Daffy Duck Recommends: The French

Greetings from Chicago everyone. I hope everyone is having a good time.

I don't know how many French people read our blog, but I hope they can agree when I say that French men are sleazebags--and to wonderful effect! As evidence I present you with two works that prove this to be entertainingly true: The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. I recently read the former and watched the latter, and I was awed by the similarity of their respective anti-heroes' brands of sleaze--so much so that I hastily decided it was a matter of national character.

The Thief's Journal is about a dandy thief thieving his way around Europe, describing his exploits in the most flowery, cranial prose that side of the pond. It's awesome. In Breathless an incompetent thief and slacker-about-town falls in love with a New York girl with an awesome haircut and a bad accent and they have a cool adventure. Cool, adventure! Did you know that you can just come into a hotel and snag the keys to a perfect stranger's room from right underneath the concierge's nose? Or that, if you are in need of a Ford convertible in Paris all you have to do is follow the driver to the bathroom, bat him in the neck while he's at the urinal, and swipe the keys? Life in Paris must revolve around whether or not you have keys, but I think you also have to be incredibly handsome to pull off this kind of stuff. Here's where my endorsement for the beautiful Jean-Paul Belmondo comes in. What a hunk! There's hardly an American stud in movies today who can compete with this flip, vain, inconsiderate, lousy, mouthy wonder of a man. I think Salt-n-Pepa wrote a song about him a few years ago or so.

The fellow in The Thief's Journal pulls off the same kind of stunts--albeit less focused on absconding with keys (though there's some of that too)--with the same breezy, sleazy ease. Both the movie and the book have a lot going on that you'll just have to find out for yourself, but I recommend them together. You'll be shocked at what a French thief can do--and how sexily he can do it--when he's set his mind to it.

I would like to know if there are any stories about French women who are thieves. I recently saw Marie Antoinette, and she's flip enough to be French, but she's not actually French. Though I recommend you see that movie--it's fun to watch dress-up movies--I reckon I don't think it was very good.

That's my recommendation for now. I promise, in the words of Michael Jackson, you'll be struck by some smooth criminals.