We’ve moved house

My Five Romances has a new home – please visit us at myfiveromances.com

Why the move? Well, blog and website design has come a long way since we started in 2013, using the Twenty Eleven theme. It was time to update, freshen up, and arrange the new site in a way that was easier for readers to navigate and find what things more easily. I hope you will agree that we have succeeded.

It has meant leaving the wordpress.com community, and we shall miss the cameraderie. There were a lot of interesting and entertaining blogs on our feed, but we plan to keep an eye on who is doing what, via this site.

The new My Five Romances website has carried over the most useful and still relevant material from here, but it’s been given a tighter edit (out went much of the waffle!) and it has taught us valuable lessons in search engine optimisation and so on.

My other website, Time To Wander, which focuses on travel, uses the same magazine-style template for WordPress as the new-look My Five Romances. On social media look out for the hashtags #TTW and #M5R

Thanks for your support, please stay in touch. Long live the five beautiful Romance languages!

 

 

Indochine’s summer fantasies

Few bands give me more pleasure than French outfit Indochine, and I have been catching up on some of the tracks from their latest album 13 (yes, it’s their thirteenth studio album). It went to No.1 in France and spawned two No.1 singles. Here’s one of them, Un été français (A French summer).

So, it looks like it was filmed in frosty conditions, when one might be dreaming of a nice warm summer. Which is appropriate when you consider the first four lines of the chorus: Quand je suis cerné  (When I’m surrounded) Je rêve d’un été français (I dream of a french summer) Un été parfait (A perfect summer) Où rien ne pourra m’arriver (Where nothing can happen to me)

Indochine’s live concerts have a great vibe and I often prefer the live versions of a song to the studio equivalent, because the choruses are rousing and great for stirring up a crowd. Here’s a two-minute extract of the song from a concert in Lille.

WHAT IS CERNÉ?

Cerné is the past participle of the verb cerner, to surround, encircle, so if you were to say, Give yourselves up, you’re surrounded it would be Rendez-vous, vous êtes cernés (the s is added to make it plural).

There is a nice expression in French, avoir les yeux cernés – literally, “to have encircled or surrounded eyes” although this would be translated as to have rings under or around one’s eyes.

Cerner also has another meaning, to figure out, work out, determine. The example given in my Oxford Hachette dictionary is J’ai du mal à le cerner – I can’t make him out.

Cerner can also mean to shell nuts.

SING ALONG

The full lyrics to the song are below, and here is the English translation on the Lyrics Translate website.

Encore
Un jour dans ma vie
Où je n’ai pas envie
De rester en place
Encore un lundi sans vie
Où je ne subis que le temps qui passe
Mardi c’est l’estomac noué
À rester enfermé
Et à marcher au pas
Mercredi je rêve d’une autre vie
Si tout pouvait s’arrêter là Histoire d’avoir le choix

CHORUS
Quand je suis cerné
Je rêve d’un été français
Un été parfait
Où rien ne pourra m’arriver
Pardonne-moi si ici
Tout devient froid national
Un pays infernal
À nous la petite mort

Je suis à la mauvaise place
Le jeudi et toutes les promesses que
Tu m’avais faites
Comme un vendredi noir
Où j’ai tout oublié
Et le rôle de ma vie
Et je me sens un peu solitaire
Un peu trop vieux
Pour mourir en hiver
Je voudrais bien une place au soleil
Mais ici tout le monde a encore
Besoin de moi

Des nuits sur un toit
À regarder les orages
Et en courant les dangers
Des éclairs sur ton visage
Et des étoiles près de toi
Et nos rêves imparfaits
Le temps d’un été français
Où on aurait tout oublié

Des nuits sur un toit
A regarder les orages
Et le ciel nous attend
Et les poissons volants
Et des étoiles près de toi
(quand je suis cerné…)
Et nos rêves imparfaits
(Je rêve d’un été français)
Le temps d’un été français (d’un été parfait….)
Et nos rêves imparfaits

Note: I’m a bit behind the times, the album 13 was actually released in September 2017, some four years after its predecessor. I was travelling at the time, and then moved house in October/November so in this period I had yeux cernés and wasn’t really paying much attention.

Cine Latino Festival features Alfonso Cuaron’s remarkable Mexican double

You may remember the Mexican film Y Tu Mamá También (2001), which among other things launched the acting career of Gael Garcia Bernal. It’s one of my favourite movies. Its director, Alfonso Cuarón, has since gone on to win many accolades, most notably in 2014 with the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe award as best director for Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. He has also directed one of the Harry Potter movies, and won awards for his camera work and screenplays. He’s a very talented man.

Team huddle: Diego Luna (left), Maribel Verdu and Gael Garcia Bernal in Y Tu Mama Tambien.

