IF you’re a regular reader of these letters, you’ll remember me saying not so long ago that the high-brow French do love to claim that they were actually the ones who thought of something first when some low-brow Johnny Foreigner subsequently makes himself a name and a zillion by transforming it into a workable proposition the rest of the world just can’t get enough of.

I mentioned just a few f’rinstances, like denim, liposuction and the bikini, the sardine can, disposable razors and babies’ feeding bottles, modern totalitarian revolution and Maurice Chevalier, who, they were saying on this radio documentary last night, was very possibly the most miserly Frenchman ever to bite a baguette, so that’s one much loved icon that’s lost some of its sheen, I’m afraid, leedle gurlz or no leedle gurlz.

Another shining example of this lack of pragmatism is the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who just didn’t see the light when they invented cinema in Paris in the 1890s. Auguste conceded that, OK, the discovery might survive for a little while as a scientific curiosity but insisted that their ‘cinématographe’ had absolutely no commercial potential whatsoever.

Mind you, when you see some of the rubbish that’s hit the planet’s screens since then, you can’t help feeling sometimes that it’s a pity he wasn’t right. So I was less than pleased when Mme Masstairmann dragged me out of my armchair and off to Dinan’s dinky little multi-screen movie centre the other night.

Because even the cinemas themselves aren’t what they were, are they? We ageing Beans were brought up on Saturday matinées upstairs in the Forum and the Odeon, or at Wests and the New Era, places that had proper giant screens and where you could always while away the boring bits when the hero got his gal by dribbling warm Coke down onto the many-headed in the threepennny seats below. Then, after the film, cut to the chase out through the foyer.

Yes, it was indeed a complete experience and I’ve often bored my two Paris-based daughters, Morgane and Fleur, with just how epic a trip to the local fleapit was in those days. Only they just yawn and say, Oui, oui, Papa, and questioned whether the modern cinema-goer really wanted a horde of rowdy kids trickling sticky drinks down his or her neck.

On top of all that, La Patronne was expecting me to sit through nearly two hours of some staggeringly unpromising tosh about this prince with a stammer, played by Colin Firth whom the French have always felt to be some kind of clone from the Hugh Grant, smug but diffident English dimwit school of acting. I agreed with them, too, but then lots of people, most of them women, funnily enough, tell me I’m obviously a halfwit myself and haven’t seen his stunning Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

Yes, the film Mme M had pencilled us in for was The King’s Speech, only she’d misread the local paper and we got the dubbed Discours d’un Roi instead of the VOST (version originale, sous-titrée) we’d wanted to see. Actually, it was a case of what you lose on the swings for me because as a court interpreter, I’m constantly distracting myself in VOST films by checking out how they handled a tricky expression or sentence in the sub-titles.

And, readily pleading guilty to being ill-placed to cast the first stone, I’m sometimes reassured by just how wrong they can get it sometimes, the most comforting example being ‘At Christmastide’ in the Rex Harrison My Fair Lady, which became When the tide rises at Noël.

Anyway, I must also plead guilty to being entirely wrong about Mme M’s choice and about Colin Firth, too. Both were magnificent, absolutely compelling, and easily passed the Masterman test of a good film, which is that nobody so much as mumbled or coughed, fidgeted or fiddled with a coat or sweet wrapping throughout, never mind dribbling Coke down the head of the Monsieur in front, or surging for the exits as soon as the credits started to roll with the said Monsieur in hot pursuit.

Yes, from start to finish, you could have heard a pin drop, or ‘une mouche voler’, a fly fly, as they say here, and he very nearly got a standing ovation at the end when he pulled off the final speech, did our King Col.

Actually, more and more cinemas here now give you the option between the original, sub-titled version of a film or its dubbed one. Either way, the titles are increasingly being left in English or even translated into, well, simpler English, like Happy-Go-Lucky, which became Be Happy, or The Boat that Rocked, shown here as Good Morning, England. But it mustn’t be anything too difficult for the rustics out in the provinces to understand, one Parisian sophisticate explained.

Lots of film fans find what they insist on calling ‘la langue de Shakespeare’ more modern, more sexy, and therefore better box-office for the distributors. But other ‘cinéphiles’ are seriously annoyed by yet another instance of the rising tide of Anglais, particularly when even films from, say, China or Poland are given English names, as if the tacky whiff of Hollywood was some kind of guarantee of quality. And yet the worst culprits in the French film industry are also often the first to complain sniffily about ‘impérialisme culturel américain’.

A King Canute law in 1994 did order that French be used wherever possible in all public life but works of art were exempted and even where the distributors are willing to make an effort, the translation can be a bit ticklish. Strictly speaking, Polanski’s The Ghost Writer should be called Le Négre, because that is indeed the standard French word for a book’s real, unnamed author.

Anyway, more often than not, it’s the marketing people rather than the makers who decide that Easy Rider or La Dolce Vita are best left alone and that Le Seigneur des Anneaux will put more derrieres on seats than The Lord of the Rings. Mind you, whoever it was that thought that Les Virtuoses was a pretty nippy rendition of Brassed Off got it badly wrong, didn’t they?

THE Blue Balloon isn’t a film as far as I know but the intriguing message-in-a-bottle story of the one my Breton brother-in-law found while out shooting fur and feather on the windswept moors in the Finistère in western Brittany mightn’t be a bad plot for one.

Attached to it was the following letter, written in English. ‘Dear Gran, How do I sum up how I feel? Well, there’s still a huge hole that I don’t think will ever be filled, somehow the world seems dull and colourless. But we’re all carrying on and it becomes a tiny bit less painful every year. I seem to have grown up a lot more since you died – found myself, my place in life. I really couldn’t have done that without you as my inspiration. Thank you so much for everything. I love you so so so much and miss you, but you must know that. All my love. XXX’

I must admit that I did hesitate about mentioning such personal thoughts, so I have withheld the name of the writer – presumably a British woman – and there was no address. But then again, do people ‘publish’ signed messages in bottles or tie them to balloons and float them off into the blue without wondering who will find them and where?
Kenavo!