Even though it sometimes gets close to the myth of l'enfant sauvage, the wild child plucked from nature to be educated by the bienveillant bourgeois, Boudu is not a child, and seems to know exactly what he's doing despite the appearances. Is he manipulating the Lestingois?

Behind the comedic appearance, the movie is a strong critic of class struggle in the France of the early 30s. Let's not forget that only four years later, the popular front and government of Leon Blum would sign the Matignon agreements, still the cornerstone of French workers right, with such advances as the right to strike, the 40 hours week and paid vacations. It is a movie with an anarchist background, rather than converting Boudu to the Bourgeois etiquette, he fully subvert the Lestingois, people he doesn't need, but who need him in return.

Technically, Renoir's photography is painfully beautiful, and way ahead of its time. Some of the shots, especially towards the end, really emphasize the dreary feeling that not everything is quite right in the world of the Lestingois, and especially the forced four-way relationship between the main characters. There is a particularly ground breaking scene where none of the characters (each one of them in a different room) can fall asleep until Boudu falls asleep. The translation from French to English is decent, even though it misses the point and rhythm of most of the best quotes from the movie. However, I admit it is incredibly difficult to translate the grammatical mistakes in Boudu's speech, which defines much of his character and also defines an aural separation from the bourgeois Lestingois.

Complex, deep, revolutionary, beautiful, funny and ultimately a very entertaining if slightly draining watch, "Boudu saved from drowning" is a defining cornerstone of French cinema. It is far more than what it appears, and develops a story and characters with great mastery and an ever present sense of exultation. It is an opulent movie, moral, educational without being elitist. And that, for me, defines great French cinema as it has been since and as it still is now. 


Here is a little sample of the movie : Boudu is asked to polish his shoes.

Discover French cinema : An intro

A while ago, I posted a review of "The Artist", and it was a reasonably successful post. As a film buff born and bred in France, it has always been a slight disappointment to know that some of my favourite movies never left France and are stuck behind the language barrier. 

So it always gives me great pleasure when I discover that some French classics are made available outside of France, usually with subtitles, either in the cinema or on DVD or Bluray, or in the UK for example, on streaming services such as Curzon on demand. The demand for more, and better quality content, and with the democratization of foreign culture I hope we will see more and more.

So I decided to start a little series about some of my favourite French movies, most of them famous in France but virtual unknowns in the UK (or elsewhere). I will limit myself to review movies I know are available n DVD or Bluray in the UK (and they are generally available in other territories too), and also to movies I personally love.


I will try extremely hard to not be elitist in my choice of movies. From black and white classics to comedies, no movie is out of my range. It's not like I'm short of options anyway. The French cinema industry has always been very creative and productive, and has a very diverse output. Sure, these movies are not Hollywood blockbusters, but you'd be amazed at the amount of Hollywood movies and directors inspired by French movies. And of course, now, quite a few French directors work in Hollywood, but got their movie education the same way I got mine : By watching French movies.

I hope you will find these reviews interesting and that they will inspire you to discover these movies, and more of the output of the French cinema industry. It needs all the help it can get!

The one billion dollars Polaroid

So Facebook bought Instagram. Interesting. Instagram, a photo sharing social network, not unlike Flickr, with one twist, the photos are "filtered" to make them look old. Instagram, a company with no business model, and no revenue whatsoever. I'll leave that aside for this post, though, as much as it baffles me, it seems irrelevant in these days and age.


Of course the big question is why? Why was Instagram so appealing to Facebook? Sure, it is a social network, and a rather successful one too. 30 million reported users before they launched on Android, add to that one million more in the few days post the Android launch, these are good numbers for any social network. Facebook is predicting reaching 900 million users before the end of the year. It hardly needs Instagram to boost its membership members. Facebook is now past its critical mass, and the numbers of new Facebook users are less than stellar, but that was to be expected. Instagram pretty much replicated the Facebook style of connecting users, you can friend people and follow their picture streams. Just with their sheer amount of users, Facebook must have a much larger amount of data than Instagram, and better connectivity information. I couldn't find figures on the average number of followers on Instagram, but I imagine it would be far less than the average number of Facebook friends (the latest figure I could find is 190 friends on average).


Is Facebook interested in the technology behind Instagram? It could be, but I very much doubt it. Sure, Instagram did it just right. They started with just an iOS app, and a backend. No access to the photos from their website, so just one point of access to maintain, and they did that maintenance perfectly, the app is a pleasure to use. Even on my old iPhone 3G is was perfectly usable, unlike most of the other web based social networks overburdened by app maintenance. I haven't tried the Android version but I imagine they follow that same principle of simplicity of development. Here's an interesting presentation from Mike Krieger on how they managed the scaling of Instagram. He does rather insist on the simplicity part of development and maintenance.

Facebook, however, are trying to get away from native apps, and use HTML5 technologies more. It makes sense for them, they want to be accessed from as many devices as possible, and with more and more vastly different devices, and different OSes, it's becoming a technological nightmare to natively support everything. On top of that, they can't have their own ads in native apps (certainly true of iOS, and I'm sure Google, the online ad giant, does not let anybody invade their space on Android). On top of that, third party developers are left out of mobile devices due to the lack of Flash. In short, both of Facebook's revenue streams are blocked on mobile devices. And their users are increasingly accessing their service from mobile (more than 50% of users, in fact. Nearly 14% exclusively access Facebook from mobile devices).

