Domme: Small Village with a Big View

 

 

 

Domme, France

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Among the numerous eye-opening lessons learned when traveling is that places that are mere dots on a detailed map were once the center of very big historical events. This was certainly a takeaway from a visit to Domme. I suspect that most tours don’t even stop there, as its population is a mere 901. We were there to say goodbye to our tour guide, Bruno, who is among the few who live in the village.

 

Domme was founded by the French king Philip the Bold in1281 because of its defensive possibilities. It sits more than 800 feet above sea level and lords several hundred feet higher than the Dordogne River. It’s spectacular location earned Domme its title as “the Acropolis of the Périgord.” The village is perched atop a limestone cliff and even today the route to the top is so winding that most visitors take a special shuttle that fits through the narrow city gates. As I’ve emphasized in previous posts, the fate of many Périgord settlements were shaped by the loyalties of its strongest nobles. When Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage to the French king was annulled in 1152, the region came under the control of England. Battles took place between the two kingdoms during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) but Domme, though, briefly occupied by English troops, was unscathed.

 

Actually, Domme’s major upheaval was sealed a century before it was built! During the Crusades (1085-1291) to liberate the Holy Lands from “infidels” (Muslims), Christian soldiers actually did gain control of the Levant (today’s Israel, Palestine Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria). But how were Christian pilgrims to get there safely? A series of Christian military orders were founded, the most famous being the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, better known as the Knights Templar.* They became the guardians of lands captured by Christian Crusaders and the protector of travelers. 

 

An important history lesson is that over time, many things that were once popular fall out of fashion and into revilement. By the late 13^th century, the Crusaders lost control of the Holy Lands; Saladin was such a brilliant leader that Richard the Lionhearted befriended his erstwhile Muslim enemy. Several popes, the most important being Clement V, wearied of the unconventional beliefs of the Templars (such as their support for the poor and renunciation of riches at a time in which the Vatican was becoming rich), accused the order of idolatry and corruption, and tried to merge them with the Knights Hospitallers. When the Templars balked, many were arrested. Domme went from strategic outpost to a prison whose graffiti persists as symbols etched onto stone walls. Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar in 1312, and numerous recalcitrant Templars were burned at the stake in Domme and elsewhere.

 

You’d never know about all of this hullaballoo and tragedy as you walk through Domme today. It is the quintessential “quiet village.” The reason to visit is that it has the proverbial million dollar (okay, Euro) view. It has a terrace that bespeaks its original intention of being able to see up and down the Dordogne River Valley. No raiders were in sight, unless distant cows grow disgruntled. Of course, being that it’s the Périgord, there are distant chateaux, tidy farmlands, and a vineyard or two. You can walk Domme’s main street in a New York minute and the main square has the townhall, an ice cream shop, a retailer of fois gras, and a statue of the valiant geese who gave their livers in the service of gastronomy. But what a view! It’s imprinted upon my brain.

 

As we left on the small shuttle that fits through the gates, I looked carefully. There were no Templars in plain view, but you never know. Most of the Templars shaved their telltale long beards and faded into the countryside. No one expects the Knights Templar!

 

Rob Weir  

 

* The Templars are gone but the name persists. London’s Temple Bar refers to the “bar(red)” gates into the City of London, and Temple Bank tube stations will take you to what is literally a major banking district, though the name probably comes from where an ancient temple to Mithras once stood.

Cell Phones, Hipsters, and Hollywood Have Killed the Movie Theater

 

 

Several years ago a Smith student told me she watched “Lawrence of Arabia” on her cell phone. “That’s too bad,” I replied. “You missed a film many consider one of the greatest films ever made.” I hasten to add that I don’t entirely agree with that; I find parts of “Lawrence of Arabia” ponderous. There is, however, no denying that it is a cinematic feast for the eyes. Or not, if you view it on a 2 ¾”  x  5 ½ ” screen.

 

The next blow came when “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won the Oscar as the Best Picture of 2023. Ugh! Hollywood honored a project I consider one of the worst movies of the entire 21^st century!  

 

Move the clock forward. Critics are currently trying to beat the holiday rush by listing their choices for the best films of 2025. Not only have I not seen a single one of them; I haven’t even heard of most of them. How could I? My town of 30,000 doesn’t have a movie theater anymore. The closest “art” theater is in Amherst, which is just 7 miles distant, but driving there when all five colleges are in session can easily take an hour in each direction. Plus, most of the films I might wish to see are tucked into smaller rooms that are sold out by the time I get there. Yeah, I could reserve tickets online, but that might mean having to arc my head upward from the front row.

 

The only other screens are at the bloody mall and I can assure you there is seldom anything of interest among its Marvel Comics, horror, military action, and comedies made for fourth grade education offerings. The less said about endless junk food, military recruiting, and local business ads, the better. These commercials–and that’s what they are–run 25-30 minutes before the feature starts. The previews of coming distractions are even worse; theaters pump up the volume to make the insipid sound more dramatic. Lately, if I see a Hollywood movie it’s several years later on a streaming service. From the little I’ve seen, there’s not much to entice me to subscribe to every bloody streaming service under the sun as if there’s virtue in seeing something on a 36” screen as opposed to my phone.

