Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Once, I was asked to do a commercial for the razor company Gillette. The director met with me and another actor before the recording and showed us the film, describing its tone as “skate and thrash meets Beastie Boys.” (Since he was French, he pronounced “thrash” trash and “Boys” without the s, so it sounded funnier.) Gillette was moving into the youth market, he said, and targeting consumers who were buying their first razors. That’s why they were going with snowboarders and skaters and why the script’s dialogue featured lines like:

  “Are you looking for a thrashing shave?”

  “Word!”

  “The Gillette so and so rocks the burn and the chaff with a two-sided system that’ll not only blow your mind but give you that ultimate swag.”

  “Word!”

  During the take, while half-pipes and skate parks jumped off the screen, I rattled off the lines as best I could, “Cutting action whose razor edge or something or other won’t let you down,” in what I thought to be a Southern California surfer’s voice. I was excited to try a new accent. Too often I’m asked to produce what the French call “the mid-Atlantic,” an accent European clients say is in between British and American, something refined yet approachable, something you might think Julia Child or William F. Buckley used to speak. The French love the mid-Atlantic accent, but they have no idea what it really sounds like. I’ve never spoken into the microphone and had someone scream through the glass, “John, stop! Where is the mid-Atlantic accent?”

  During our recording, I noticed my coactor was having trouble with our back and forth. He couldn’t find a proper rhythm. His English was fine, but it was as if he’d never been in a situation like this before. He wasn’t jumping on the phrases like you should, or zinging me back with a convincing high five of “Dude totally!” Something smelled foreign to me, and after three takes I realized what it was. He was Australian, and struggling with the mid-Atlantic.

  The studio had given him the lion’s share of the dialogue. The man was laboring. “It’s Wahn ryezah for whan killah shayve.” I assumed, of course, the production company knew all this. They wouldn’t have hired an Australian not knowing the lead voice wasn’t American, would they? So I spoke up.

  “Should we switch and maybe I could try Mark’s role, just because I’m not sure it works with his Australian accent.”

  “Who’s Australian?” the recording studio voice came through our headsets.

  I pointed to Mark like a child would a classmate who’d convinced him to shoplift. Mark stared back at me, his eyes pleading for me to shut up, and I knew I’d blown it.

  “Mark, is this true?” said a scolding voice.

  “Yes,” Mark sighed, “I’m Australian.” He looked at me in squinted defeat as if to say I hope you’re happy!

  I wanted to die. I’d committed the unpardonable offense of voice-over etiquette, an etiquette I would have known to follow, had I done more voice-overs.

  “Let’s take five,” the voice in the headsets said, leaving Mark and me alone in an airless booth, both staring at the floor. Our phones were in our coats on the other side of the glass, so we couldn’t look at them to avoid each other’s eyes.

  “Sorry, dude,” I turned to him, still using my skater accent. “I didn’t know. I mean, I thought they knew, you know?”

  “No worries, mate,” Mark said. “You’re a cunt.”

  The voice on the headphones came back within minutes. “I think there’s been a mix-up, guys, and Mark, sorry, but we need to change voices. Now, John? Just so we’re clear. Are you American?”

  “Yes. I. Am,” I said proudly, waving to Mark as he left the booth. I’d already forgotten what had transpired and turned back to the client smiling. “Do you need me to do both versions now?”

  Once I was asked to dub John McEnroe’s voice for the car manufacturer Seat. In the film, McEnroe had parked his car illegally. And since he didn’t have a Seat (a smaller car), his vehicle stretched beyond the marked lines, and a cop was issuing him a ticket. Of course, and in classic McEnroe fashion, the tennis star argued with the police officer, shouting at him “But it’s on the line! Look! It’s on the line!”

  The film, I admit, was pretty funny, but the production company didn’t want McEnroe’s lines in English. They wanted him to speak French with a classic twangy American accent. So, for close to an hour, I watched the prompter and repeated the same line in poorly pronounced French, trying to match John McEnroe’s enraged lips as much as possible. “C’était sur la ligne!! Regardez! C’est sur la ligne!!”

