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Spectator
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Monaco, the people-watching paradise
I'm lying on a sun lounger in Monte Carlo and there are so many women with extended blonde hair, hornet-stung lips and bazooka breasts stuffed into tiny monogrammed bikinis that I can't distinguish between them. They make me feel as though I'm part of a different species. My battered copy of Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction and a sweating glass of champagne complete the scene. Like Bret, I'm drawn to the dark side of glamour, which means Monaco is a people-watching paradise. Along with the bazooka babes, ninety-something men also aren't in short supply. A leathery, wispy-chested man in that age category is slumped next to the pool, with a bandage on his foot, plasters up his arm and a wheelchair tucked away to the side. He is chain-smoking cigars and chugging beers. I fear his obit is due any minute, but what a way to go. One striking feature is the sheer number of newly installed British expats. With Labour's changes to non-dom status and the tax raids on private schools, can anyone be that surprised that our ultra-rich are fleeing to places like Monaco? Though I've heard there have been complaints from bored wives trapped in their new gilded cages abroad, missing the verve of British society, which nothing can ever replace. Poor Rachel Reeves. The left-wingers in her party want to bring in a wealth tax, which everyone with a brain knows will drive away even more high-earners, but she's too weak to rule it out. Ever since her horrific breakdown in the Commons, she's been singing for her supper in the City, with a desperate smile screwed to her face. Oh well, at least some of the expats seem to be enjoying their time here. I watch an English man with big gnashers devour an entire watermelon while casually transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars from one account to another on his laptop, which has a terrier drinking a cocktail as its background. A week before I flew to Monaco, I had a padel lesson as part of my attempt to ingratiate myself with the world's elite. Forget Wimbledon or even polo, these days it's all about padel in high-society land. Clare Stobart – of the haulage dynasty – took her helicopter to a club in Oxfordshire to meet me and we pranced around with a dashing Spanish instructor (they are always Spanish and always hot) firing balls at us. Goldman Sachs-type guys in caps battled it out on the next-door court while yummy mummies waited their turn. I've been a Francophile since my late grandmother, Anne, first told me stories of her summers in Paris. During the second world war, when she was wee, the family had hosted officers from the Polish tank regiment at home in Kelso. One of those officers, Romain, died in battle in France and was never forgotten by my family. One day at the end of the war there came a knock at the door. A Parisian woman in a powder-blue Dior suit asked to come in – her name was Agnès Chabrier. She claimed to be Romain's fiancée and wanted to see where he had been happy. As it turns out, Agnès was a fierce writer in the Saint Germain set. She released political manifestos under her own name (she wrote scathingly against the USSR, saying that 'When the Russians take Paris I'll be the first to hang from my balcony!') and potboilers under the name Daniel Gray. She became close to the family and invited Anne to spend summer with her in Paris, in her apartment on Boulevard Raspail. The characters my grandmother met there became my fairy tales: the Japanese woman in the kimono who came to tell of the horrors of Hiroshima; the Slav who put his gun on the mantelpiece; the Dior model on the train; the American soldiers celebrating Bastille Day. So began my lifelong pursuit of France and society (I once lived for a year on an oyster farm on Ile de Ré – but that is a story for another time). Monte Carlo, though, is more humorous than France, so extravagant is the richesse. At breakfast at the Hotel de Paris, I enjoy watching the super-rich on the terrace front row being attacked by hungry gulls. (The secret is to ask for a table a row or two back.) Schadenfreude is delicious. And hubris is punishable. On my final night, I request room service on my balcony and brush off the server's warning about those gulls – I want that sea view. So when, like harpies, they circle, swoop and attack, I flee screaming inside only to see my dinner be snatched up and the glasses smashed. I suppose it's only fair enough.
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sidelined: The QB and Me review – hot cheerleader meets star quarterback movie is streaming-age bubblegum
Dallas (Siena Agudong) is a hot cheerleader with dreams of auditioning for CalTech. Drayton (Noah Beck) is a cute star quarterback whose dad is adamant he follow in his footsteps and attend his alma mater with a football scholarship. Surely this very well-matched chalk and chalk couple will never overcome their complete lack of differences and get together? Only time will tell. A slickly made, nicely shot high-school movie adapted from a Wattpad story with an Instagram-ready cast, the biggest surprise here is James Van Der Beek popping up in a thankless role as the humourless dad. We know from The Rules of Attraction and Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 that Van Der Beek's tastes are on the edgier side, but don't tune in if you're expecting any subversive humour; this is a straightforward and edge-free romance for younger teens. The script is laden with examples of what execs will be hoping is authentic Gen Z argot, though lines such as 'I am sick and tired of your main character energy' sound like they've been plucked from A Handy Guide to Understanding Your Teen. Visually the film has a bit more to offer, effortlessly adopting the onscreen grammar of countless high-school movies before it, so we get all the slow-motion corridor walks and flawlessly executed cheer-squad routines we could hope for. It's all pleasant enough, in a glossy, wallpapery kind of way, but it's hard to get caught up in a plot with so few surprises and dialogue so relentlessly sincere. Frank Lloyd Wright famously described television as chewing gum for the eyes, but what's less discussed is that Henri Peyre, professor of French at Yale University, coined a similar phrase a little earlier in 1944, in relation to cinema: 'They dutifully chew their gum to keep from yawning, while absorbing the chewing gum for the eyes of the movies.' This applies here: in the era of streaming, there's a vast amount of ocular movie gum being pumped out, including this little piece. That's not even necessarily a bad thing: who doesn't love a stick of bubblegum every now and then? Still, we cannot live on gum alone – it's hard not to long for the bonafide hits of the high school genre, which manage to be be both bubblegumesque and have a flavour that lasts. Sidelined: The QB and Me is on digital platforms from 17 February.
