A Good Year - take two, in Gordes

 

In the decade or so since Ridley Scott's "local" movie A Good Year was released to less than ecstatic critical acclaim and box office success, something rather extraordinary has happened. It had become everyone's favourite sun-drenched, feel-good Luberon comfort film. People in the villages featured still talk about the making of it, and Russell Crowe gossip snakes around. My own piece about it has been my most popular blog post for years.

 

So I can never pass the restaurant in the corner of the Place du Château at Gordes without being reminded of Max and Fanny, so beautifully played by Marion Cotillard. Gordes is a stunning place anyway, but this is just an extra dusting of stardust.

 

 

Sadly, though the atmosphere of the real life "Fanny's Café" is indelible, the restaurant under current management is not getting good reviews, and the crowds are staying away from its tables. We went to La Trinquette, tucked away down a precipitous street, the Rue des Tracapelles, and it was fantastic, with glorious views over the Petit Luberon.

 

Afterwards, a brilliant concert of operatic arias and Lieder starring Elsa Dreisig at the Théatre des Terrasses. The cobbled alleys down from the main square showcase the height of the village above the valley - and give a sweeping view of a great number of other locations used in A Good Year, including the Château la Canorgue at Bonnieux, the Provencal dream of a house and vineyard that Max inherits.

 

 

 

 

A box of lavender

I saw this old box of dried lavender at the Friday market in Bonnieux during a flying visit last month, and I post it here as an article of faith that I will be getting back to regular blogging over the next few weeks. The US paperback edition of The Sea Garden is due out on Tuesday, and I have been saving a photos and few intriguing background insights to add to the read. Watch this space...

I'd also like to say a big thank you to all my blog friends who have written such generous and supportive comments here over the past months. I'm sorry I haven't always replied, but I have appreciated every word.

The strange calm of snow

          Snow took hold of the skeletal structures of the garden, coating seed heads and stalks. Soon the alliums and globe artichoke were extravagantly plumed in winter's coat. Life slowed into strange calm as disarray and decay was covered over, thickly smothered, hour by hour. 

                                                      

                                                                                 From The Lantern

Winters can often be harsh in Provence, for all the luminous skies. When the snows come they can be heavy. In our village they still talk of a winter in the 1930s when the paths up to the village from the outlying hamlets were impassable for several weeks. The school was half-empty and so cold that the violet ink froze solid in the wells set in the wooden desks.

The isolating effect of snow in these hilltop villages is captured by artist Rahim Najfar in this painting, Bonnieux sous la Neige. The beautiful desolation of the winter sky holds pale reflections of spring colours. The exposed trees at the summit are clogged full of snow and wind. And you can almost feel the frozen stillness of the orchard trees lower down, the quiet closing down of life.

Rahim Najfar is an Iranian-born artist works in the picturesque village of Bonnieux, above. I’ve already blogged (here) about the masterly way understands the sizzling colours of summer in Provence. His studio and exhibition space in Place Carnot burst with big powerful landscapes, some completely abstract and always engaging of the senses. Some have Persian-influenced borders which seem to tell his journey here, from his birthplace in Teheran, an academic career as professor of art and drawing at the universities of  Farabi and Teheran, to teaching at Aix-Marseille, and becoming an artist who has lived for many years in Provence and exhibited widely abroad.

But this painting is the exception: the winter scene that tells a more subtle story of life year-round in Provence, the contrasts and the cold.

 For Rahim Najfar’s website, click here.

The Marquis de Sade's castle

Now that high tourist season was over, the streets were quiet. We discovered anew the enchanted villages of the great valley: Bonnieux, topped with a church not a castle, opposite the bleak ruined fortress of Lacoste; Menerbes, ship-like on its low outcrop at the foot of the range; Roussillon, perched on the edge of surging cliffs of red ochre amid green pines; Gordes, majestic in its autumn emptiness, incomparable views framed to artistic perfection by its own limestone ridges planted with candles of cypress.

                                                             From The Lantern

These villages, built on high rocky outcrops, are some of the most lovely in Provence. From a distance, the most forbidding is Lacoste, with its bleak ruined castle that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade. These days it is owned by the veteran fashion designer Pierre Cardin and is the centerpiece of a summer music festival. World-wide opera stars sing here within its ruined walls on warm summer nights, and tickets are much prized.

But it has a gruesome past. Before the cruel and excessive Marquis arrived, the castle was already a notorious haunt, as the scene of the rape, torture and murder of three hundred members of the heretical sect of the Vaudois in the sixteenth century. The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was a politician, philosopher and sexual libertine. He was forced to flee his castle in Lacoste in 1777 – that year there was trouble with everyone: local women, male servants, the police – and the place was eventually destroyed by an angry mob. The Marquis spent thirty-two years in prison, some of those in a mental asylum, and sealed his notoriety in his own books Justine and One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, written in his cell.

Nowadays it’s still a steep climb on the narrow cobbled streets up to the castle, but Lacoste is a sleepy place. An art school flourishes here, and galleries of modern work, including the Espace Cardin, stand higgledy-piggeldy with cracked stone houses with lushly overflowing gardens, cafés and restaurants, including the Restaurant Sade. (“Bet they can whip up a good lunch there!” – Rob)

There are lovely views from all around, especially across a valley to the east where the village of Bonnieux flaunts its proud Catholic tradition with a church at its highest point, in answer to the stark ruins of Lacoste’s pinnacle of amorality.



Terre Fauve

                

Between the tumbling slopes and steep pine-bristled ravines, the sea was a constant companion. Its dazzle lifted the letters off the pages of my walking guide until I could see precisely how each black mark was stamped on the soft paper.

                                                        from The Lantern

                                                                                                     

This bold Fauvist-inspired painting by Rahim Najfar is a masterly understanding of landscape lit by summer sun in the south of France. This is the burning light that sears every edge between tree and sky, earth and scrub, setting disparate elements jangling and competing. Opposites sizzle against opposites in a joyous display of the colour wheel: blue versus orange; red versus green; yellow versus purple.

Born in Iran, Rahim Najfar works in the picturesque village of Bonnieux, high on its hill and topped by a defiant church spire. Across the valley, one of the many that ripple the Luberon ridge, is Lacoste with its ruined castle once owned by the Marquis de Sade.

A stroll up the steep winding streets of Bonnieux will bring you to Najfar’s studio and exhibition space in Place Carnot. From spring to autumn the door is always open. His landscapes are big, powerful statements: some completely abstract, some with Persian-influenced borders which seem to tell his journey here, from his birthplace in Teheran, an academic career as professor of art and drawing at the universities of  Farabi and Teheran, to teaching at Aix-Marseille, and becoming an artist who has lived for many years in Provence and exhibited widely abroad.

Terre Fauve, the picture above, is redolent of a slightly more southern landscape, where umbrella pines flower against the penetrating blue of Riviera skies. It’s the countryside down towards the sea at Marseille and Cassis where the much-loved French writer Marcel Pagnol spent his boyhood and recaptured in La Gloire de Mon Pere.

But you can still be surprised where we are by paths that seem warmed by their own micro-climate, and have the look and scent of the coastal south. Pines smell stronger, as does the wild thyme. On such a path the low spreading juniper bushes release the sharp tang of gin and the dry earth beneath your feet seems salted with sand.

For Rahim Najfar’s website, click here. His studio-shop in Bonnieux also sells limited edition prints and a wide selection of his pictures printed on cards.