Salon.com > Beth Arnold

“Everything matters to everybody”

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:30:00 +0000

Since he began his career 35 years ago, self-described leftist, philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy has never been caught without a cause or opinion. He has flamboyantly articulated these in more than 30 books (including the much discussed "American Vertigo"), countless television appearances, articles and even films that he’s written, produced, directed and/or narrated. Lévy is a kind of intellectual Robin Hood, going where there is totalitarianism and/or war. He has been a passionate advocate of Bosnia, smuggled himself into Darfur to report on the Sudanese genocide and followed the perilous trail of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl into Pakistan to write the New York Times bestseller "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?"

Lévy is a showman -- his narcissism is legendary -- which adds fuel to the fire of his critics, who accuse him of lacking original ideas. Known in France as BHL, Lévy is his own wildly successful brand. He wears the mantle of polarizing intellectual quite happily along with made-to-measure clothing from French house Charvet, which also made shirts for JFK and Marcel Proust. He was recently quoted in the New York Times' T Magazine men’s fall fashion supplement saying he had no interest in his bespoke apparel or even talking about it -- though he had clearly agreed to this fashion profile, which was set in Bosnia, where he was screening two documentaries he had shot there and attending a children's festival partly financed by his family foundation.

Vive la Obama diff

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:20:00 +0000

The building is not far from the Place Vendôme and the Opéra Garnier and is closer still to the Bibliothèque Nationale. For those in the know, this area, the 2nd arrondissement, is where Napoleon Bonaparte once lived, where the Americans Robert Livingston and James Monroe signed the Louisiana Purchase into being, and where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart debuted his "Magic Flute." This quartier is where the "Jewish question" was decided during the German occupation, and where Alexandre Dumas' three musketeers rode and fought their way into myth and history. This is the very heart of Paris.

On Wednesday, a good-looking young man wearing jeans and a Barack Obama/France T-shirt waves his visitor into a chic, but not fussy, light-filled conference room. With its sofas, its simple black chairs filed around an elegantly rustic table, the room could double as a gracious salon in someone's home -- someone who's a hard-core Barack Obama supporter, that is. Obama posters are tacked to the wall, and others lie on the big table. An Obama banner is unfurled around one of the fireplaces, and two flags are draped on a chair -- one American, the other French.

The truth about “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:00:00 +0000

The quietly stunning film of Jean-Dominique Bauby's phenomenal memoir, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," is nominated for four Oscars this year. They include directing by Julian Schnabel -- an honor he won for the film at the Cannes Film Festival and Golden Globes -- and best adapted screenplay by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar in 2002 for his adaptation "The Pianist." "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is also nominated for cinematography and editing, and has won numerous awards in film festivals across the world.

There is every reason for the film's success. It recounts the remarkable life of Bauby, the debonair editor of French Elle magazine who in 1995 suffered a massive stroke. He slipped into a coma that lasted 20 days and awoke to find himself paralyzed from head to toe. He was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called locked-in syndrome.