France Bucket List

A racing driver and a script girl meet at their children's school in Deauville.

Six friends keep trying to have dinner; Bunuel keeps stopping them.

French and German colonists in 1915 Africa learn there is a war and stage their own.

A husband recruits a stranger to cheer up his depressed wife, and a boy of thirteen does it instead.

Catherine Deneuve as a rubber-plantation owner in French Vietnam as it starts to end.

Tati's Monsieur Hulot against an ultra-modern house that hates people.

Simone Signoret as an ageing ex-prostitute raising the children of others in Belleville.

A writer is tried for her husband's death, with only their blind son as witness.

The novelist takes on the Dreyfus affair; the first biopic to win.

A painter is hired to paint a bride in secret on a Breton island in 1770.

An illiterate teenager enters a French prison and leaves running the place.

Agnes Varda films the people who pick up what the harvest and the city leave behind.

A clerk's wife borrows a diamond necklace for one ball, loses it, and spends ten years paying off the replacement.

John Difool, a class-R detective, and a crystal that can save the universe; Moebius and Jodorowsky.

A village of indomitable Gauls, a magic potion and Romans to thump; the first of thirty-nine.

Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.

Marjane Satrapi grows up through the Iranian revolution, in black and white.

Julia Child's 1961 book that taught Americans to make boeuf bourguignon.

One is not born but becomes a woman; de Beauvoir's 1949 foundation of feminism.

Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.

A Muslim party wins the French presidency in 2022; Houellebecq published it the day of Charlie Hebdo.

A French girl and a Chinese man in colonial Saigon; Duras at 70 remembering.

A 17-year-old on the Riviera destroys her father's engagement; Sagan wrote it at 18.

A murderer with a perfect nose in 18th-century France distils the scent of girls.

A concierge who hides her intelligence and a girl planning suicide in a Paris building.

Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.

The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.

Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.

Saint-Exupery flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes, and crashing in the Libyan desert.

Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.