So, we come back to the original question : Why did Facebook buy Instagram. The answer is simple. They had no choice. Instagram was the first serious competitor to Facebook, attacking one of Facebook's main strengths, the sharing of pictures. They had no choice but to get rid of a serious competitor before the IPO. However, the cost of this acquisition is extremely high. I'm not just talking about the valuation of Instagram (they raised $50 millions at a $500 millions valuation four days before the acquisition), but also, and mainly, the lack of long term strategy for Facebook. If their strategy is to buy any up and coming competitors, they risk running out of cash very quickly. Their future very much lies on mobile devices, away from native apps, yet they acquire a native app only competitor, which they will now struggle to monetize. We'll see hoe the IPO pans out very soon, but I have to say, if I had any money, that is not a company I would invest in. 

Watch out, Raymond Blanc!

Ooh la la! Fantastique!

Here's a very different post from me, today I'd like to talk to you about cooking. Yes, cooking.

As I mentioned before, my first career choice was to be a chef. And then a few years ago, I nearly gave up my career as a software engineer to train to be one. I guess this says of me that, yes, I pretty much like cooking. And I'm not too bad at it, even if I say so myself. And as I am a software engineer, I had to approach learning to cook in a very professional, organised, methodical manner. Yes, as usual, I went slightly overboard. I just cannot have a hobby.

I didn't start very brightly, I have to admit. I remember a very embarrassing full English breakfast I cooked 14 years ago that was an absolute disaster. None of it was right! Ok, maybe the sausages were fine. The rest, awful. That's when I decided to get serious. Far from me the idea of teaching you how to cook, I'm not a chef after all. But I can share with you how I got from rubbery eggs to putting together some pretty nice, and original dishes.

I enjoy cooking. It's a prerequisite, I think. If you can't stand cooking, there's not much I can do for you. Find somebody to cook for you, that's your best option. I also enjoy eating, and that's another prerequisite. If you don't have any particular interest in fine food, and consider eating a necessity rather than a pleasure, forget it, you'll never be a good cook.

Cooking takes a lot of time. I won't deny it, it's true, but with a bit of organisation, and some professional tips, you can cut down on the time needed to cook most dishes.

The first part is the preparation (or prep, as the pro call it). In short, getting the ingredients ready before you start cooking. It's very important to get right, so you don't run around like a headless chicken trying to chop an onion while something is burning on the stove. And it saves you time on the whole.

Prep is mostly chopping, dicing, filleting and a lot of other fun activities you can have with a knife. A lot of people are afraid to use a proper chef sized knives. It's completely understandable, they are huge scary things after all. I was afraid too when I got my first set of knives. Then I read this book. It teaches every thing you need to know about knives, the safety of them, how to care for them and how use them correctly. I've been using chef knives for about 10 years now, and I have very rarely cut myself, and most importantly I still have all my fingers. There is no way now that I would use a smaller knife, it is simply safer to use a bigger one. Yes, really, safer. It's all explained in the book.

My favourite knives at the moment are a pair of ceramic knives (this is one of them). I like them because they are light, the handle fits well in my hand, extremely sharp, and maintenance wise they don't require anything, they stay sharp virtually forever. The only downside is that they break if dropped, so bear that in mind if you have butterfingers.

I'm sure a few of you are already saying “Jesus, Vale, these things are expensive!” And yes, they are (in reality, they're quite a bargain at that price). Buying good quality equipment for the kitchen is not cheap, I'll give you that. However, it is better to invest in quality. With proper care, you will keep these knives for a long time, if not a lifetime. Cheaper knives will not last, will become dull extremely quickly and will not be worth having sharpened professionally. And also, importantly, dull knives are dangerous!

Pair that with a good, solid, heavy chopping board, and you will be well on your way to prep heaven. Follow the lessons in the book, practice, and your preparation will be so much quicker and enjoyable.

One of the great fun of cooking is coming up with your own recipes. It's even better if they taste good, though. You can't improvise yourself a creative cook, it requires culture and experience. The experience you will have to get yourself, but here's how I started acquiring the culture.

The first part is learning the techniques. The techniques give you some very solid basis in getting more independent from recipes. I have a few techniques book, but the one I always go back to is this one. It is very well done, rather complete, and the large amount of pictures really help understanding. I can honestly say that I have never missed anything I have followed in this book. It's also full of classic recipes from around the world, so it is a good cooking book to have in its own right.

One little aside about recipes. They are just an indication (the only exceptions here would be baking recipes, they should be followed closely, most of the time because they are based on chemical reactions). That means that rather than keeping your nose in the cookbook, it's better to have it in the pots. It's only by tasting regularly, and then correcting, that you will end up with delicious dishes. You simply cannot cook properly without tasting. It makes sense, really, you are combining different ingredients of different quality, so they contribute differently to the final dish. Your tastebuds are your friends.

After mastering the techniques, you can start understanding tastes, and how they combine. I found this book to be particularly useful. It describes the 5 tastes (tastes, not flavours, and yes, 5, not 4) and how they interact together, how they can complement or ruin each other. The book also has some pretty good recipes, so its a good investment.

These should get you well on your way to become more independent from recipes, and really start having fun in the kitchen, and then on the dining table! As I mentioned earlier, food culture is essential. Analysing how a dish is put together, from which ingredient, how they combine in terms of taste, texture and colour. Try to do that when you go to restaurants, when reading cookbooks or watching a cooking show. It's a very good mental gymnastic, and gets you in the advanced cooking frame of mind.

I think that's enough information for today. The next step in your food education/discovery would then be to learn the basics of different styles of cuisine. We'll leave that for another day. Let me know if any of it helps. If you're interested in picking up more tips and tricks, I can share some of the tricks I use to speed up my cooking.

And don't forget to have fun!