Jeanne Moreau's Lips Around my Cigarette

Blowin' smoke.  Yeah right.  This sexy french icon may be a bit old these days, but in the 60's she was quite the bomb, and still very mucho fuckin' hot in the 70's.  She was everywhere and in every guy's wet dream, double-teamed in front of Truffaut's lens, and a volcanic eruption inducing chambermaid for my perverted old friend Bunuel.

She appeared in San-Antonio's adaptation of LA VIEILLE QUI MARCHAIT DANS LA MER, directed by Laurent Heynemann in '91.  The movie didn't quite carry the spirit of despair the book did, and that seems to be a curse that San-Antonio (a.k.a. Frédéric Dard) ran into quite often.  Even Jean-Pierre Mocky's take on Y A-T-IL UN FRANCAIS DANS LA SALLE (1982) lacked the atmosphere present in the novel, turning it into something more funny than what was originally intended.

I spent numerous summers reading spy novels, and more serious "dramas" written by the man.  In the small town where I grew up, the public library was litterally stacked with his titles.

Looking for more french thrills, I ran into Philippe Djian, René Beletto, and a bunch of other frenchsters, including the dreamlike Patrick Modiano, a writer I still cherish very much, thank you.

Djian brought his raw life and wrote about it like no other.  I almost can't help believing that all his readers have something in common, a kind of thirst for life, sex, death, and drama, something intense and rare.  That's why I felt weird when I noticed that the nice looking blonde girl that was sitting next to me, in the bus I took to work this morning, was reading 37,2 LE MATIN.  When we switched from bus to metro wagon, she was still within 5 meters of me, pretending to read.