French Gigolos

Last night Brandt and I stayed home and watched the movie French Gigolo (2008) with Nathalie Baye. It was available through Time Warner, on the Free Movies on Demand channel, which is channel 1006 here on the Upper West Side.

For Movies in French, and Other Languages, Too

French Gigolo is about a successful middle-aged businesswoman who turns to male escorts for sex, then unexpectedly develops a relationship with one of them. Despite some flaws, we both liked the movie. By the way, it had English subtitles; it was not dubbed. I can’t stand dubbing.

I found it in the Sundance section. 1006 has quite a few free French movies—free if you are already paying for cable, that is. If you are a subscriber, I recommend checking it out.

Okay, now some French comments and questions.

Recently I came across this as an equivalent for “Sincerely (yours)” at the end of a business letter: Veuillez agréer, Madame/Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués.

Seriously? Do people really put all that? It sounds so formal for 2011.

Midtown Manhattan Tonight

Here is “Please leave a message after the beep”: Veuillez laisser un message après le bip. 

Bip is so cute. It cracks me up.

In one exercise I just did, I had to say whether this sentence was true or false: Le jour de son mariage une femme est radieuse. That translates as, “On her wedding day a woman is radiant.” Barf. I refused to mark it vrai or faux and instead wrote, “Mon dieu.” Plus something I won’t repeat.

And now, a technical grammar/translation question. In another book, I was told these sentences are equivalents, both translating as, “They watch their kids playing.”

• Ils regardent leurs enfants jouer.
• Ils regardent leurs enfants qui jouent.

Are they really equivalent? I would have guessed the second meant, “They watch their children who are playing.”

And actually, I would also have thrown in a comma before the “who” in my English version (thereby changing “who are playing” from what is known as a restrictive relative clause into a non-restrictive relative clause), and then I would have done the same to the French, with a comma before the qui. 

But French remains a mystery to me, in thousands of ways large and small. So perhaps this is just how it is, and I am viewing French through English-colored glasses?