I’m back from Cannes in a thoughtful mood, having learned a lesson about negotiating personal space. Just before the very last film of the festival, I exchanged affable nods with a producer who sat next to me. The lights dimmed. The film started. And then, at a reasonably tense stage in the movie, he took my hand in the darkness. In the next microsecond, with his cool, dry palm in mine, I mentally reviewed a disquieting range of explanations. Were we having some sort of Trump-May moment? No. The truth revealed itself in the next billionth of a moment. His wife was seated on his other side. He had absentmindedly thought I was her, in the pitch black. But there was frankly no time to lose in disabusing him. “Euh … ” I whispered, and I think I actually did that monosyllable in a French accent, “ … c’est moi.” He smartly withdrew his hand. I think I handled that reasonably well. Immediately snatching my own hand away would have been tactless, undiplomatic and might have implied some sort of absurd suspicion on my part. But leave it too long, and I would have allowed him to suspect, after the event, that I was furtively enjoying the mixup while it lasted. It was all far more interesting and dramatic than anything happening on screen.
What Brexit really means
Hearing someone use the first-person plural in such a way as to exclude you never feels good. So I was lower-lip-tremblingly hurt when I heard of Angela Merkel’s speech last week, given in a Bavarian beer tent, declaring that the US and Britain, with their Brexit-plus-plus-plus attitude, were no longer to be relied upon. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands,” she declared. We Europeans! All my adult life I’ve been thinking of myself as a European. I thought that Britain’s history from the 1975 referendum onwards was a gradual, enlightened progress. But no. Was 1975 to 2017 just a blip? Angela Merkel’s “we Europeans” speech will come to have the same importance as General de Gaulle’s press conference, in which he was asked to name three authors who in his view represented the greatness of Europe. Without hesitation he replied: “Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand.” The journalist who had asked the question said: “Shakespeare … ?” De Gaulle fixed him with a gaze and replied: “Européen … ?”
1974: the era of no safe word
The discussion around BDSM, having been given a public prominence by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, has been complicated further. The widow of Lord Lucan – the fugitive murder-suspect peer who was officially declared dead last year – has revealed that her husband liked to beat her on the buttocks with a cane. Yet there was no safe word. Lady Lucan was moreover not aware of any empowering role-play possibilities. Lucan told his wife at the time that he was doing it to “beat the mad ideas out of your head”, and she said: “They were measured blows. He must have got pleasure out of it because he had intercourse with me afterwards.” Given the grisly crime that Lucan went on to commit, there is something very queasy and very non-aspirational, non-ironic, non-Fifty-Shades about all this. It’s intensely 1974, a creepy, nasty, dandruffy male world in which there was not much debate in Britain about sexual politics. The revelations have emerged indirectly, from an article by Michael Waldman, who’s produced a TV documentary in which Lady Lucan appears as his interviewee. And this piece is in the Radio Times, a publication which I think of as having a U certificate, or PG at the most. So BDSM really has made the mainstream.
