Happy Bloomsday from France!
The James and Sylvia story
Demonstrators take over a Cinema
Kidnapped off a street by demonstrators calling for juries to end and democracy begin at a famous film festival, producer Larry Linsteeg joins the marchers who dragged him into a cinema demanding one view one vote.
Watching this on TV from a Renne flat, a former KGB agent with a film idea to hock at Renne, panics over the occupation chaos thinking he’ll get the blame.
The Nude Truth
2025 Cannes Film Festival management banned nudity on the red carpet and in the festival environs.
2023, Semolina Pynes, a character in Out of Competition attending another festival on the Riviera, took on the vexed subject:
Review: “Out of Competition” by Lew Collins
by Austin Williams, Director of The Future Cities Project
It is fifty years since Spielberg’s movie, Jaws, first reached the big screen. It was described by film critic, Mark Kermode as a “genre-defining blockbuster that changed the face of modern cinema.” Indeed, a new theatre production, The Shark Is Broken, reflecting on the making of that movie is playing in UK theatres today. Lew Collins’ new book “Out of Competition” makes a few nods to the film – one of the characters is proposing yet another remake of the Jaws franchise – and to film-making per se, in a novel of intrigue, murder, and protest set in the murky world of international-finance in the film industry. Within the first chapter, a motor-boat driver is killed by a real shark falling from a promotional helicopter stunt. And so it begins.
The story is told in chronological order, day by day, over the course of a Film Festival in the south of France. A central protagonist Larry Linsteeg, a failing Hollywood film producer, kicks things off and within the first few pages we see him manhandled in a street in the south of France and bundled into a rowdy, radical, pro-democracy meeting. He’d been on his way to close a film-deal, and this opening chapter is fast-paced, and scripted in a manner of a Tarantino-esque film-edit. And equally confusing.
This book has been acclaimed as the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award-winner (a prize celebrated by the Journal of Experimental Fiction). The author, Lew Collins relocated to France several years ago and his love of the country and especially its language comes across in the text that mixes French language freely into the dialogue. Maybe it’s a little too much for this GCSE-level reader. I found myself reaching for the Google Translate app across several paragraphs (but perhaps that says more about me than the average reader).
Adding to the need for concentration while reading this book, a number of characters appear with few flags or signature and we are confronted by a growing cast in rapid succession: a dodgy Russian oligarch, a film correspondent, a freelance photographer, a chief inspector, an ex-KGB agent with a heart condition, an outgoing festival director, critics, journalists, billionaires and showgirls. Along the way, there is a disappearance and a murder; there are Chinese kickboxers, Japanese artists and leftist demonstrators. It’s a lot for the reader to take in, and it is clearly a strain in the author’s character-naming inventiveness; culminating in Semolina Pynes, the out-of-her-depth, lead actress; or Zena Zatters, the festival gofer. Where characterisations are made, they are a little laboured, for example, sign-posting the “LA-based American audiovisual expert and putative film producer” or describing the oligarch’s boat as “a three hundred and twenty foot welded steel and aluminium moulded fibre-glass… ocean-going, part-solar-powered ship cruiser.”
That said, the story settles, and intrigue ensues. With so many characters, they rise and fall, appear and disappear all too easily and it is hard to relate to the characters in sufficient depth. But the pace is cinematic. Indeed, the filmic ambitions of the novel seem to have drawn characters from movie references: I pictured Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, or Alain Delon in La Piscine, and one can imagine a script for the big screen that emphasises the “homage“, as they say in France, towards updated Bogart detective noir. Maybe even a hint of Get Shorty… about a loan shark after all.
“Out of Competition” by Lew Collins, Jef Books, 2024. pp407.
Worth remembering that most things
Out of Competition and Democracy
Grifters, sharks, wannabes, liars, creativors cruise the seaside Promenade as an enfranchising of an entire festival grows out of protest, taking voting from annual juries and giving it to the fans, without whom the festival would not be.
When I was writing this the second invasion of Ukraine hadn’t happened. When I was in the the final draft oligarchs lived only in Russia. Now they’re hard at gaming America. When I was in the final draft, political sycophancy was in its infancy now it’s fully grown.
When I was in the final draft there was still an operational Democratic Party, now a couple State governors are performing CPR on its seemingly lifeless body. When I began writing this most of America believed in habeas corpus, personal and civil rights, accountability and independence of the judiciary.
When I was writing this novel it wasn’t clear how much damage the right wing of the Supreme Court could inflict on America.
Is American democracy at death’s door …..
The No Kings Protest, and then what happens..
Plage de la Garoupe
In Antibes after the heavy rains and walked out to the beach where Picasso, Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds swam.
With debris on the sands, and the clear air and snow on the alps over the water, it was cold and wonderful. No one else went out. Nothing like winter waters and history all to yourself.
Oh dear, oh dear
This old block of apartments was once one of the few examples of an older more interesting building along Cannes’s waterfront. There seems little virtue in destroying interesting architecture, especially with original wrought-iron balcony railings, high ceilings, old shutters. But now it’s gone – while Antibes has kept its past.
Except for the Carlton, what historic buildings are left on Cannes’s waterfront? Why not remodel a site like this?
Well they have.
The developer’s sign says the new offering will provide a private treated heated pool for two penthouse apartments – just a hop, step and tiny jump away from the Mediterranean.
Credit where, all hail to..
It is, I assure you, an infuriating mess, a refuge, a joy to behold, an acrimonious cesspool of computerisable angst, an endless checklist of outso(u)rcerized disputes – a hole in the wall for all the world’s minds to filter down onto damaged DVDs. They will in time. And this you will find will be their final resting place.
The staff are miraculous, critically underpaid, limitlessly incompetent, irritatingly profound, delightfully empty, lazified beyond imagining, utterly perfect in their rhombus like cartoon feature creatures silicon graphic simulatoring carnival spirit. They sit there one at a time in that hell’s kitchen like Camusian sentences in utter knowing decrepitude.
If I could ever find the title I crave, the one I have up here, I will throw a week long party for all of you (send me yr contact). As a photocopier – though – to be honest – let’s be fair – my local is the soul of efficiency. As a printer of documents it is besmirchless –
….any fault the computer hard-drives at you is not down to the poor beleaguered impoverished centre.
It is a meeting, as it were or was – point by point – planned, for the perfect silence of minds, brought to life ONLY by murmuring mobile phonies and at least one hundred SE-a-MLESS dialects.
Not a letter I know is transferrable in order to patronise misapplication by default (if you know how to approach it). So…All hail to my local
….– library.
Swimanög 