I don’t know if you have a favorite lawsuit, but I do: the one brought by the director who’d been pitching a movie about a killer shark in the Seine for a decade vs. Netflix, which just made a movie about a killer shark in the Seine. “Sous la Seine” has not been a hit with French critics, with responses ranging from “catastrophique” to “a real turnip stuffed with shark.” (A French turnip is an English turkey when we’re talking big-screen bombs.) Obviously, I had to see it. Could not have enjoyed it more. My review is that the film suffers from a not-insignificant conceptual problem, in that the killer shark wouldn’t have killed anyone if they hadn’t kept voluntarily flinging themselves in the Seine. Anne Marivin steals the show as the mayor of Paris, who’s not about to let a few severed limbs get in the way of her showpiece triathlon. Meanwhile, the real mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has promised a pre-Olympic plouf on June 23, and, not very elegantly, someone has created a hashtag encouraging people to “shit in the Seine.” Speaking of sport, I wrote a short piece about sweatin’ at the Louvre. Isn’t it messed up how PSG did les frères Mbappé?
What if the real sharks in the Seine are Jordan Bardella and his extreme-right sharklets, who threaten to cruise in to the Assemblée Nationale now that Emmanuel Macron has called a snap election? (“Moi ou le chaos,” Macron is arguing, echoing De Gaulle, but it’s hard to disagree that le chaos, c’est lui, for the moment.) The first round will be held June 30th and the second July 7th. If you can vote but you won’t be in town, it is as easy to vote by procuration as it is imperative. I’ll probably be writing more about this, so gonna stop here. In India, thirty-three poll workers died in extreme heat on the last day of voting. The World Health Organization says that in Gaza more than eight thousand children are suffering from acute malnutrition. Joe Biden, not wanting to give the impression that he was taking “a down day,” flew to Europe twice in one week.
The best thing I’ve read on the abject state of French politics is this Ariane Chemin and Olivier Fay piece, on the coterie of pretentious P.R. bros (and they are all bros), who persuaded Macron that dissolution was the thing to do. How about a pig farmer putsch? The Bréton diaspora in Saint-Denis? On the ole Substacks, I learned from
that a Scottish lord made his personal bagpiper keep pumping out tunes in the middle of the D-Day invasion. (Apparently, he survived because the Germans “thought that killing a mad person was bad luck.”) I also enjoyed ’s take on village power moves, perhaps to be read as a companion piece to Mediapart’s series on how LVMH ate Paris. I answered ’s fashion Proust questionnaire. I should have told her that my most prized possession is this 100% blackout sleep mask. Sorry to be all Wirecutter, but it’s bright over here, in these pre-solstice-y days, temps des cerises-y days. More recs of all sorts below for subscribers (thank you so much to those of you who are)…
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