  After twenty takes, I could tell the client still wasn’t happy, so I offered up an idea.

  “Perhaps it would be better if you just kept the English version and subtitled it. It might even be funnier to watch McEnroe interact with the policeman.”

  There was silence in the booth. Then one of the producers said, “C’est pas con” (That’s not completely stupid), which I quickly took as a compliment. French has become so sarcastic and negative nowadays that “not insanely moronic” is actually more positive than “c’est vraiment du génie!” (that’s genius), which, of course, means the opposite, that you’re a total idiot. I sincerely think I was the first person in the production to ever evoke this possibility. Within minutes, the client told me I was done for the day and that I could leave. And thus I became the first voice-over person to ever fire himself.

  * * *

  Anaïs also does voice-overs, and we were hired as a duo once to translate and dub into French a series of For Dummies films, namely Pilates for Dummies and Yoga for Dummies. The plan was that I’d first translate the English into French, then Anaïs would translate my French into real French. Afterward, Anaïs would record the scripts in a studio. The producer hired us because we were cheaper than the competition (professionals who knew how much to properly bid). Plus, he felt a husband-and-wife team would work well together, which let me know loud and clear that this man had never been married.

  We fought horribly throughout the production process. Anaïs is a perfectionist, and she insisted on finding the exact translation for every phrase. For example, with “build the core,” she smelled a rat when I tried to sneak in a literal translation, “Construisez le core.”

  “But that doesn’t mean anything!” she yelled, ordering me to fetch the Robert-Collins dictionary.

  “But it doesn’t mean anything in English, either!” I yelled back. “And why do we have to be so thorough anyway,” I’d scream. “It’s fucking Pilates for Dummies!”

  But she was right. A job is a job. And I reminded her of that when she had to record the French voice-over, her enthusiasm waning each time she was forced to mimic a peppy American woman in spandex shouting into the microphone, “Are you ready to work those rock-hard abs?”

  “Yes we are!” I’d yell to Anaïs behind the glass.

  * * *

  A producer who’d read some of my magazine pieces contacted me with an idea. He wanted to create an animation series based on talking sausages. Yup, sausages that talk. And since sausages differ in length and color and texture, he told me, we already had a varied cast. The idea was to film a bunch of them on a green screen, superimpose just the actors’ lips onto the sausages, insert a background like a high school gym or office and let the hijinks ensue. The idea seemed easy enough. Comedy Central had even done something similar with sock puppets, so pourquoi pas?

  The problem, this time, was me. I tried to be too clever. The producers wanted typecast characters for a dumbed-down audience, meaning the merguez sausage might be Arabic and speak in Parisian slang. The frankfurter might have a German accent and wear lederhosen, and the kielbasa would be Polish and a plumber. Instead, I treated the sausages as if they were real people with complex lives. One was an Ikea bed salesman who laced his sales pitches with crude sexual innuendo. There was a sausage named Dan, who always had to tell you during a party that the party you w
ere both at was awesome. There was a sausage who speed dated but was paranoid the person across from him had been sent by his ex. Like the Chamarée people, the producers wanted an American to write the series, just not this American. The pilot was never picked up. However, five years later, while in the subway, I noticed a poster for a movie called Sausage Party produced by the actor Seth Rogen. Had Seth seen my pilot? Probably not. And I’d have to let this all roll off my back, despite the stream of congratulatory emails I received, now that “my sausage project” had finally gotten picked up.

  * * *

  When I tell people I live in France and write for Vanity Fair, they assume I followed the Medill School of Journalism, local paper, assistant editor, editor, contributor trajectory, toiling in the bowels of Condé Nast. It’s been everything but that. I took work where I could find it, knowing it would pay off not just immediately in terms of money, but down the line, too, in one form or another, just as long as I jotted it all down in a journal.

