Avant, la haine

One magical day, Guerlain Attrape-Coeur started to love me. Before, it was all scat, toothache, and hate -- as is nearly everything Guerlain for me. But one afternoon, just before watching Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris, I happened to dab on a bit from a random sample vial... and my heart was captured.

Ambushed. I don't know what happened. It was very sudden. I became obsessed with its romantic luscious peachy violet over vanillic woods and slight undertone of something intriguingly dirty and Jickyish.

I'm reminded of it today, because I've finally gotten around to trying the tea blend I had made to approximate that Attrape-Coeur / Dans Paris moment. Apricot and vanilla flavored black teas, Earl Grey for the bergamot, gingerbread spices, dried lavender buds, and candied dried violets... not bad but nothing close.

But the perfume-movie pairing turned out to be serendipitous, because L'Attrape-Coeurs happens to be the French title of The Catcher in the Rye (I didn't know this at the time) and Dans Paris is heavy in its Salinger allusions.

However, I have to say, I wasn't overwhelmed with love for the movie. It seems to me a little too self-conscious, or maybe not self-conscious enough, to be particularly standout amid the crowd of homages to La Nouvelle Vague (though Garrel has to have the most perfect delightfully squirmy charm); and I think it works better as an intimate family/relationship piece with Duris' Paul in the center, brooding about the apartment, and his father, brother, and ex as satellites. As that, there are some touching moments. And I think it's that that Attrape-Coeur seemed to me to suit, that close, warm, melancholic atmosphere of sepia-tones and jazzy, muted score and the end of a love affair -- but not of love.

'Avant la haine' by Alex Beaupain, performed by Romain Duris and Joana Preiss:


English translation:
(Please note: This is my translation, not transliteration, nor from the movie subtitles.)

RD: You know, my lovely,
that the brightest loves tarnish
the dirty sun of the day, the day
they are subjected to scrutiny?
I have an irrefutable idea
for avoiding the unbearable:
Before the hate, before the blows,
the hisses or the lashes,
before the pain and the disgust --
Please, let's end it there.

JP: But I kiss you and it passes.
You see,
you can't brush me off like that.
You thought to get yourself out of it
by leaving me like
some great love that must die.
But, you see, I prefer
the tempests of the inevitable
to your stupid little idea.
Before the hate, before the blows,
the hisses or the lashes,
before the pain and the disgust --
End it there, you say?

RD: But you kiss me and it passes.
I know, you can't be brushed off like that.

RD: I could avoid for you the worst.
JP: But the best is yet to come.

RD&JP: Before the hate, before the blows,
the hisses or the lashes,
before the pain and the disgust --
RD: Please, let's end it there.
JP: But I kiss you and it passes. You see?
(Repeat)

RD: You kiss me and it passes.
I know, you can't be brushed off like that.
JP: You can't brush me off like that.