Morning

¶ Marion: The Édith Piaf biopic, La Môme (La Vie en Rose), made a big Marion Cotillard fan out of me, and I set about seeing as many of her movies as I could. Her presence in Ma vie en l’air, which didn’t even make it to the United States as a video, is somewhat decorative; the movie is really about two guys who don’t want to grow up. But she brings to it a screen-goddess quality that’s reminiscent of Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth. Unlike those divas, Marion Cotillard is a genuine actress, but, at least in this droll comedy, she’s a goddess, too. There are always a few goddesses running around, but today’s filmmakers don’t seem to know what to do with them.

¶ Newton Falls: The heartwarming story of a pluckily-revived paper mill in the middle of Nowhere, Upstate, will — ought to — make a great movie. But I wish that reporter Fernando Santos had given my inner business historian something more to work with.

Noon

¶ Exemptive: “What is the scope of the Commission’s authority to exempt?” This burning question is addressed as I write by a panel of securities lawyers that includes my dear wife. Tune in!

Night

¶ Dissertation: As the song says, “At Last.” I had a call from M le Neveu this evening. To get an idea of how unlikely it was that he would finish his dissertation — and I hasten to note that he has finished his disseration — have a look at the table entitled “Cumulative Completion Rates for Cohorts Entering 1992-4, by Fields” (scroll down a bit).

Morning, cont’d

§ Marion. What’s mystifying is the failure of this movie to soar in the draft of Amélie, which it resembles stylistically. It’s not quite so cute, but it’s still plenty cute, and its story is just as “French.” Yann (Vincent Elbaz), a young man who’s afraid of flying (his mother died giving birth to him at 30,000 feet) flourishes as a “security operative,” meaning that he runs flight simulations. Nobody who has never been willingly aloft knows more than he does about flying commercial airliners — a knack that comes in handy at the end. Behind this story is Yann’s relationship with Ludo (Gilles Lellouche), his friend since grade school. I’m not sure that I got this right, but I think that Yann has a voice-over in which he tells us that if you don’t get rid of your embarrassing childhood friends in adolescence, you’re stuck with them for life. Ma vie en l’air is an endearing monument to that problem. Ms Cotillard plays Alice, the woman whom Yann wants to grow up for so badly that he not only gets on a plane but flies to Tahiti to find her.

Now that Ms Cotillard is a Best Actress, perhaps Ma vie en l’air (so close to “La vie en rose,” which after all was that movie’s American title, that I’d recommend leaving it untranslated) will be packaged for American distribution, at least on video. It’s a tremendously appealing film, very easy to like.

§ Newton Falls. I’m already tearing up at the montage in which Andy Leroux and Levi Durham run around the shuttered mill unscrewing lightbulbs and lowering the thermostats as a welcome to prospective investors who only want to buy the mill’s heavy equipment and then gut the place. But she doesn’t say much about the thinking behind Scotia Investment’s $20 million purchase. The plant at Newton Falls is expected to turn a profit in this year’s fourth quarter — Bravo! But we’re not in a movie by Frank Capra, and the paper mill is not a charity case.

I ask, in case you haven’t figured out why, because Newton Falls might be a template for the revival of American manufacturing. Small and smart.

Noon, cont’d

§ Exemptive. Call it déformation familiale. I can listen to this sort of thing not only because I’m a lawyer, and therefore have the stamina required to pay attention to lengthy expositions of minutiae, but because when I was a little boy I would beg my father to tell me about his appearances before the (then) Federal Power Commission, seeking rate increases for the price of his company’s natural gas. Perhaps “beg” is an overstatement. But there has always been an one federal Commission or another somewhere in the background (and occasionally in the foreground) of my life.

Night, cont’d

§ Dissertation. They say that things are better now, but better is still not very good. A more recent tabulation that I encountered in my Googling gave a less-than-half result.

M le Neveu will defend his dissertation in a couple of weeks. That won’t be a problem; he could convince you that Hillary Clinton will be the next President, and without seeming at all partisan about it. (If he weren’t so ethical, he could sell you a summer house on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.) What I can’t believe is that the fresh young college grad who arrived just in time to see the Twin Towers fall is going to be thirty next year. It’s easier by far to remember holding him, nearly thirty years ago (when I was thirty-one!), at a picnic on the banks of the Connecticut River. And yet the whole process by which an armful of newborn becomes a college professor remains deeply mysterious to me.

Congratulations, coz!

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