Bouton de Rose

That’s French for rosebud. I had an oddly, almost surrealistically “American” evening the other night. First, a friend and I went to Breakfast in America, or BIA, as it is abbreviated – a diner specializing in omelets, French toast, pancakes, and the usual greasy spoon fare. It is essentially an “American” restaurant – just as in America we have Chinese, Italian, and Mexican restaurants. But just like those sorts of restaurants, they are far from the real thing. First of all, my friend Matthew and I sat outside. That would never happen at any American diner that I know of. My omelet, while tasty, was lacking in grease – and my home fries weren’t darkened and caramelized, as most seem to be in America. Matthew ordered chocolate milk, and the waiter didn’t understand what it was. “You want milk, with chocolate in it?” “Yes.” “Hot chocolate?”
“No.” He ended up getting milk with hot chocolate mix stirred into it. For dinner he had French toast (in French, “pain perdu aux americains” – “The Americans' lost bread”), which came with little slices of banana on top. Perhaps too fancy a relish for American diner food, but I will let you decide that.

After eating at the American restaurant, we went to a cinema that just happened to be showing Citizen Kane, with French subtitles. I had never seen Citizen Kane all the way through, at least until that night. It’s quite an amazing movie, because it seems to say so much about America and the American personality. While watching, I could only wander what the mostly French audience thought with their quite inordinate subtitles. Citizen Kane captures the great emptiness and danger of the American dream so very well, in addition to the snappiness of the American dialect – and yet, in French, it seemed so lost. I will admit I felt a bit homesick watching the movie, with its evocations of individualism and reckless spending and extravagance. The world was truly our oyster for a few years between the wars, I think, and maybe while Europe was annoyed that we were buying its precious artwork and running drunken through its streets, we were contributing to the economy after all. But Citizen Kane has so much more to say than that – about perceived notions of American generosity, about wealth, about ambition…I could write on it for a long time, I think. Yet I understand now its importance in cinema, and I find it vaguely ironic that it could never appear clearer to me than when I was in a foreign country where the story of a poor farm boy-cum-millionaire who turns his back on the banker who raises him seems anything but likely.