Opinion: Dear Hollywood

Dear Hollywood,

I’m leaving you. I’ve met someone. Something. It’s over.

Do you remember when I went to Paris last year? On my last night in the city, there was a downpour and I stumbled into the dark embrace of Studio 28 in Montmartre. I collided with a strong, silent type in the box office; a film I’d never heard of called The Artist. It reminded me of you, in your youth, at your best. I didn’t tell you when I got home. I know how jealous you can get. Remember Indecent Proposal?

You just don’t know me anymore, Hollywood. You expect me to have a brood of female friends who titter about shoes and shriek over cocktails. Your heroines work in media, or with clothes, or with pictures of clothes. They are heterosexual, monogamous, beautiful and dull.

Did you know that a French romantic heroine can be happy being a waitress, or a hairdresser, or a whore? She doesn’t need to excuse her lifestyle with apologistic aspirations involving secret talents or evening classes. She might have cropped hair and a tattoo on her neck, like Audrey Tautou in Beautiful Lies, or a giant gap in her teeth like Vanessa Paradis. She can be painfully naïve, with the simple ambition to work in an insurance office, for a dashing chauvinist, as Déborah François in Populaire.

It turns out, Hollywood, a man may be perfectly desirable, even if he isn’t a chunk of smirking, sculpted muscle. He can be balding with sweaty hands, like François Damiens in Delicacy. He might be a dwarf, like Dominique Pinon in Delicatessen. He may even possess the fat, gnarled face of Gerard Depardieu. While you were spending all those hours posing homogenous, supple mannequins like Ryan Reynolds and Katherine Heigl back to back, you forgot that love takes other forms. You may well love if you are middle-aged, as Catherine Deneuve does in Potiche, or if you are gay, as in La cage aux folles. You may even love platonically, as Omar Sy and François Cluzet do in Untouchable.

I want to be clear about this, Hollywood. You won’t win me back by commandeering a moped and weaving through traffic. And you can’t just chase people through airport security. There are invasive, unlubricated consequences. If you appear on my lawn in six months wielding a blaring stereo, the only intimacy to be gained will be in the arms of a straightjacket, upon the couch of a mental health professional. You need to learn to move on.

I know you’ll be okay, Hollywood. Remember, for every Charlie St. Cloud, there is a Silver Linings Playbook.