Just like Eva Green, I’m French and I’m rude. And no, I don’t care what you think
The relationship between France and Britain, the best of frenemies, seems to finally be thawing. The Brexit wars are behind us, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson no longer annoy each other on a near weekly basis, and the first Franco-British summit in years will take place in March.
That’s no fun. Allow me, then, to do my French patriotic duty and open up a new front of combat. Here goes: the British, despite what they might think, aren’t any good at complaining. This is an odd state of affairs, as they – well, you –see it as a proud national trait. But they are wrong.
The British like to grumble and moan and whine, but really, no one does it like us. There is nothing like a true, spirited, cathartic French whinge. That, you could say, is what Eva Green has been trying to argue in court this week.
Green is suing a production company over the collapse of a film she was meant to star in. As a result, some unflattering WhatsApp messages have been revealed in which she harshly insults the producers and others – but it was her response in court in London this week that really caught people’s attention.
When asked about messages that described others involved in the film as “weak and stupid”, Green replied: that’s “my Frenchness coming out sometimes”. (She added: “Sometimes you say things you don’t actually mean. Of course they are not weak and stupid.”)
You may laugh at her justification, but there is some truth to it. Aggressive, rude, constant complaining is what we do; it’s who we are. Take this satirical piece from Le Gorafi, France’s answer to the Onion, published last year.
“France will send 10,000 French people to Ukraine to complain”, the headline read. “Among the French citizens who will be deployed, we will have 5,000 individuals whose job will be to repeat ‘It sucks so much here’, ‘What a shitty situation’, or even ‘If I’d been in power here I would have settled all this in a jiffy’”, was the (false) quote of the home secretary.
Another popular parody from the site cited dire concerns from French citizens that putting an end to lockdown would mean that they would no longer have enough to complain about. In short, and whatever the cost may be, we’ll complain on the beaches, we’ll complain on the landing grounds, we’ll complain in the fields and … well, you get the gist.
Of course, mere relentlessness isn’t what makes French complaining unique. While the British enjoy seething passive aggression and cloaking their feelings in euphemism, a good Gallic whinge must be vicious, and ideally come at an inopportune time.
A classic from my own life involved a close friend exploding in my face about the various parts of my personality that she felt she could no longer stand. I was, at that point in time, sitting on a skip in the street, crying, having just been dumped.
She apologised the next day, and it soon became something we both laughed about. She agreed that she could have picked better timing and I agreed that her criticisms had a point, and so we moved on.
Still, I understand that this can all be a bit of a shock to outsiders. In the same way that Brits are taken aback when they go abroad and find queues being ignored, trenchant Frenchness can grate if you aren’t used to it.
This is something that another actor, Scarlett Johansson, found when she moved to Paris a decade ago. “When I first got there I thought people were not that whole kind of rude Parisian thing – you know, people aren’t rude, they’re wonderful,” she told David Letterman in 2014. “Well, that was before I was a mainstay there, and then people decided that once I wasn’t going away they could just be really terribly rude to me.” Johansson has since moved back to the US.
Ultimately, the beauty of French complaining is its almost democratic nature. If we all know that we will all eventually fly into a rage at some inconvenient point, we find it hard to hold it against one another. We can also recognise its uses: sometimes harsh truths do just need to come out. They may feel painful when they do, but it is still better than leaving issues to fester.
At risk of being sympathetic to the point of bias, perhaps this is what happened to Eva Green. She was concerned about the quality of the movie she was making, and felt she’d been misled. What else was she going to do? Sigh and tut? That’s just not the way we do things.
Marie Le Conte is a French journalist living in London
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
with the unease of being still, just to see what would come up,” Elliot explains.
What came up was the kind of revelation people usually pay thousands of dollars for in therapy.
“I guess I just realize now that no amount of security could make me feel as good as it feels to live my life truly,” Elliot says.
Before, Elliot says, his anxiety about money was so powerful that, no matter how much he made, he felt like he could never take time off, “not even while my mom was dying”.
Matt reached a similar realization. Following his inner voice and living his heart’s desire, he says, has given him more confidence than approval-seeking and people-pleasing ever did – an epiphany that reaches its full expression in their YouTube post Why You Should Run Away and Destroy Your Reputation. The title says it all.
While sometimes the zeal of the newly converted can feel superficial or exclusionary in its moral superiority, Matt and Elliot share their fears and discoveries in a way that feels earnest and relatable. Like the Akpans, they’ve quickly garnered a loyal and sizable social media following.
But after a year on the road, Elliot tells me their “wandering retreat” has come to an end. They have found home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
While searching the Woofing website for an opportunity to volunteer on an organic farm, they came across the profile of a small intentional community that intrigued them – two families of musicians and artists, living sustainably on 100 acres of land in Brevard.
In a stunning video of their time on the homestead, we see Elliot and a young boy with earth-caked fingernails foraging in the forest; Matt and Uma kneading dough in a wood cabin; an afternoon hootenanny with parents and kids strumming, plucking, fiddling and singing; the adults and all six kids building a greenhouse. In fact, the kids help do everything. They garden. They fish. They catch and kill and prepare a snapping turtle for dinner.
Elliot says that when he and Matt were dreaming, scheming, and fretting over world affairs on their long quarantine walks, this was the tangible education they imagined for Uma – far from the confinement, abstraction and rules of the classroom, learning how to have a “reciprocal living relationship with the earth”.
“We’ve all been convinced that we need a lot more to be happy, when exactly the opposite is true. What we need is a lot less to be happy. What we need is to feel a sense of groundedness and connectedness within a web community, to have our actions feel intentional and for ourselves, andto be a part of something bigger than ourselves,” Elliot says.
•••
In the end, my husband and I chose to have our baby in Peru and carry on in our van, discovering our own way of bridging the gap between what worked for our parents’ generation and the reality of today. That journey took us through 17 Latin American countries along the Pan-American Highway over the course of five years, where we saw, first-hand, the true cost of the American dream to people south of the US border, and the benefit of reinventing it for ourselves.
And despite the many differences between the Akpans’, the Dürts’, and my own story, we share a narrative through-line with each other and thousands of other families: our American dream is changing.
For decades now, our cultural values and personal aspirations have been rooted in self-gain and materialism, but the dream of a McMansion on an exclusive hilltop isn’t just unattainable for most of us, it has put us on a path toward eco-suicide and widespread despair. It has made us and the planet equally sick in our constant pursuit of more.
We can dream better.
So, with increasing frequency and fervor, families like my own, the Akpans and the Dürts are spreading the gospel of less. We’re tooting the horns of time and freedom over the soul-crushing cycle of debt and consumption. And, most importantly, rather than encouraging our children to rise to the top of a cruel pyramid scheme at any cost, we’re prioritizing mental health, interpersonal relationships, community building and the preservation of our ecosystem.
As Elliot says: “We don’t have to cling to what’s dying. We can dance on the ashes of this crumbling empire. We can be part of imagining what is coming.”