There has been great excitement around his latest film, Roma, in which he returned to his Mexican roots. It won the Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival, and has been chosen as Mexico’s entry in for the Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Oscars. It has also been chosen to open the 2018 Cine Latino festival, which starts next week in major Australian cities and features a very impressive line-up, including a restored version of Y Tu Mamá También, which will close the festival.

I was fortunate to be treated to a preview of Roma at Palace Cinemas in Sydney. It is superb in many ways, particularly the cinematography – Cuarón’s own, all in black and white. I mean, look at how stunning the images are in the trailer…

 

Still, it’s a very different kettle of fish to Y Tu Mamá También. It’s slower, sombre, very measured and requires patient viewing, at 135 minutes. To be honest, it felt longer! But it was more my bladder than my brain that wanted it to get a move on.

Naked warrior!

Be warned: there is a lot of dog turd (symbolic of ???? – you decide) in it, and unusually for modern cinema there is a startling spell of full-frontal male nudity in which Mexican actor Jorge Antonio Guerrero shows off his martial arts prowess to his girlfriend (the female lead, played by Yalitza Aparicio) with a makeshift weapon – a shower curtain rod.

It’s a film that every aspiring film maker should see, once for pleasure and for the story, at least once again to study the cinematography, clever imagery and symbolism. Here are comprehensive reviews (i.e., by much better film critics than me): from Variety, from The Guardian and from The Hollywood Reporter.

The 2018 Cine Latino Festival dates are:

• Melbourne: November 13-28
• Canberra: November 14-28
• Sydney: November 15-28
• Brisbane: November 21 to December 2
• Perth: December 6-16

Music for coffins? The heavenly sounds of Mexico’s Caifanes

Recently a couple of songs by Mexican band Caifanes have popped up on my Shazam app. They are famous in their own country and wider Latin America, but as with many trailblazing bands, were initially pooh-poohed by the conservative music establishment when they first approached record companies in the late 1980s. Here’s an amusing extract from their biography on Wikipedia:

With demo in hand Caifanes approached CBS Mexico. The musical director at the time shunned them for dark new wave attire and said, “You look like fags.” At the time, Caifanes’ sound and look was influenced by British post-punk groups such as The Cure and The Jesus and Mary Chain. They dressed in black suits and sported frizzly hair and makeup. Upon hearing the demo of “Será Por Eso” (English: “That’s Why”), the CBS executive said, “At CBS, our business is to sell records, not coffins.”

I wonder what that executive thinks now when sees something like this…

Here’s a live version of one of the songs I Shazammed, Viento (Wind) . The lyrics are here.

Cumbia is a type of music that originated in Colombia. It’s catchy, infectious, happy and makes you want to dance in a wiggle-your-hips-kind-of way (particularly when you are imbibing at parties and festivals). Their cover of La Negra Tomasa was a huge hit.

Their first ever single, Mátenme Porque Me Muero (Kill Me Because I’m Dying), is typically 1980s but has stood the test of time. I like the keyboard intro and the flourish at the finish.

Here’s another one that Caifanes fans recommend, Debajo de tu piel (Under your skin).

Finally, I heard this one in a car one day after a long Sunday drive to a beach followed by a couple of beers at sundown. It was a pleasantly mellow way to see out the weekend.

Thrills and spills: are you ‘torpe’?

I have a friend who is clumsy in an endearing way. He’s Colombian and talks a lot with his hands, so anything that is in gesticulating range – the salt cellar or wine glasses at the dinner table, for example – is in immediate danger of being karate-chopped and sent flying. When accidents happened I’d good-naturedly exclaim “clumsy!” and then, one day, realising that I didn’t know the Spanish word for it, asked him what it was. The answer: torpe.

Exclaiming “torpe!” has become a running joke between us – after all, his clumsiness or torpeza is ongoing – and I have Christened him Mr Torpe, Señor Torpe.

It is a word I will never forget, and quite pleasant-sounding too – two syllables, rather like the English words “tore’ and “pay’ joined together.

HOW TO MAKE NEW WORDS STICK IN YOUR MEMORY

A good way of learning and remembering new adjectives, then, is to give your friends appropriate nicknames in your target language, and then tease them mercilessly until the word sticks. Some other examples in Spanish.

• Mr Grumpy – Señor Gruñón
• Mr Fastidious – Señor Fastidioso
• Mrs Cheerful – Señora Alegre
• Mrs Forgetful – Señora Olvidadiza

And the one that’s most applicable to me? Príncipe Encantador (Prince Charming) haha.

MEET THE FIVE ROMANTIC MR TORPES

So, I know Colombia’s clumsy Señor Torpe (centre) but I have only just come across his  other Romance language equivalents. Allow me to present the following, from left:

• Senhor Desajeitado of Portugal/Brazil
• Domnule Neîndemânatic of Romania/Moldova
• Signor Maldestro of Italy
• Monsieur Maladroit of France

That’s all for now.

