maeve66 | A Postscript I Think I Wish I Didn't Know (Reply)

From:

maeve66.livejournal.com

Last night at the Nader-Camejo rally (which was very good -- about 800 to 900 folks, I'd guess, and in my opinion, Peter Camejo is a much better speaker (and has better politics) than Ralph Nader), I ran into a French comrade of mine and told him about Rendez-vous aux quais, and he said that he knew the film, and it WAS made by CPers, and in fact, the CP owned the rights, and felt it was so incendiary that they refused to release it until 1972. Damn. Now, granted, this was a French Trotskyist, so I'd like some confirmation, but if it's true, it's actually one more confirmation of the CP's then politics... I guess I'd just hoped they were better in France than the US.

Oh, and this semi-irrelevant bit keeps coming to the surface of my mind, like flotsom or jetsom, bobbing about. It's more on Young Adult fiction, and how that can have links to any topic, for me.

There's a book by Bette Greene that is pretty famous, called The Summer of my German Soldier, published in the late 70s, I think. The heroine in it is a young Jewish girl in the South during WWII, who falls for an escaped POW who is an anti-war German soldier. It's great, nuanced, deals with her father's abuse, and her mother's abuse, with race relations, etc.

But it has a lesser-known sequel that I actually preferred, as a young woman. In it, she has just graduated from high school, in about 1950, and takes a graduation gift from her grandparents to travel to France, instead of using it for tuition. In France, she is for the first time confronted with a culture which is not McCarthyesque, which is not unquestioning, for which the ideas of anti-imperialism, of opposition to one's government, of communism itself are not anathema. It's one of the most beautiful coming of age novels I read at that point in my life. She falls for a guy who makes her question gender roles and political certitude and the narrow parochialism of the US. He's opposed to the French involvement in Indochine, and favors self-determination.

What the hell does this have to do with this movie? I think just the political nuances of the novel, really.