SUNDAY JOINT, 8-18-2024: I CAN'T QUIT YOU, FRANCE

Hey All,

Thanks to everybody who reached out after last week's famille c’est une grande table Sunday Joint on the de Rosnay brothers. Apart from Joel and Arnaud, of course, I didn't get much into the specifics of this storied and accomplished clan, but I should have at least pointed out that for 15 or so years now the family headliner has been Joel's firstborn, Tatiana de Rosnay, a novelist and screenwriter whose best-known work, the holocaust-based family drama Sarah's Key, was turned into a film starring the chilled and flawlessly bilingual Kristin Scott Thomas. And here's a rabbit hole worth spending a moment in: Scott Thomas was born in Cornwall but has spent most of her adult life in France; received a DBE from the Queen Elizabeth in 2003 and the Légion d'honneur in 2005; starred opposite Prince in Under the Cherry Moon; is a haughty English Rose beauty who has also been described as “foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, and lewd"—and I only wish that she and Tatiana had married and made the de Rosnay family tree that much more fascinating.

Speaking of couples that did not actually happen but nonetheless spark interest, I will take any excuse to re-post this 1962 photo of Joel de Rosnay and Catherine Deneuve:

Last week I also forgot to mention a just-uploaded clip on French engineer and boardmaker Michel Barland—like de Rosnay, another first-generation Paris-educated Biarritz surfer—who is now best remembered as the person who did the early heavy lifting on computer-linked shaping machines. Before that, he was the first person in the nation to make polyurethane surfboard blanks, which is what we see here. The opening shot shows the Barland Construcions Méchaniques factory, in Bayonne, just inland from Biarritz. Not seen but just to the right of the factory is the sprawling Barland family home, where I had the pleasure of staying in 1989 during my first visit to France. It was (still is) a big family, five or six kids, and the only time I ever saw Michel was at the all-hands dinner each night, where he sat quietly at the head of the table, a bit stern-faced, lost in what I assume were thoughts of a mechanical nature—right up until the end of the meal when one of the kids would bring out a huge bowl of what I've just learned is called le chocolat chaud, at which point, every night, Michel's craggy face opened into a wide boyish grin. Barland died three years later, and I like to think it happened swiftly and smoothly, like pulling the parking brake and cutting the engine on a well-maintained Citroën DS after a long cross-country drive.

The Barland clip is worth a second watch. The first thing to catch my eye of course was the foam-pouring bit at the beginning, because the liquid is so velvety smooth and thick (like melted white chocolate!) but of course also so toxic and gnarly and reactive. Foam was a chemical monster that had to be tamed. Yet here we see Barland doing the business in what appears to be a black Lacoste shirt, like Steve McQueen on pit lane at the Monaco Grand Prix. And then we have Barland's elegant ultra-thin watch—what is that, like literally what brand, does anybody know? More to the point, who wears an expensive timepiece while mowing foam?

The brooding hot-chocolate-loving mechanical genius of Bayonne, that's who.

One more clip before we go, shot at Côte des Basques, just around the corner from Biarritz' Grande Plage. This one was also filmed in 1966. The faces and setting are French as crêpes, but the surf lesson format and just the feel of what it means to be a group of curious and slightly excited people taking in a few minutes of basic instruction before heading out to surf for the first time—this is universal.

I'd bet that none of these five students became surfers, or at least not in the open-trapdoor, sorry-I-missed-dinner-again, surf-stupor way that many of you Sunday Joint devotees became surfers. Not through any fault of the instructor or the lesson itself. Just because, as all-consuming as the sport is for many of us here, my guess is that for 500 people who try surfing, just one or two really dive in and put it front and center in their lives. There were 2,500 students at Mira Costa High School, my alma mater, in Manhattan Beach. Just guessing, but I'd say between one-third and one-half of the student body had tried surfing at least once. And less than 100 of us, maybe just 50—in one of the most surf-centric beach towns in America, mind you—were really hardcore surfers.

Counter to what we've always told ourselves and others, surfing is by and large not addictive. It is just too hard, and the rewards are brief and infrequent. The surf instructor won't mention any of this. The grindy part is not obvious during the first lesson, which is communal and encouraging and literally hands-on. But frustration or something close to it—the sticky and enduring nonalignment of wind, swell, tide, crowd, performance; it could have been better, you could have gotten more—turns out to be the surfer's default setting.

This is the second-best thing about our sport, in my view, after the tent-pole fact that we're out there in the ocean. The difficulty and the fact that the grace moments are so fleeting and unpredictable—that's what will keep you in the game for 50-plus years. A few of us, anyway. And it is so worth it.

Who knows, maybe the kid in the video in the flower-print jams is out there as we speak, sitting in the grumpy pack at Guethary on a midlength, tight-faced because he got dropped in on two waves in a row and wondering if he can peel enough off his next few Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse checks to fund a return trip to Reunion Island with Philippe, Claude, and the gang.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Matt

[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: 1950s Biarritz travel poster; surfing at La Barre, Biarritz, in 1967; Kristin Scott Thomas and Prince in Under the Cherry Moon; 1964 Biarritz beach scene; vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre watch; Biarritz surfers, around 1960, Michel Barland, center. Joel de Rosnay and Catherine Deneuve, 1962. Barland surfing in the finals of the 1961 French National Championships. 1970 Barland surfboards laminate. Barland and his shaping machine, 1984. Beginning surfers in Biarritz, 1966.]