Discover Top Posts Tagged with #the cid

Deep in my enemy I find the lover;

Pierre Corneille, The Cid (tr. by A.S. Kline), 1636

#pierre corneille #the cid #french literature #drama #literature

5 episodes later I am pretty pleased with what camw out!! There is obvs Stuff, like 1 gratuituous sex scene with an absolute stereotype and another stereotype making the rounds (if a cool one at least), but other than that!!! Its good! I see it all!!!

#el cid #el cid amazon #the cid

Have you watched the short Cid Story with Noémie Merlant? I'm assuming it's a love triangle between 2 women and a man that ends up with murder? It's what I can surmise being a non-French speaker. It's easy to say that it has a lesbian trope (LGBTQ people being violent murderers), but it would be unfair to say that when I don't even know what the dialogue is about. What are your thoughts? P.S. Thank you for all your translations - especially the ones for the French released Portrait DVD. ❤

For those who are wondering what we are talking about, you can watch the short movie here (the password is rwsrws).

Okay so i guess that short movie is hard to understand for non french people haha. But Le Cid is a very famous tragedy written by Pierre Corneille in the 17th century. And i think I have to explain the play before explaining that short film.

I’m so bad at summaries please stick with me, tragedies are so fucking complicated and hard to explain and it’s gonna be very long lmao.

Basically the story is about two dudes, Don Sanche and Don Rodrigue who are fighting for the hand of Chimène. Chimène prefers to marry Rodrigue. But Chimène’s father (Gomes) kills Rodrigue’s father (Diègue) because of some conflict (i believe Diegue got the position of Governor that Gomes wanted badly and he got jealous and killed him… men’s ego smh).

So here comes the problems…. Rodrigue has to defend his father’s honor and so he must kill Chimène’s father to avenge his death, even though that means that he’ll break his lover’s heart. But anyway he still kills Chimène’s father. And so Chimène can’t marry him anymore obviously and she’s looking for a man who would kill Rodrigue to avenge his father’s death. And she promises to marry whoever kills him. And so Sanche,who wants to marry her, says he’ll do it. But he fails miserably and Rodrigue is still alive. And Chimène realizes that she still loves Rodrigue even after what he did but still can’t forgive him for what he did so she still won’t marry him.

So basically that’s the story.

In the short film Noémie plays Chimène and Carolina (the other actress) plays Elvire, who in the play is Chimène’s governess. And when you read the play you can see that Elvire has a kind of fascination for Chimène, and it’s a bit ambiguous. And so the director of the short movie is playing with that ambiguity and gave another version/ a sequel to the story where Chimène and Elvire have a love story together and Elvire decides to kill Rodrigue to defend Chimène’s honor, the woman she loves.

And the scene they are doing in the short movie is the original text of the Act III, scene III of the play, that you can find here (in french though). That’s why Noémie is sounding quite dramatic when she talks haha.

But anyway, as you can understand it now, this has nothing to do with showing lgbtq people being violent for no reason haha. It’s actually about making a minor female character quite badass and about creating a lesbian love story in an classical play that doesn’t have one haha.