Joyeux Noël

A quick non-music post while the little dude is napping. I've got my language proficiency interview with CRS this evening, and it's gonna be in French -- a language I haven't used on a regular basis in two years, and haven't spoken at all since September. Even then, I was needing to push through my Arabic to get to the words and fillers and sounds I needed...so I was feeling a bit nervous about this thing tonight.

Back in our days as a childless couple, Anna and I used to occasionally hang out with the Raleigh French MeetUp group. They're organized by an amazing woman named Michelle. She's a French teacher at a middle- or high-school here in the Triangle, but she's a single mom raising a beautiful little girl with French as her native language. Talk about self-discipline! I can't even imagine. They speak *nothing* but French at home. Wow.

At any rate, I decided I needed to track them down sometime this weekend in order to get in some speaking practice before the interview. Turned out she was hosting a movie night at her place, so I went by to chill. The flick being shown was "Joyeux Noël," and I highly recommend it to everyone. It's a French/German collaboration, I think, and the dialogue is actually about evenly split between Scots English, French, and German. Oh, and did I mention it stars Diane Krüger (my biggest Hollywood crush)?

The film depicts the events of the Christmas Truce of 1914 between the Germans, French, and Scottish on the front lines in Alsace-Lorraine. It is, simply put, amazing. Nominated for Best Foreign Film in '05, features the singing of Natalie Dessay and Rolando Villazón (both of whom are apparently huge in the opera world, neither of whom I'd ever heard of before watching this movie), and is by turns hilarious and heartrending. I'm no film critic, so I can't do this justice, so I shan't really try. But if you have Netflix or Blockbuster or anything, you've GOT to see this. (They've apparently got it under the title "Merry Christmas" -- it's the 2005 release, rated PG-13.)

Here's a clip of Natalie Dessay doing the 'Kill Sarastro' aria from Die Zauberflote: Whew!