Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray aka Sundays and Cybele written by Bernard Eschasseriaux and Serge Bourguignon, directed by the latter is the 1963 Winner of The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it was also nominated for another two, including for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, furthermore, it is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made – you have thousands of notes on films from that NYT and other pages, plus other thousands of reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html this is more of an inside joke, only four subscribed

 

Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray aka Sundays and Cybele written by Bernard Eschasseriaux and Serge Bourguignon, directed by the latter is the 1963 Winner of The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it was also nominated for another two, including for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, furthermore, it is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made – you have thousands of notes on films from that NYT and other pages, plus other thousands of reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html this is more of an inside joke, only four subscribed

 

 

8 out of 10

 

Sundays and Cybele has reminded me of…Lolita https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/04/lolita-by-vladimir-nabokov-well-known.html a chef d’oeuvre that sits at number six, or was it four, on The Modern Library Top 100 Best Novels of the last century – another caveat is that these are works written in English – list

 

Nevertheless, Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-letters-of-kingsley-amis-edited-by.html had this to say ‘The only success of the book is the portrait of Lolita herself. I have rarely seen the external ambience of a character so marvelously realized, and yet there is seldom more than the necessary undertone of sensuality…Do not misunderstand me if I say that one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough. As well as 'moral' and 'beautiful', the book is also held to be 'funny', often 'devastatingly' so, and 'satirical'. As for the 'funny' part, all that registered with me were a few passages where irritation caused Humbert to drop the old style-scrambler for a moment…’

 

Francoise is the heroine of the film, they talk about Cybele as a new name, at one point, she is a child, she discusses her age at some stage, when she is making calculations: when she will be eighteen, and able to marry the other main character, Pierre, he would be thirty-six (Insha’Allah) and I think her age was twelve

We first meet the two protagonists at the railway station of the town of Avray, where Pierre is spending quite a lot of time: he had been fighting in the Vietnam, in fact, it had been Indochina, before the Americans intervened, the French had been fighting for what used to be one of their colonies in South Asia

 

Francoise has been travelling by train with her father, who is asking about the way to the convent, where he wants to take – and abandon – his daughter, it is late, she is more than upset, crying, because she does not have a mother, we would learn that the woman had left, and now the child may be left without any parent at all

Pierre sees all this, and he insists the girl should not cry, he even offers her some small glass pebbles, but the father is not interested in anything except getting rid of this ‘burden’, and as soon as possible, Pierre is following, one nun opens the door, objects it is late, but takes the girl inside, and closed the heavy door…

 

The parent has forgotten the case with things for the child, but to underline his unemphatic, cold, cruel attitude, the director has him leaving the things outside the gate…however, the stranger takes this luggage, calls after the father, but this one is practically running away, he will never come back, he made this clear

The problem with Pierre is that he had been injured in the war, he does not have his memory back, and he acts as an ‘innocent’, seems to have the mind, and the purity of a child, ergo there is a major difference here, in fact, maybe this is the opposite of Lolita, Humbert Humbert might have been perverse, while this personage is not

 

Or is he, I was actually wondering, and that makies the motion picture appealing, sophisticated, if it were just a story with two children playing, well, it might be for those channels with cartoons and very young audiences, this is not that sort of feature, there are more relationships in here, and a rewarding narrative, complex and challenging

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – I am on Goodreads as Realini Ionescu, at least for the moment, if I keep on expressing my views on Orange Wiland aka TACO, it may be a short-lived presence

Also, maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the benefits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’