It's all go

... in downtown Lézignan. Well, it is a Monday. The only usable photo I took today, on my way to French book group. We were talking about Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, one of my favourite novels of all time. It wasn't me that chose it (I would have suggested The House of Sleep) and I did wonder what people not steeped in the atmosphere of Britain in the 1980s would make of it. "It was boring," said one person. "It wasn't funny." "What??" It's true that there is a tragedy at the heart of the novel, but he never fails to make me laugh out loud in other places (this must be my fourth read, and every time I find something further to admire). This same person said that she'd read a novel by another British writer that she'd found very funny. "Who was that? "Ian McEwan". Hmmm ... no accounting for taste! I did make myself useful by explaining that the seemingly exaggerated account of marketisation of the NHS was all true, as indeed was the account of the arms trade. And we then ended up discussing how the same trends are now apparent in France.

Yesterday we went to see our second Wong Kar Wai film in two weeks. This time it was In the Mood for Love. It regularly appears in "100 best films" and "1000 films to see before you die" lists, but in a way I liked Chung King Express better -- it was much weirder. This one is really beautiful and melancholy to watch, but it was let down for us by the last 15 minutes. As we left I said to S, "It's as if he was short of money for the budget, so he quickly had a whip round a few tourist boards." All of the story takes place in Hong Kong in the 1960s (though it was actually shot in Thailand) but at the end it suddenly whizzes off to Singapore and then Cambodia, for no good reason. Even less comprehensible was a quick blast of newsreel featuring General de Gaulle.

The cinematography is brilliant though -- the colours, the tones, the way many scenes are shot through small gaps or with obstructions at the front of the frame giving it a crushed, claustrophobic feel. And Maggie Cheung's dresses! She wears a different one in virtually every scene. See 21 of them here. They too are all incredibly constricting, with very high, tight collars, and so stylish. Worth seeing just for these aspects.