A cult movie star and a tank

My friend Morgan and I have each been having unusually frequent encounters of late with probably one of the most cult movie stars in the world, one Lou Castel, a Colombian-born Italian possessed of one of the highest foreheads in the movies and a weirdly natural tonsure that has enabled him to play unsettling, sometimes disturbed individuals ever since he started off in his first film, Marco Bellochio's Fists in the Pockets by killing off, one by one, every member of his own family. A nice juicy role for the then-22-year-old to get his teeth into.

In recent years Lou has been living in Paris and our interest in him was recently sparked by seeing him in one of his more recent films, Joseph Mordor's El Cantor at the MK2 Beaubourg. Within a week Morgan had spotted him at la FEMIS, the main Parisian film school and last week I encountered him on rue de la main d'or in the 11th, while sneakily puffing on a joint with some friends. The encounters were rounded off, with pleasing symmetry last night, again at the MK2 Beaubourg, when Signor Castel sat in front of us at a screening of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger. Maybe he had been there all along but we just didn't notice...

I had to take a detour to get home on my bike this afternoon as the bottom of the street was blocked off by a tank (yes, the sort they use in wartime). I love Bastille Day and its shameless displays of the military strength of the Fifth Republic. Shame I didn't have a camera on me...