Movie theaters are a dying breed in part because they don’t show many films.  Films intend some sort of artistic and/or political statement, whereas movies are simply a way to anesthetize you for 90 minutes and have little enduring educational or redeeming value. There have always been scads of movies, but films that generally win awards. Of course, sometimes a trite movie like “Rocky” gets mistaken for a film, but overall merit used to be an award factor. Internet sites will tell you there are more cinema screens now than there were in the 1970s, but if you inquire about art houses or independent theaters, you get a different picture. Yes, there are more screens, but most of them are showing the same movies that every other American mall is showing. In the 1940s, often considered part of the golden age of cinema, there were 18,000 independent theaters. By the 1970s it was down to 4,000 and today it is half of that. In 1940, the U.S. population was about 132.2 million. It is now 342 million. Scale matters; today there are more than 200 million more Americans but your chance of seeing a serious film have decreased by over 60 percent.

 

Art films do exist, but very few are made in America and even fewer are screened here. I, of course, exaggerate to suggest that theaters are dead, but for much of the USA that’s only mild hyperbole. One-third of all US movie theaters are concentrated in just three markets: Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas-Fort Worth. To add perspective,  Massachusetts is the most-educated state in America. In the Pioneer Valley where I live, if  you combine Amherst and Northampton, a whopping 70 percent of residents have graduate degrees. I wonder how few Heartland and Rocky Mountain towns have access to serious cinema.

 

As hipsters age and start paying their own bills, expect theaters to take a big hit. A generation hypnotized by their phones is one culprit, but Hollywood tripe is another. Cities such as London, Montreal, and Paris still have cinemas, a further indication that film has migrated. For the record, the nations with the highest numbers of movie tickets sold are (in order): India, China, and Singapore. When Hollywood celebrates itself at Oscar time, it is also talking to itself.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

  

The Old Fire (Release date 1/13/2026)

By Elisa Shua Dusapin

Simon & Schuster, 192 pages.

★★★★

 

The Old Fire comes out in a few weeks. I really liked this work by award-winning Swiss/French author Elisa Shua Dusapin, but unless I miss my guess it is a work that will prove polarizing.

 

It is set in the French countryside and involves two sisters who have had minimal contact in more than a decade. Agathe is now 30 and left home at 15 to study and ultimately live in New York where she now writes dialogue for adapted scripts. When she left, her younger sister Véra had stopped talking. It is not entirely clear is she has aphasia or has voluntarily chosen to be mute. I suspect Dusapin wanted this to be ambiguous because the very crux of The Old Fire is about what is said and what is unsaid, explained and unexplained, and what should be saved and what should be discarded.

 

Agathe returns to France in the autumn to help Véra clear out their father’s home several years after his actual death. The book’s title, like many things in it, carries several potential meanings, but the most immediate is that their childhood home sat on the edge of a chateau-like estate in the Périgord that was ravaged by fire. By happenstance, I visited the Périgord just two months ago. It is a beautiful part of France with a storied past but its economy now relies heavily on tourism, wine, and agricultural products, the latter two of which are weather-dependent. There are many chateaux, all of which are enormously expensive to maintain. Neither Agathe nor Véra have the money it would take to restore their home, though one of the many disagreements among the sisters is that Véra loves nature and would stay if she could, whereas Agathe is urbanized and plans to leave as soon as she can, even though her life in New York has been anything other than a bed of roses.

 

The book opens with Agathe’s observation that her childhood home and immediate surroundings look at once familiar, but are a tatterdemalion version of what she remembers. In any event, the die has been cast. The house has been sold and will be demolished as the value of land exceeds that of renovating the building. Agathe’s desire not to linger is bolstered by the fact that everything they want must be taken away within nine days before the bulldozers level everything. Agathe wants nothing from the house, but Véra is bent on saving way too many things.

 

It is a classic push-pull between a pragmatist and a sentimentalist. Try resolving that dispute via gestures, hastily scribbled notes, and messages Véra types on her phone. In essence, Agathe and Véra are sorting, but not sorting out. Among the things they can’t sort out are why their mother ran off when they were both girls, why Agathe promised to protect her sister but then abandoned her, and what will happen to Véra in nine days, though the latter bothers Agathe more than it does Véra. In the hands of a less confident and competent author, The Old Fire would have a Hallmark ending in which all disagreements melt in the face of an unearthed mutual love. Without resorting to spoilers, I will simply note that Dusapin seldom resorts to sentimentalism. Some “old fires” can’t be rekindled. Not to mention that Véra’s brain works better than Agathe thinks.

 

Dusapin has written an unusual work of fiction that has very little plot, a surfeit of action, no primary narrator, and contains more internalized thought than dialogue. It is a quiet book that is often sad, but is also a study in resiliency (or stubbornness–take your pick). Courtesy of her translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins, the book’s prose is clear and unadorned, yet evocative and poetic. It leaves us with questions such as those I’ve raised, plus one of how two people can see the same things differently. Some early readers have yearned for a longer book to resolve numerous issues; at 192 pages, The Old Fire is either a short novel or a long novella. In my mind, though, concision was a virtue. What can be said when there’s nothing left to say?

 

A trigger warning: One of the characters is asleep and awakes to find she is being penetrated. She finds this semi-romantic. Ouch! Romance or rape?

 

Rob Weir   

 

 

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book.