Yours,
Príncipe Encantador

Images taken from Pixabay.

It’s my big Italian film festival!

 

This is the time of the year when Australia really goes Italian; and by that I don’t mean we suck up more strands of spaghetti into our mouths and pile up the pizza, washed down with Sambuca, Aperol or Peroni beers. No, no, no, this is when the best Italian films of the previous year or so hit the big screens in the big cities, and we say benvenuto to the Italian Film Festival.

Like the other foreign language film festivals in Australia, which I cover regularly on this blog, the Italian festival has been growing in in popularity each year since its inception in 2000. Back then, it offered 16 features; this year, by my count, there are 38.

The festival has been running in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra for more than a week, and only just started in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, but carries over into the first half of October, when it starts in Hobart (details at bottom).

So far I have seen only one film,  BOYS CRY (La Terra Dell’Abbastanza), a gripping drama in which two young men played by Andrea Carpenzano (above, left) and Matteo Olivetti (right) are drawn into Rome’s criminal underworld and gang warfare. The more they get drawn in, the harder it is to get out.

I’m planning on going on a big binge of Italian cinema in coming days, and while there are other dramas I’d like to see, usually I go for the comedies. Here are some that look promising.

MY BIG GAY ITALIAN WEDDING (Puoi baciare lo sposo) – based on a hit play, this is described as a “chaotic, heart-warming trip to the altar” as a young man travels to his conservative hometown (where his conservative father is the mayor) to marry his big bear of a fiancé. Expect some disgruntled growling from the mayoral offices!

 

PUT NONNA IN THE FREEZER (Metti La Nonna In Freezer).  When her grandmother dies, a young woman has to put her in the freezer, so to speak, to receive her nonna’s pension and make ends meet. Then a cop enters her life and “amidst ingenious deceptions, disguises and misunderstandings, the young woman’s scam will begin to melt like a frozen grandmother in the sun”.

 

LOVE & BULLETS (Ammore e Malavita) won the Best Film at the Italian Academy Awards and many other international awards. It’s described as a “hugely entertaining mafia musical” involving a family of schemers whose latest plan is jeopardised by true love.

WHERE AND WHEN

• Sydney: 11 Sept  – 7 Oct, Palace Norton Street, Palace Verona, Chauvel Cinemas, Palace Central
• Canberra: 12 Sept – 7 Oct, Palace Electric Cinemas
• Melbourne: 13 Sept – 7 Oct, Palace Cinema Como, Palace Westgarth, Palace Balwyn, Palace Brighton Bay, Kino Cinemas, The Astor Theatre
• Brisbane: 19 Sept – 14 Oct, Palace Barracks, Palace Centro
• Adelaide: 19 Sept – 14 Oct, Palace Nova Eastend, Palace Nova Prospect
• Perth: 20 Sept – 10 Oct, Cinema Paradiso, Luna on SX
• Hobart: 18 Oct – 24 Oct, The State Cinema

Let’s do the SLAFF!

Last night was the start of a special event, the Sydney Latin American Film Festival. What makes it special Let me quote from the “About” section of the SLAFF website:

“We are a not for profit organisation and funds raised from tickets sales are injected into social justice, environmental and community development organisations in Latin America and Australia. Over the past 12 years, our Community Support Program has raised more than $120,000. We could not have done this without our numerous volunteers, supporters, collaborators and sponsors, whose passion for promoting Latin American cinema and culture has enriched many lives.”

The video clip below gives details of which projects in Bolivia and Chile will receive grants this year.

Learning another language, travelling to places where the language is spoken and experiencing the culture first-hand, or simply watching films and listening to music in that language, have certainly enriched my life, and this is why I am a great fan of foreign film festivals. A big thanks to all the people and organisations that make them happen.

Obviously, if you are not in Sydney, you might think this festival is of no use to you, but the program is a “best of” recent South American films that might inspire you if you are looking for something to watch in Spanish, particularly, or Portuguese.

There will be films from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, and Brazil. Great armchair travel! The trailers are up on the website.

Here are some that I am particularly looking forward to seeing. This Colombian one, which was in the running to be the country’s official entry as best foreign film for the next Oscars, looks intriguing. Does he know that she knows that he murdered her father?

I like the look of this one, not only for the Peruvian Andes scenery, but also for the insight into the retablo art form.

I have to have a bit of Brazilian Portuguese in the mix, and “trial by social media” is a very modern theme, so …

LOOK OUT, THERE IS MORE TO COME 

If you happen to be in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane or Melbourne between mid and late November, you will be able to catch some of the Cine Latino Film Festival at Palace Cinemas. I will post the program as soon as it is announced.

