Armchair Escapism 22

BOOKS

Slanting Towards the Sea, Lidija Hill

Set along the Adriatic coast in the years after the Yugoslav wars, the novel follows Ivona, a translator living in a small Croatian town. Her life appears to run smoothly and routinely flitting between family obligations and half-finished relationships but the arrival of a foreign journalist researching the region’s recent past changes the pace of her reality. The two grow closer, bonding over conversations about politics and memory, the depth of which contrasts with the bright, beautiful, impossibly blue coastline. It’s a book about the strange stillness that follows upheaval: what remains after conflict, and the ways people try to build ordinary lives among the ruins of things never fully resolved.

Lie with Me, Philippe Besson

The novel begins decades after the affair itself, when a writer returns to a memory he has spent years circling around. As a teenager in provincial France, he falls into an intense, secret affair with Thomas, a farmer living nearby. Their meetings take place in unstable spaces representing the fragility of their relationship. After Thomas abruptly ends their meetings and we join the narrator 20 years later as a now successful writer. When he bumps into a young man who looks uncannily like Thomas, he must confront the bottled emotions of his past and the regrets which are tethered to them.

Villa Triste, Patrick Modiano

Near the French-Swiss border, a young man arrives in a lakeside town introducing himself as Count Victor Chmara. He lays low, melting into the backgrounds of hotel lounges, cafés, and a nuclear group of people who seem equally detached from their own lives. Victor doesn’t make it clear that the reason for his sudden arrival was to escape the compulsory military service during the Algeria War. Soon he meets and falls for Yvonne who slowly unravels the false version of himself which he has worked so hard to build. Patrick Modiano’s Nobel Prize-winning writing is more about evoking atmospheres than a series of dramatic events. Through Victor’s newfound relationships, Modiano explores complex themes of memory, impermanence, and the performance of identity.

FILMS

The Way

One day, while playing golf with his buddies, Tom receives a call telling him that his son Daniel, has died while walking the Camino di Santiago, a thousand year old pilgrimage. To honour the journey which Daniel began, Tom takes his ashes and decides they will finish it together. As he walks through astounding Spanish landscapes, towns, vineyards and cliff edges, he makes new friends along the way all of them with their own reasons for taking this arduous journey. The Way is deeply emotional, inspiring yet witty with an alluring filmography that tempts you to walk the Camino yourself.

Haute Cuisine

Based on the true story of Danièle Delpeuch, Haute Cuisine follows the tale of Hortense Laborie who is plucked from a truffle farm in rural France to lead the President of France’s bustling kitchen. The path is not smooth and Hortense faces a variety of obstacles including a male-dominated environment of erratic chefs, high stakes environments . But her talent and her drive save the day; the President is continually bowled over by her execution of dishes that use the most delectable ingredients. Told in a series of flashbacks as Hortense recounts her ‘time in office,’  you’ll fall in love with the delicacy and art of French cooking.

Pain and Glory

With a cast as talented as they are beautiful, Pain and Glory is a visual masterpiece tracing the melancholic and sentimental phase of a director’s life as he enters old age. Played by Antonio Banderas, we watch Salvador cope with his declining health by escaping into his memories from childhood and beyond. These recollections of his glory days bring him joy and pain, and are beautifully captured to evoke a level of nostalgia for the past which all of us feel.