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rabid dog. But just a minute, everyone said, what about
Amélie
? That was funny. (It was.) And
Delicatessen
, that was funny too. (It was.) And as Himself said, the French might make loads of light-hearted stuff that we never see. What do we know about what they do in the privacy of their own country?
    Then, you know, once I thought about it, I realized there’s a fair bit of sex in
Last Chance Saloon
. And one of the characters, Tara, smokes a lot –
and
is on an eternal quest to find genuine long-last lipstick. And although it’s a comedy, it’s a comedy about a young man who gets cancer. Plenty of opportunity to muse on la vie versus la mort. Yes, I was beginning to understand.
    So off Himself and myself went to France (any excuse) and showed up at a massive film studio in a Parisian suburb. They’d said we could come at any time of the day but we didn’t want to presume we were invited for lunch, so we calculated that the optimum arrival time would be around4 p.m. This is the hour when workers of the world unite, by downing their tools and having a KitKat Chunky and a can of Lilt (or local equivalent).
    But when we arrived, filming was still underway so, through cables and monitors and tons of people, we picked our way onto the set – and all of a sudden I nearly keeled over with shock. The actress playing Katherine looked
exactly
as I had imagined her when I wrote her: very beautiful in a pure, innocent sort of way. It was the spookiest feeling – for a moment it felt as if I had conjured her up, that she was only real because I’d imagined her. And the actress playing Tara was ‘my’ Tara, she totally embodied her spirit. As for the man playing the book’s egomaniac actor, Lorcan Larkin, he’d had his name changed to Leo (not too many French Lorcans, I suppose) and his long red hair was now short and dark. But swaggering about in a long leather coat and cowboy boots, he managed to be both sexy and repellent, just as I’d always visualized him.
    I stood in the shadows, watching the scene, and I had a second shock – I knew this! The dialogue was exactly as I had written it. (But in French.) This might seem like a total no-brainer but actually, very often, all a film adaptation has in common with the source book is the title.
    The spirit of my book had been captured exactly – even the smaller characters were perfect. It was all very moving and, to my mortification, I began to cry. Luckily not in a big, shoulder-shaking extravaganza of emotion – I didn’t make a complete gom of myself – just in an eye-filling, discreet-sniffy kind of way. Bad enough, though.
    Then the director yelled, ‘Coupe!’ (no, really, she did, it was gorgeous – so
French
) and the glad-handing began. Whenwe’d bonjoured ourselves blue in the face, the long-awaited moment finally arrived: we were offered ‘refreshments’. Himself and myself exchanged a flicker. Easy now. No dribbling. No running. Act nonchalant. But to our phenomenal surprise, all there was to eat were sweets. French sweets, which meant, of course, that they were superior to any other sweets, but nothing like the gourmet’s smorgasbord we’d fantasized about.
    Some time later, in the back of the taxi as we drove away, Himself said, ‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand.’
    ‘The food?’ I said. ‘I know!’
    ‘Not the food. I just don’t understand how none of the girls got their kit off.’ Then he thought about it further. ‘You know what? None of them were even smoking!’
    He was right and I was seized by a sudden, dreadful suspicion – no lovely food, no nudity, no Gauloises – had all of this been a big elaborate hoax? A reality TV con-job?
    After several seconds of stricken silence, Himself said, like a drowning man clutching an armband, ‘Tara’s lipstick was very red, though.’
    Yes, I agreed, Tara’s lipstick had been very red. Extremely red. Possibly the reddest lipstick I’d ever seen.
    And, at that, we cheered up