Aside from French fries and French kissing, I know nothing of French.
This blog post is not about my ignorance of European culture, or inability to learn a foreign language, but what rolled into my head when I was eating bread (which was far too heavily buttered) in bed at 3AM this morning and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.
Shortly after counting the number of stars and brushing the bread crumbs off my pyjama top, I thought ‘What type of movie would my life be?’
This being where the French bit comes in.
My life would be a film with subtitles – it doesn’t matter if it’s French or Belgian, really (mmm, now I’m thinking about chocolate) – but it must be European.
It’d be quiet – no huge musical score, no music at all really, except for an occasional lilting guitar folk tune and maybe a nightclub scene.
I would be the main character. I would be waifishly thin and pale-skinned, with long hair that’s either very dark or very light. I would speak quietly and rarely in either Belgian or French, and I would walk around without a shirt on often, and people would call it a cross between Chocolat and Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities.
There would be prolonged scenes of silence, lengthy monologues, a lot of me staring at the camera and going for long walks around Paris or Amsterdam or Copenhagen… I feel like an apricot scroll. Do you feel like an apricot scroll?
The film would show only in artsy cinemas, and there’d be no message behind it all but all those posers who wear berets and go to those types of cinemas would nod and understand it (I call them posers only because I am one of those people).
The film would be dramatic and sad and you would frequently not understand what was going on but the settings would be wonderful and I would be so effortlessly beautiful that the Times would describe it as a ‘visual delight’ and the Herald Sun reviewer (who once said the message of Twilight was ‘abstinence makes the heart grow fonder’) would call it ‘a feast of the senses… raw human emotion that grabs hold of you and never lets go’ (at least not till the credits, or that last scene where I’m smoking on the balcony and the camera watches my blank face for about ten minutes, because that lost me). It would be directed by someone foreign and crisp, who would later commit suicide.
The question behind all of this is: Why?
I am not waifishly thin or French (or even Belgian for that matter) and I’m not particularly inclined to walk around topless.
I just feel as if, if my life were a movie, I’d need subtitles. I know I am not a box office blockbuster or Academy award-winning (but I might win some awards at a weird French festival).
I don’t know. It was just 3AM, and I was eating bread and lying in bed and thinking about it.
Tell me about what kind of movie your life would be. Any ideas for what my film might be called? Something French, preferably, but Belgian is okay.