  There’s something liberating about being an immigrant, I’ve found. You’re defined just by that—being an immigrant. You’re not a journalist or an actor or a translator or a voice for an exercise video. In the States, it would hurt me to my soul when I catered weddings or scooped ice cream. “I have a college education!” I’d scream in my head. “I took poli-sci!” In France, who cares? Embracing ambivalence has been comforting. In a land not my own, I really could choose my own adventure and aliases.

  And don’t worry. When my friends in the States ask me what I’m up to nowadays, I’m quick to remind them of lots. “Even if you haven’t heard about me here,” I tell them, “I’m pretty huge in France.”

  Voulez-Vous Think Tank Avec Moi?

  When my parents and I took our first family trip to Europe, we visited Paris and Amsterdam, Rome, and Venice, and in the manner most Americans do—meaning over the course of ten days. At the time, I thought it was normal to run in and out of the Louvre drive-by photographing the Mona Lisa, then dashing through the Tuileries Gardens to grab a seat on a bateau mouche to be whisked past the Eiffel Tower so we could catch the overnight train leaving for Marseilles that evening.

  Like any nine-year-old traveling American, I was hard to please. Going to Europe hadn’t been my idea, and although I went through the motions and aped interest, my mind was focused more on playing Galaga and Pac-Man inside random cafés than sitting outside en terrasse with my parents. I preferred feeding the pigeons at Piazza San Marco to actually visiting the Piazza San Marco.

  But the one time I was floored and shaken to my core by Europe was when we visited Cassis, a charming seaside town near Marseilles. Nestled between two cliffs, its beach part of a rocky stretch of national park coastline called Les Calanques, Cassis is the kind of place you’ve seen reproduced in Matisse paintings: charming white and turquoise boats bouncing in the harbor, older men playing bocci in low-cut Speedos, café regulars sprawled over chairs with their shirts opened, chests tanned, and gold chains sparkling in the sun, while the Pastis flows like a ruptured water main.

  I’d been watching this scene from my perch next to the beach’s public changing booths, waiting for my parents to arrive, wondering if by any chance there might be a sit-down Space Invaders in one of the cafés. Just then, an adult brunette waltzed by wearing sunglasses and a headscarf, a bikini bottom, and no top. Before my mouth could register a gawk, I found myself at arm’s length from two exposed breasts.

  The woman was on her way to the bathroom. She shut the door behind her, leaving me dumbfounded. For me, it was like spotting a giant squid, something that in nature humans rarely get to see, and yet here I was watching it live. And what was nuts was that to leave the restroom this woman was going to reappear, likely still topless.

  By then, my parents had also surfaced, holding towels and a picnic, bitching as they had the whole trip that we didn’t have much time to lose if we wanted to visit the Château d’If prison and the Vieux-Port de Marseille and see where Gene Hackman filmed The French Connection. I limped along reluctantly, knowing nobody at home would believe my story; why hadn’t I thought to take a photo? It wasn’t until I tossed my towel down and looked toward the waves that I realized the woman in the bathroom was not an outlier. A sea of humanity was lying down or standing up right next to me, all of them topless.

  Suddenly everything went silent for me. A Steadicam zoom-in of my face would have revealed a stunned-looking boy staring straight ahead at the water as if he’d witnessed a shark attack. I was both scared and embarrassed, not just because everyone was naked, but because I worried that they might notice me staring. Plus, I had my parents to consider. Neither had had anything to do with the sexual revolution. They’d grown up in the prim fifties and listened to Count Basie. My mother had gone to Vassar and called dogshit “dog dirt,” and when she drank too much at a party, she’d claim the next day she’d been “overserved.” They weren’t prudes, but they definitely weren’t libertines, either, and when they were in my presence, anything sexual onscreen or in real life only caused fussing and fidgeting on their end as well as mine.

