Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...planets discovered outside our solar system to nearly 50. Closer to home, this was the year they cloned a pig, approved an abortion pill and took saccharin off the list of known carcinogens. It was also the year that gene therapy, having shown promise in treating a pair of French "bubble boys," suffered its first casualty--a brave young patient named Jesse Gelsinger, who underwent the experimental gene transplant not to save himself but to help other youngsters suffering, as he had been, from congenital disorders...
...what a strange story one guest had to tell---of a great public intellectual, a Jew and survivor of Nazi death camps, who eventually became friends, long after the war, with a powerful French politician. They discussed literature, philosophy, metaphysics. Then late in the politician's life it came out that for a time during the Second World War the politician had worked in the Vichy government. It came out he had been a friend of a monstrous collaborator with the blood of many French Jews on his hands...
...painting what he knew, neither more nor less, he became the standard-bearer of visual truth to a generation of French intellectuals...
...snowy day, a woman named Vianne Rocher (Binoche) and her daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol) arrive in the staid if picturesque French village of Lansquenet. Their intent is to open a chocolate shop, the sensual products of which are bound to remind the locals that life has more to offer than churchgoing and spousal abuse. Their goodies place them in conflict with the rectitudinous mayor (Alfred Molina) but warm the chilled souls of various inhabitants (Judi Dench, Lena Olin, John Wood). Vianne eventually makes common romantic cause with a riverboat wanderer (Depp), who also scandalizes the town with his unsettled...
...look back in history to see that that humanity has survived its many travails over the past millennium. Furthermore, the predictions of the French priest Raoul Glaber that Satan would be unleashed upon us and that the great Apocalypse would arrive last January have not come true. We can also take comfort in what one of our forebears thought of the passage of the last millennium, one thousand years...