|
BACK
Paris My Heart (2017) • On Saint Ronan Street (1976)
Two Novels, Same Story, 40 Years and Two Cities Far Apart.
ABOUT:
00
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
8. Needless to say, it was not as I had anticipated
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a musical, with a desperately tragic core wrapped in candy wrapper colors and song. It is the ultimate down-beat up-beat or up-beat down-beat.
I found excerpts of the film on YouTube and in other venues, and came to a startling realization. The ending is a let-down. The two young lovers (Geneviève, played by Catherine Deneuve; and Guy, played by Nino Castelnuovo) are enjoying the love of a lifetime, which should lead to marriage. They are separated by circumstances, and ended up living their lives out with others. They lose touch, and when they accidentally meet years later, they are nearly complete strangers to each other. The epitome of this separation lies in the fact that Geneviève had been pregnant by Guy, and borne his daughter. Now he doesn't even want to have anything to do with his daughter (a powerful, wrenching rejection of the past and of lost loves).
The movie is a total downer, you'd think. It's one long shrug. Critics loved it, of course (it is artistic or artsy, even poetic). That was always my doom in the commercial fast-food factory of New York City publishing (the Big Five foreign-owned publishers who remain after consolidations; European; and I predict they will eventually be owned by Chinese and Indians, maybe Alibaba and Jack Ma if not by Jeff Bezos on this side).
Thinking about this French movie from the 1960s, it struck me: this sounds a lot like Jon+Merile. And that is how I became motivated to take the exact story of my '27' novel and rewrite it as a Paris love story in 2018. I even used a pseudonym (L.A. Cherbourg) at first, until I got bored and put my real name on it. I was trying to not confuse readers, or to be coy, or whatever. But now I want the earnest literary and /or romantic pursuer to know the background truth.
TOP | BACK
|
