Today’s trip along the coast took us to Menton on the border of Italy. We wanted to get away from busy promenades and we succeeded. Menton has all the attributes of a French Riviera town minus the crowd attractions of a famous casino, cathedral, or film festival.
It does have the Jean Cocteau museum in a former fort at the base of a sea wall called “the Bastion.”
Right now this is sort of a makeshift museum since the major portion of the Cocteau collection has been in a larger more architecturally interesting building that was damaged by a storm in autumn 2018. It hasn’t opened since then because of ongoing litigation about the artwork that was destroyed when the basement flooded.
Approaching the Bastion I saw an empty bus parked on the street and worried that a tiny museum hosting a large tour means we haven’t escaped the crowds after all. I was a little puzzled that Cocteau might be a big draw since most of his poetry and plays have been forgotten, but his surrealist short film, “The Blood of a Poet” was as groundbreaking as Bunuel and Dali’s “Andalusian Dog,” and along with his lyrical “Beauty and the Beast” I imagine they’re still taught as film classics. So I was prepared to squiggle through a swarm of film buffs (fresh from a select screening of surrealist work up the coast in Cannes). But the vacant tour bus turned out to be an objet d’art mocking the empty Cocteau museum. The size of an attic apartment, it was really more of a gallery of drawings with snippets of a timeline of his life. We were done with our visit in less than twenty minutes.
When we left the museum to have coffee and walk on the sea wall, I kept thinking what a remarkable life Cocteau had led knowing Proust, Collette, Gide, and Picasso and having collaborated with Apollinaire, Diagheliv, Erik Satie, and Stravinsky. Somebody should do a movie on his life (Ken Russell come back from the dead!) with Alan Cummings playing the part.
Walking the sea wall was fine, but what would a day on the Coté d’Azur be without a climb? Ella saw a church rising out of hills and suddenly we were pilgrims.
And above the church, after winding through narrow medieval streets, we found—pause for the excitement—an old graveyard.
With a great view.
Descending from the sky high cemetery, I had to pause and admire this nameplate on a door.
Cocteau, we already miss you! What would you have come up with if you had a film produced called, “Dr. Strangio”? Played by Gary Oldman, the devious doctor selects his victims from tourists shattered by their losses at the Monte Carlo casino, and they return from their vacations in a trancelike state as Manchurian candidates waiting to be activated for evil purposes by a certain playing card. Okay, so maybe it’s a collaboration between John Frankenheimer and Cocteau. However the tale is told, it will take James Bond hunting down the catalyst card to save the day.