Raging Against The Artifice: Edith Nylon

It was 1977 when Edith Nylon burst onto the Punk scene in France. Still a little wet behind the ears, it was another couple of years before they achieved mainstream success with their eponymous debut single and album.

With its foreboding opening riffs, the single is particularly distinctive, its narrative foretelling the transformation of a young woman (Edith Nylon) into a sort of bionic, hypersexual plaything made of synthetic materials and modern technology. The arrangement is quite astute for such a young band, skillfully alternating between moods of suspense and jubilance.

The lyrical theme speaks of our increasingly commercial and synthetic culture, and comparisons with bands like X-Ray Spex are irresistible. Plastic Bag, The Day The World Turned Day-glo and Germfree Adolescents invited us to ponder similar ideas, but both bands existed in the same pop-cultural bubble; both were inspired by the same clichéd talking points of their generation.

While Edith Nylon went on to achieve further success, their later output became less provocative. Even after learning recently that they reformed (I’ve apparently been asleep for three years) the temptation to talk about them in the past-tense is strong. I’d love to see them live, but the band I fell in love with was very much of another time.

(The performance above is an out-take from La Brune et moi—the cult punk film I previously wrote about here.)

Lino the Linotype

Humble newspaper seller Pascal (Lino Ventura) saves a man who jumps into the Seine only to find himself embroiled in a complex crime of passion.

After being manipulated into taking the fall, his inner lion awakens, and a clock seems to be ticking as he tries to clear his name. Will he get out of this or is a miscarriage of justice on the cards? Are we right to believe him anyway? We are tossed from one unreliable character to another, not knowing who to believe.

As psychological thrillers go, the foundations of 125 rue Montmartre are remarkably well laid, but it is ultimately undermined by the odd circumstance that plumbs the limits of disbelief. There is also this niggling doubt about the casting. Robert Hirsch and Jean Desailly deliver sterling supporting performances, and our protagonist is a good fit for his role on paper… but there is no escaping the fact that he is Lino Ventura.

Still, this is an engaging nearly-noir that is well worthy of its recent remaster.

Sadism, Drugs and Rolling Stock

A film director, a producer and a script girl take a train to Antwerp and improvise a screenplay along the way.

Their unfolding vision of a drug runner making the same journey materialises as a separate film that runs in parallel. In other words, film one (about the production team) gives birth to film two (their drug runner story) and they are intersected into a single 105 minute film.

This is not so much a play within a play as two films within a film, and they occasionally collide and generate intrigue—particularly when characters and scenarios from both films occupy the same sequences; more so when the filmmakers select or sacrifice problematic ideas.

Of additional note is the relatively tame (by today’s standards) sexual sadism that resulted in a ban by the BBC.

A highly experimental film for 1966 to say the least, and one which is lent bags of gravity and credibility by the presence of Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Too Ch'ti for Me

Dany Boon’s celebrated directorial début is a comedy about a hopeless civil servant (played by Kad Merad) forced to exile himself to a notoriously backward part of France in order to keep his job.

The gags are generally self-deprecating—revolving around prejudicial stereotypes associated with Boon’s home region (Nord-Pas-de-Calais) and the people (the Ch’tis) who live there. Gradually, the slapstick gives way to a sympathetic portrait that is clearly designed to rehabilitate this backwater in the French national psyche.

Given the film’s success (the highest grossing ever in France until The Intouchables), I’d say it struck a chord, but the Ch’ti lingo was so problematic for this non-native French speaker that I can’t really give a fair opinion.

Much of the regional dialect is incomprehensible to me and enabling the English subtitles doesn’t help. Many scenes simply cannot be translated literally and some are so far removed from the original French that it’s like watching two different films.

Maybe I’ll rewatch and re-rate if I can improve my Ch’ti comprehension.