All names have been changed, and some details fictionalized, to protect the guilty.

Thirteen kilometers from Omaha Beach sits a house perched on a bluff looking North, as it has for over a century, toward the English Channel. It weathered two world wars. When bombed in 1944, the house benefited from state funded renovations to the tune of a new wing that expanded the already impressive property.

The house is, as one might imagine, a Nancy Meyers fantasy – green shutters that cover poorly insulated glass doors (it is, after all, a summer property), a thatched roof over two stories with sea views, and grounds made no less impressive by France’s socialist requirements to provide access to those who roam.

The warm weather estate owned by a single family and inherited by one generation after another for those 100 years is situated in a town called Commes, pronounced “cum”, and ironically, in the three days and nights spent overlooking the channel, Commes is the only thing its next inheritor, Laurent, and I did not do.

The sky was impossibly blue and stretched without end over a city falling fast into the cold embrace of Autumn.

It was October in Paris and I stood outside of Jeu de Paume in a long line of visitors who were using the opportunity to enjoy one last cigarette before heading into the dual exhibition featuring Chantal Akerman upstairs and Tina Barney below.

Agnes paced back and forth on the phone 20 meters away. Parisian-born and educated in Connecticut, she was back in France after eight years pounding the pavement as an independent film producer in Brooklyn and she was unleashing an enviable force on the French entertainment industry.

Vanya arrived just as Agnes closed a deal, locking her phone which she decisively installed in her purse. We shuffled through the entrance one at a time shedding our warm layers in unison and locking them away in a clear cubby in the basement, depositing the 2 euro coin required to lock and which the locker promised to return upon retrieval.

We wandered the exhibit, awash in New Wave angst. I admired the sheer breadth of Akerman’s oeuvre and wondered, is it even possible to produce as prolifically today? Are the myriad constraints, financial, political, logistical, insurmountable for a filmmaker with that much to say and urban rent to pay? The thought alone gave me a headache.

When Laurent sat next to me at a tiny square table in the museum’s very own Rose Bakery, it was as if I could see into the future. He arrived disheveled and two hours late, and I had the feeling that I had already met him, even though I knew I hadn’t.

He reminded me of one of my great loves from the past, an echo from a previous life over a decade and an ocean away. Maybe it was the familiarity that drew me to him, the flags were red but the fact that I could recognize them was comforting.

I looked at his sad face, his droopy, puffy eyes that scanned slowly and blinked with a heavy existential exhaustion, while catching errant words as he told Vanya, in French, how he’d lost his passport at the wedding they’d just attended in Cinque Terre and therefore was stuck in Paris even though he should be in New York but that before leaving he had already rented his apartment, which he owned, in the 8th arrondissement which is why he was currently staying at his sister’s in the 6th.

In short, he was a mess. I remember thinking, “this will end badly.”

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