Ça continue ...

A French conversation again tomorrow; Marie Danielle will introduce the group to a passage from Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince. At a previous conversation, she got us reading extracts from Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon, a book I didn't know, but I bought it from the Librairie du Soleil in town last week and am reading the whole of it now. Wikipedia tells me ...

Aimed at young French and Quebec people, the book had been included in school curricula, translated, and has been extensively analyzed and adapted.

What I'll remember from this novel will be the descriptions of people's struggle for the basic necessities, food and warmth, through the harsh winters of the old days, in the northern forests. The story is set in the Lac Saint-Jean area near Saguenay where we flew in the spring of 2013. Spring comes late to those parts of Canada.

Blockflöte

Another cultural pursuit at home this month is learning the keyboard accompaniment for JS Bach's aria Schafe können sicher weiden in preparation for Chris' Tuesday singing lessons. Although I remember the voice part from school lessons (with my dad as the music teacher) more than half a century ago I had no idea then of the subtlety of the accompaniment with its opening in thirds, originally meant for a pair of Blockflöten, and the trudging bass line. There's something tremendously satisfying about playing it now, so long as I get the notes right. Chris feels the same about conquering the challenges of the melody line. We're still practising our romantic Schubert, Schumann, Vaughan Williams repertoire, but aiming to branch out into Bach and Handel as well, lately.

Everyone in the Movie Club I belong to was asked to watch The Lost Daughter on Netflix this month, set on an island in Greece. The film stars Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley (as the main character's younger self) and then share our reviews of it. This was mine:

I wasn't quite sure which person the lost daughter is supposed to be. The doll in this story is particularly disturbing; there are too many films where dolls turn out to be horrific, harmful objects. Do you remember the science fiction satire Barbarella (1968) that included man-eating dolls?

I keep thinking about The Lost Daughter. This very well acted film forces us to consider our relationship with our own children. The younger Leda seems to have been in her mid-twenties when she had her children. So was I — uncomfortable memories surface of the times when my parenting skills were none too good.

The film is all about girl children and their mothers, but surely boys can be just as sensitive to tensions in the adult world and in just as much need of reassurance; in my opinion, sons deserve sympathy too, and so do fathers, even if societal norms allow men more licence to do what they want, when they want. Another omission was the role of Leda's mother, the grandmother. When the little girls have been abandoned by their mother, their grandmother (just mentioned in passing at one moment, never shown as a person in the drama) must have become a very important person in their lives, and how did she feel about Leda's bid for freedom? Another thought: did Leda's frustrations stem from her own upbringing? Was she influenced by her own mother's desire to be more than just a mother? That would figure — the grandmother would have been of that unfulfilled, postwar generation of women who had limited options.

It seems to me that this film is all about frustration. The little girl on the beach, howling in distress at not being able to find her doll, is just one example of this. The main characters all suffer from frustrations of one sort or another and keep losing their patience. For the younger Leda, never to have a moment to herself when her young children are in the house, is a privation similar to being in prison. For a bookish and sensual person this lack of privacy becomes unbearable, hence her decision to escape. The academic conference with its opportunities for "liaisons dangereuses" has given her a taste of freedom. She's craving adult company, sick of the childish dialogues with her demanding daughters and obviously tired of her husband's company. She is fond of her family but they whine when she doesn't give them her full attention. She tries, but doesn't know how to control her pent-up emotions, and when she slams a door the glass breaks.

I particularly sympathized with the older Leda at those moments when she had her precious holiday ruined by rowdy people behaving badly and was helpless to do anything about it. Her temper tantrum in the cinema (brought on by frustration again) conveyed that so well!

The Nina character (played by Dakota Johnson), the other young mother in the film, is physically attractive but turns out to be an unpleasant, untrustworthy character. Why is Leda attracted to her? How badly is she injured at the end; is she killed? The orange peeling scene was food for thought: is it an imaginary orange (so unlike the symbolic, rotting one, that she picked up earlier in the film)? Does Leda feel that the stabbing has been a punishment for her failures as a mother and that now she has paid the price, she can move on with her life, if there is any life to follow (is there?), with more serenity?

In summary, I didn't like the film at all, but it's a good one.

And I've just remembered that we heard a podcast that was a lively discussion of Homer's The Iliad. I took notes on that, to help me follow the speakers' train of thought. Chris is now reading The Iliad and finding it depressing, page after page about people doing stupid things, he says.