The François Truffaut season at the BFI in London remains a delightful event for me, irrespective of the fact that some of the director’s less well-known films turn out to be turkeys. Agreed: The Woman Next Door from 1981, starring Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant, is quite terrible. But deprived of travel, as we have been for so long, there in the darkness I hardly cared. The clothes, the houses, the restaurants: not since I was a moody teenager and obsessed with Françoise Sagan has la vie française seemed more bewitching.
Each film makes me think again about the way movies date (or not). While some age painfully fast – the scene in which Ardant finds herself in her underwear at a garden party, her dress having been ripped off in one fell swoop, is straight out of Benny Hill – others come into their own only late in life. When The Bride Wore Black was released in 1968, for instance, the critics disliked it. But in 2022, it reads rather well, at least for any women in the audience. Every time the vengeful widow played by Jeanne Moreau (in a startling monochrome wardrobe by Pierre Cardin) sets about killing another of the men responsible for the shooting of her husband on her wedding day, she must first endure not only their utter conviction that, yes, of course this beautiful woman only wants to sleep with them, but also their inevitably pompous monologues. Truffaut gave us mansplaining avant la lettre.
Piano was not my forte
Parents, don’t give up on your recalcitrant children! They will come good in the end. My young self, who refused ever to practise the piano no matter how much I was nagged, would be amazed to learn of my latest project: an essay I’ve written for BBC Radio 3 about JS Bach (part of a series celebrating the 300th birthday of The Well-Tempered Clavier, it will be broadcast this week).
These days, I don’t even own a piano. But my love for classical music grows exponentially with every year that passes, a blessing for which I should really give grateful thanks, not only to my long-suffering parents but also to the many teachers who had to put up with both my rotten arpeggios and my barefaced lies (“Yes, I have practised every night for an hour… No, I have no idea why this has had no effect whatsoever on my playing”).
Sweet memories
I’m enjoying Nine Quarters of Jerusalem, a new biography of the Old City by Matthew Teller (it’s published next month). The fact that it’s as much about the present as the past makes it vivid, even if it does come with standard tales of the utterly dysfunctional Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a ladder has leant against the facade for 265 years and Ethiopian Christians have long since been exiled to the roof.
But there is a catch. Every time I open it, all I want to do is eat. I long for halawa, a sweet I haven’t liked since childhood; I’ve never been more desperate for a warm slice of mutabbaq, the fragrant, sugary pastry that in Jerusalem is folded over melting Nabulsi cheese.
Teller writes that the Via Dolorosa branch of Zalatimo’s, a Palestinian baker that has been making mutabbaq since the 19th century, closed its doors in 2019, and this has come as the most terrible news to me (I was last there in 2018).
As someone once said, to visit Jerusalem without calling in at Zalatimo’s is not really to visit Jerusalem at all.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