French film festival sets new record

The attendance figures from the Alliance Française French Film Festival in Australia have just been released, and once again a new record has been set. All up there were 184,713 attendances – a 5.8 per cent increase on the previous year – at the 50 films screened across 23 cinemas.

The festival was especially popular in Sydney, where attendances rose by 9 per cent to 57,427, helped in part by the opening of the Palace Central Park cinema complex near Central station. The figures for the other cities are not yet available.

The most popular film was the one that got the festival off to a rollicking start,  C’est La Vie.

It will be interesting to see if the Spanish Film Festival, which has only just ended, achieved similar growth. I suspect it will.

MORE REEL DEALS

As one festival ends, so another begins: the German Film Festival is on from May 22 to June 10 in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, to be followed shortly afterwards by the Scandinavian Film Festival (July).

Romances languages will be back in focus with the Italian Film Festival (September) and Cine Latino Film Festival (November).

Images from Pixabay.

What went wrong for Portugal at Eurovision?

Well, well, well. Eurovision can be cruel. One year you win it, the next you come last in the final. On your home territory! This was Portugal’s experience at the Eurovision 2018 final in Lisbon on the weekend.

So, unlike Salvador Sobral‘s Amar Pelas Dois (Love For Two) which won in Kiev in 2017 despite being so old-fashioned and so untypical of Eurovision, the equally untypical  O Jardim (The Garden), sung by Cláudia Pascoal, turned out to be the wrong song in the wrong time. It got just 39 points. That said, I much prefer it to Israel’s winning entry, Netta’s Toy, a song that I never, ever want to hear again!

Here is Cláudia in action.

The backing singer in the video is the woman who wrote the song, Isaura Santos, and I would have liked her to have played a more prominent part in it. She’s an interesting performer. Check this out:

Was there better options for Portugal?

Did the Portuguese “music authorities” err in their selection process for Eurovision 2018? The Eurovision entry is chosen at the annual Festival da Canção (Festival of Song). Here O Jardim scored 22 points, but so did another song, Para Sorrir Eu Não Precisco De Nada (I don’t need anything to make me smile) by Catarina Miranda. The latter was the jury’s top pick, but O Jardim won the televoting, and that clinched it for Cláudia.

Would Catarina have done any better? One thing’s for sure, the Portuguese don’t seem to go in for lively dance tunes! This is the song that came third at the Festival da Canção.

Despite the result, I am sure the Portuguese enjoyed the attention and the honour of hosting the event. Have you been to Lisbon? It’s a great city, as I explain on my travel website in a piece to coincide with Eurovision – Lisbon’s in the limelight.

Maribel Verdú driven to drink in hilarious Spanish movie

Hola amigos! The Spanish film festival is winding up in Australia (although Perth has three more days to go). I caught seven films in all on top of a busy working schedule, so me siento orgulloso de mi mismo – I am feeling pretty pleased with myself.

The film chosen as the opening night special The Tribe – La Tribu, (click here for info and trailer) proved every bit as fun as anticipated. It’s a great feel-good movie.

Here’s another that I highly recommend. It’s actually the Spanish remake of a film made in Chile in 2016 and was such a hit that a Mexican remake soon followed, and now Spain is getting in on the act, with the marvellous Maribel Verdú (pictured above, at right) playing the lead. (Read about all three versions here).

No Filter – Sin Rodeos

I haven’t found a subtitled trailer for this yet, but you’ll get the gist of it anyway. On IMDB (the Internet Movie Data Base) the film is listed as “Empowered”.

In the film Maribel Verdú has a whale of a time going from a as-meek-as-a-mouse downtrodden woman named Paz to a lioness who roars and lashes out with her claws: revenge proves to be very sweet and satisfying.

Much of Paz’s new-found courage is down to a mysterious potion that she is given by a shonky guru whose mysticism – and some prominent advertising – somehow lures her into his den. He warns her to take only a sip, but she downs it in one go. Will she need her stomach pumped? And will she lose all her strength after it has passed through her digestive system? Or is it really the potion that has such a radical effect? Maybe the mental strength has been in her head all along, just waiting for something to unleash it.

Either way, the leash comes off the results are hilarious. The film had the audience in stitches of laughter, and it’s much funnier than the trailer above suggests.

Some of the best scenes involve her and her insufferable pompous, pretentious painter/artist of a husband (a superb performance by Argentinian actor Rafael Spregelburd) who seems to be suffering a chronic case of the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block.
But Paz, too, proves a dab hand with the paint, and the scene where he finally gets his comeuppance is a treasure. Anyone who has ever been bemused or befuddled by modern art will be tickled pink with the outcome.

If you happen to be a cat lover (or are exasperated by cat lovers) you should also see this film – I’m not going to say any more.