News From France That's On My Radar This Week

....from the sad loss of actor Émilie Dequenne to a look at Edward Hopper's Paris, & other stories from Substack writers that are inspiring/intriguing me

‘Woman Seated at a Café Table’ by Edward Hopper/source: Whitney Museum. See the full feature on Hopper in Paris at Jen Bragg’s post at “For Love of France”.

This week, a heavy cold has laid me up a bit, and I need to pack for an imminent trip— so I apologize if this post is a bit less narrative and personal than it normally would be. My chest and head are currently steeped in thick viral fog, and I need to eke out some serious time to pack *intelligently* for a weeklong trip with a three-year-old (an endeavor I’ll inevitably fail at). So for this week’s post, I figured that the best use of my remaining brain cells might be to direct you to stories & writings that are inspiring me or getting me to think differently this week. Here goes.

First, I was so sorry to hear of the too-early loss of Émilie Dequenne, a Belgium-born actor who’d illuminated the big screen in films such as “Rosetta” by the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc). Dequenne passed away on March 16th after battling a rare form of cancer called adrenocortical carcinoma. She was only 43, and left behind a daughter, Milla, and husband, the actor Michel Ferracci.

Émilie Dequenne at the IFFR 2017 promoting the movie "This Is Our Land"/CC 4.0/Wikimedia Commons

In 1999 and at only 16, Dequenne won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as the titular character in Rosetta. The film follows tells the story of a teen who lives in a trailer park with her mother, herself battling alcoholism.