By Patrick Pike
By Patrick Pike
Depardieu plays Falstaff
BOF! I watched part of the so-called report on Depardieu and Moix in North Korea. Frankly, there's nothing to whip a cat about, to use a 17th-century expression. Except that these two, attending the birthday party of the Pyonyang dictator, seem to appreciate his jovial authority. As pachyderms go, there's no need to translate their grumbling. For Depardieu, belching in a wheelchair pushed by a local coolie while the other insignificant man laughs while filming him, looks more like a pathetic tyrant who has become a petomaniac than a sexual obsessive, who is more so than all the males who declaim the same tired jokes about the feminine gender with such elegance and banality over a little white wine on the zinc of the local bar, while enjoying an espresso near the coffee machine in the offices, during a break on the construction sites of buildings, while relaxing in the boarding schools of the Carabins or burping in the meals of a sales representative's congress. And if the pachyderm has a little more talent than the previous ones, it's just as vulgar, saucy, libidinous, obscene and of no consequence other than stupidity and the demonstration of a lack of education. As for trying to demonstrate that, ipso facto, this makes him a rapist, the barking pack is taking a hazardous shortcut. Correlation is not causation. Let's leave it to the courts to decide, if they ever do.
As for the anonymous social networkers, journalists, politicians and pudibonds of all stripes who cry foul, blush or howl at the scandal, how many of the aforementioned pack have never uttered a gravelly, salacious joke?
These days, you have to live in a sanitized bubble. To say nothing. To live like Isidore, Madame Husson's rose-bush, chosen by default because none of the women of Gisors were chaste enough: «Bold words, Gallicisms, gravelly allusions made him blush so quickly that Dr Barbesol nicknamed him the thermometer of modesty. Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, Le Rosier de Mme Husson, p. 22.» The rest of the story showed that the prudish man perverted himself for his own misfortune.
To use a later expression, I think that in these days of gloomy future, there are other fish to fry than to be dizzy with the libidinous nonsense of a goguetting Falstaff accompanied by a falot and false-assed Bardolphe.
Depardieu is a great actor, of course, but he has retained the louboutin habits of his youth Castelroussine, without having known how to cut the diamond of manners.. They were the same down the street from my childhood. As were many others whom I later came across, heard or read about. Pierre Perret, for example, who advises "To swirl your tongue seven times in the mouth of the neighboring woman." You think that's better? And yet there are schools and colleges named after him.
Clap de fin.
09/12/2023
Falstaff courting Mrs. Ford . John Masey Wright (1777–1866) - Folger Shakespeare Library
Le Plumier© 2023 Patrick Pike