  I jumped into the water to collect my bearings, sinking to eye-level depth where I could subtly look back at the sand and all of the topless women on it. There in the cool Mediterranean Sea, the unthinkable soon became banal, the exotique eventually quotidien. Within a half hour I was strolling down the beach in my Ferrari fold-up glasses, watching half-naked women of all ages promenade past me, smiling stupidly at my dumb fucking luck.

  And it was during this stroll, with Rod Stewart crackling inside some beachside café nearby, that the purpose of France hit me: You could actually live like this. It was legal. And for a nine-year-old, the realization wasn’t framed in a repressed or unchained context, or as Latin versus Puritan, but just as a rock-and-roll celebration of life, one expressed through sex.

  The boy came home changed that summer. My trip to France gave me the impression I was more sexually advanced than my peers. When they riffled through Playboy magazine and showed me centerfolds up in their attic, I’d shrug with blasé disdain as if to say “whatever.” Sex didn’t need to be snuck around on or leered at in private. It was out there for everyone to see on a tiny beach in a country far across the sea. And one day, I promised them and myself, I’d live there and prosper and have all the sex I wanted.

  * * *

  When I returned to France as an adult, I was immediately disappointed that it wasn’t as I’d so vividly remembered: It was gray, cramped, and the people weren’t as topless as I wanted them to be. I was only at the baggage claim of Charles de Gaulle Airport, but still.

  Ever since that fateful trip to Cassis, I’d been building France up in my head as a hedonistic land of transgression, mythologizing French women to the point of fetishism. Unlike my friends who dreamed about Michelle Pfeiffer or Kim Basinger or Farrah Fawcett, I was more into French actresses such as Anne Parillaud, who’d starred in the eighties Luc Besson thriller La Femme Nikita or Béatrice Dalle from the bleak movie Betty Blue, films I’d seen on video or in French class. In fact, the only American actress I did find sexy was Nasstassja Kinski, but she wasn’t even American, was she?

  During college and afterward, I found myself dating French women, but at the time, I was never allowed to call it a date, at least not to their faces. For them, the entire institution of “dating” was fraudulent. They were fine with getting a drink with you, but under one condition: Nothing could be formally organized. They wanted spontaneity, as if we both had stumbled on the same sushi restaurant in the East Village at the same time, and since we were both there, hell, we might as well share a table, right?

  They also didn’t want a lot of questions thrown their way. Asking them where they were from or what they did for a living wasn’t showing interest. It was conducting an interview. And there was nothing more wet-blankety and romance-killing for a French woman than to be asked on a date, and asked questions on t
hat date.

  Whereas they’d insist on ambiguity during the meet-and-greet process, they were brutally up front as to what would happen later on sexually if they found you appealing. These French women didn’t mess around. All of the jumping through hoops (the first date, the dinner, then the invite over to meet friends, then the weekend together) American women pulled, French women found childish and a waste of time. For them, sleeping with the person wasn’t the big deal; it was poetic and impromptu. And once a French woman decided to go there with you, she was all in, which sometimes meant doing it on the first date (which you weren’t allowed to call a date). Afterward, though, she was your woman and you were her man, and it wasn’t pushy for her to make plans to move in. Her approach to dating was a mix of sexual liberty and old-country tradition. The act of sleeping with someone was taken super seriously, and they weren’t buying the convenient out that I and many of my American friends (men and women both) had perfected of “wanting to keep our space” or “take things slow.”

  * * *

  All of this may sound tame in the age of Tinder, but for me, the French woman’s approach to sex was pretty out there. And now that I was living in the country where these women were made, the stuff I saw on a daily basis only confirmed my preconceptions.

  On TV, there were French commercials flashing nudity to sell shower gels. The equivalents of US Weekly featured celebs, not topless, but bottomless, and Paris pharmacies sold cellulite cream the old-fashioned way, by placing a giant poster of an arched back and a woman’s ass with a thong in the window. My dreary airport arrival had been the exception, I realized, and as I passed a club in the Quartier Pigalle named Sexodrome, my preconceptions were confirmed.