Ça Tourne!

Naturally, French school is, to me, ten different shades of awesome. This opinion was justified this last weekend, when I went on the most amazing of all field trips.

Montpellier Film Festival.

As an American, the idea of cinema as an art form is dodgy at best. Film to me, at least two months ago, meant entertainment and possibly a fun trip to the movies with my friends. There were good movies and bad movies, but their worth was mainly assigned based on their plots. If a plot was well done, it was a good movie. I understood that movies took a long time to make, and that things like camera angles existed, but they didn't mean anything to me, the viewer, watching the film. If a film was well done, I thought, I wouldn't notice the camera angles, because they would look natural to me.

The French would have been horrified.

Their idea of film is much more tasteful and artistic. A film is a work of art: no less. It shouldn't have to stoop to the low expectations of pleasing an audience, and its sole purpose is not entertainment. It's an expression of living art. Through the camera, the artist can make his work live, breathe, and flourish. The film tells a story, yes, but much in the same way that a painting does.

The only downside to this: imagine looking at a really boring classical painting. It takes a few minutes to appreciate it, and unless you're an art fanatic, you're very quickly bored. It's nice at first glance, but you don't really understand the message the artist was trying to convey, so you give up pretty quickly.

Films are two hours of art.

So, as I sat on the bus in a parking lot next to the school with about thirty other kids, all of them French, waiting for it to leave and take me to Montpellier and the Mediterranean Film Festival, I was understandably a little wary of the films I expected that I'd be forced to watch as part of the Baccalaureate curriculum. No later than five minutes into the bus ride, my fears were confirmed when one of the Cinéma class teachers grabbed the microphone from the front of the bus and handed out sheets of paper with all the films and their times and locations on it, detailing very rapidly in French what we were supposed to do.

Naturally, no matter how hard I tried to listen, none of what he was saying made any sense to me, so, trusting that my classmates had enough of a conscience not to let the poor stupid American girl get completely lost in a foreign city, I instead spent the bus trip deciphering the list.

(It wasn't very complicated, in the end, although the letters VOSTF continued to confuse me until day two, when I realized they must stand for "Version Originale, Sous-titres Français"...which is pretty much just "Original Version, French Subtitles", if you were having any difficulty translating that.)

We got off the bus about an hour and a half later, walked a mile or so laden down with suitcases to get to the hotel when the teachers mistakenly had the bus driver drop us all off at the wrong one, and then spent an hour or so (I may be exaggerating.) waiting for the incredibly slow elevators to cooperate and take twenty kids and their suitcases down a couple floors, because, of course, there were no stairs.

It didn't take very long after that to get our bags deposited in our rooms, however, and then we were off to the place where they were holding the festival, and the films began!

The first film was, as I feared, a film that was on our school curriculum, and was incredibly boring, though I'm not sure if that was because it was a documentary, or because I could hardly understand a word being spoken. It was all about French-speaking Africa, and if you think French is hard when actual French people are speaking it, you've never heard it with an African accent.

Later, all of the students had been invited to the opening night movie, which was held in this gigantic hall with about a million seats. Every single one of them was full by the end of the night. As a special treat before the movie, a few of the main actors and actresses (none of whom I could identify, but then, I'm not very well-versed in French films) came out and spoke to the audience for a little while. If the reactions of my classmates were anything to go by, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

And that was the first day.

The second day went much like the first, without the long boring bus ride. There was a required film in the morning, which...okay, I sort of slept through it. My roommates kept me up until three o'clock in the morning, and it was incredibly boring. I know that's no excuse, but really. I just couldn't help it. The theater was dark, the chairs were comfy, the movie had music that was kind of soothing...it was impossible to keep your eyes open. I know I saw one or two adults sleeping too.

After the movie, we were required to attend a three-hour discussion of the movie, which, if not incredibly entertaining, was at least a little bit of listening practice for me. After that, my roommates and I went outside to hunt up some lunch, found a McDonald's, and ordered something there.

The afternoon was free choice, and we were allowed to see the films we wanted. It was nice, really, having the choice. I ended up seeing three films before I and the rest of my class ended up calling it a day and going back to the hotel. Sunday morning was also free choice, and I ended up buying a pack of chips for lunch and walking around with a few of my friends, eating in the park and making general fools of ourselves trying to climb monkey bars made for four-year-olds. (What's a few funny looks when you've got monkey bars to play with?)

All in all, I was kind of sad when we got back on the bus ( and not just because the skies had opened and unleashed a torrent of rain on us just as we stepped outside with our jackets all packed in our suitcases.)...

But now, let me tell you, I'm really glad we had a week and a half of vacation after it. I was so exhausted when I stepped off the bus it's not even funny. I spent the next few days spitting out random chunks of unconjugated verbs as attempted speech, my brain just so sick and tired of having to try so hard to understand movies all weekend. I'm almost completely sure that the night I returned home, my host parents asked me about my day, I said the French equivalent of "Liked I did the festival, I to sleep soon please?"

I must have sounded like a drunk French Yoda. Probably not one of my best moments.

~Josie Harris