Last weekend, the Netflix home page suggested I would be interested in something called Cat and Dog, with a featured image of a cartoon cat in peril. I shrugged and kept scrolling—and further down on the page, it was recommended to me again. What was this thing, and why was Netflix so certain I needed to know about it?
So I clicked, and I discovered that its original title is not Cat and Dog but Chien et chat. Netflix knows me pretty well after all.
Did I really want to watch a silly movie for kids involving live-action humans and animated pets? If it were made in English, it would have gotten a pass from me, but I will watch practically anything in French (or Spanish, or Irish).
There’s not much I liked about Cat and Dog—the humor relies on a puppy swallowing a precious gem and wearing a diaper for the rest of the movie; I am not the target audience for this—yet I had a smile on my face the whole time.
As a teenager learning French at school in the ’90s, I was desperate for films, books, and music in the language I was coming to love. Aside from occasional opera productions on PBS, I had no easy access to French-language media. At one point, I requested a catalog of French books and CDs through the mail and ordered a few items based on their one-line descriptions. (How did I know such a catalog existed? I don’t remember.) Mylène Farmer’s music didn’t quite line up with my taste, but that didn’t matter; it was new music, in French, and I had it in my possession, so I became obsessed with it. I haven’t listened to her in years, but I’m bopping around in my office chair and stage-whispering the lyrics to “Alice” as I write this.
That’s how I know my younger self would have been thrilled by Cat and Dog. A movie with current slang showing up in my house a month after its release in France would have been a mind-blowing turn of events. It reminded me of my high school students who binge-watched Miraculous Ladybug several years ago—a habit that was more beneficial to them than watching a bunch of highbrow films would likely have been. Access to fun, relaxing entertainment of their choosing in the target language can have an outsized impact on learners’ skills and motivation, and I hope teen language learners today are enjoying all the goofy kids’ programming they can handle.
A Humble Suggestion
In each newsletter, I’ll offer at least one recommendation for your reading, watching, or listening pleasure. This time around: two new debut novels I enjoyed for very different reasons.
Set in the early 1950s, Rowan Beaird’s The Divorcées follows a young Illinois housewife to a Reno “divorce ranch,” where women from all over the United States spend six weeks establishing Nevada residency in order to obtain a divorce. Lois plans to pass the time swimming in the pool and reading novels, but when she sees her fellow guests spending long evenings at the local bars and casinos, she gets swept up into their world and begins taking risks she could never have imagined. Parts of the novel are as quiet as its protagonist, and the pace may be too slow for some readers’ tastes, but for me, those elements of the book only make Lois’s ultimate assertion of her independence more compelling.
In Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, eight translators travel to a remote village in Poland, where they plan to stay in the home of a revered author while translating her latest masterpiece into their respective languages. But when the author disappears, the translators’ personality conflicts and long-held grudges hinder both the investigation into her whereabouts and their progress on the translations. Extinction, we are told, is the English translation of the Argentinean translator’s Polish-language autofiction about these events—but the translator is one of the main characters, and she does not like the way she is portrayed. It’s a tough book to categorize—a satisfying mystery overlaid with snarky workplace comedy and meditations on the nature of language, art, and national identity—but it’s delightful throughout.
Here, Look at My Cats
The world is a mess, and you might welcome a pleasant distraction. For what it’s worth—and I suspect it’s worth extra on National Respect Your Cat Day—here are my cats.
Laura