The self-evidently posh US publication Elite Traveler (ooh, get you) has just awarded the title of best eating-out city in the world to London. Yes, ahead of Paris or New York. Their selection is a bit silly and ludicrously high-end, but it’s a far cry from the days when we were derided for our dining even more than for our dentistry.

Note they say “London”, though, not the UK. Sorry, but I’m saying it again: with a bunch of notable exceptions, eating out on our sceptred isle is still something of a lottery, one where the winning numbers are 3663. Doesn’t mean anything to you? That’s because it’s a restaurant biz grubby little secret, a massive “foodservices” company that, with its cohort, Brakes, is likely to be responsible for the “BBQ pulled pork with jalapeño peppers”, “lamb rogan josh” or “sticky toffee pudding” that turn up on our plates in restaurants the length of the country and that you might have fondly imagined were made on the premises. Yes, their vans criss-cross the capital, too, but at least big city dwellers have the luxury of choice.

Look at their websites, spouting stuff such as “all the beautiful dishes that your customers will love, but unfortunately take hours to prepare and cook properly”. (That’s from the Pub Food Company, by the way.) The Three Mariners at Oare and the Anchor in Faversham, both run by Claire Houlihan with her partner, the Average White Band‘s Hamish Stuart, both did it properly, without recourse to this kind of cheating. This new baby in Tankerton is their first actual restaurant as opposed to pub – and another shining example of how to do things right.

I’m not going to pretend the East Coast Dining Room offers anything groundbreaking – you’ll not find molecular pyrotechnics or much that’s gaspworthy. Few are going to wax poetic about soup, but in chef Ryan Smith’s hands (he’s ex-the Sportsman in Seasalter, a top CV entry, and has followed Claire from the Anchor), this simple pleasure transforms into something luxurious: emerald spring peas with homemade smoky bacon and parmesan straws, maybe; or spiced butternut squash with shortcakes of roquefort.

This sense of getting the most out of fine ingredients pervades the menu. Fat quails crammed into casseroles with good red wine and aromatics, then pot-roasted; salt cod whipped into fried buñuelos (they call them “balls”; no fancy-schmancy stuff here) with a fiercely garlicky aïoli. There’s a sloppy-looking plate of burrata and aubergine puree, but the flavours are pure: blasts of rosemary and sweet cream.

There are roasts on Sunday, and pearly slabs of local fish. It’s not flawless by any means – rock-hard “pavlova” and dreary kedgeree – but the heart is there. Even the stupidly good-value set lunch doesn’t stint on the produce: a duck’s egg oozes its rich yolk over a chard-crowned rösti, and the blobs of sauce are garlic and truffle. All the breads, puddings and ice-creams (the raspberry vodka is sharp and lush) are made in-house. And the short wine list is a belter – a lovely, fragrant Trimbach pinot gris, for instance, with an ungreedy markup.

The East Coast Dining Room is a plain little place, a white-painted shopfront with fashionable, battleship-grey interior and quirky textiles on modernist chairs. But it doesn’t need to drag itself up in anything too try-hard: its audience is happy with the good cooking and genuine welcome. This is the kind of place where customers become regulars and then friends. It has that rare quality: integrity.

Tankerton may be a funny, off-piste little place, satellite to groovier Whitstable, but it’s also home to the redoutable Jo-Jo’s, a joint that will always have a place in my heart for charging a higher corkage for wine from Tesco. Tiny town, two restaurants worth travelling for, not a pre-portioned ham hock terrine in sight – take that, all you bastards who flog us mass-produced platefuls as if they were homemade.

• East Coast Dining Room, 101 Tankerton Road, Whitstable, Kent, 01227 281180. Open lunch Wed-Sun, noon-3pm (4pm Sun); dinner Thurs, Fri & Sat, 6.30-9.30pm. Meal with drinks, about £35 a head.

Food 7/10
Atmosphere 7/10
Value for money 8/10

spiel

Which is why an Italian woman is suing for the €800,000 she says is due to her father, who she claims played those notes for Morricone but never received full credit.

Maria Rucher says her father, Pino Rucher, who died 17 years ago, played solos on the soundtracks of all three of Leone’s seminal westerns starring Clint Eastwood – A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly – which were made by the Italian director between 1964 and 1966. She first approached three other Italian guitarists to challenge their claims to have worked on the soundtracks, but was rebuffed by all three.

Moreover, the trio of musicians – Enrico Ciacci, Alessandro Alessandroni and Bruno Battisti D’Amario – then began to argue among themselves over who played what, wrote the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Rucher then took her claim to Morricone, but La Repubblica reported that the composer denied her father worked on the films. To solve the dispute among the other three guitarists, Morricone said he remembered Alessandroni being used on A Fistful of Dollars and Battisti D’Amario playing on the other two films.

Now Rucher has decided to take Morricone, 84, and the three guitarists to court, demanding €200,000 from each.

Pino Rucher became a successful guitarist in Italy in the 1960s after he performed with US jazz musicians playing for allied soldiers stationed in his hometown in Puglia in southern Italy after the second world war.

For Morricone, the spaghetti westerns – so-called because they were often filmed in Europe – were a turning point his career. Lacking the large orchestra used in westerns until then, he used whips, gunshots, whistles and electric guitars to accompany Eastwood’s Man with No Name.

So pleased was Leone with the music he would lengthen scenes to fit the score, and the soundtrack for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly sold more than three million copies.

The case is due in court in Rome on 23 May and Morricone, who is reportedly angry that the case has been brought, is expected to give evidence.

Underrated Russian classic portrays battle of cultural values between russophiles and westernisers. Family melodrama to boot.

Ingredients: 2 carrots, thickly sliced 1 celery stalk, thinly sliced 2 scallions, rinsed and chopped 1 tbsp olive oil 1 onion, chopped 2 Chicken Breast Fillets, cut into strips (about 300g) 3tsp Ras El Hanout Spice Mix or Harrisa paste 400g can chopped tomatoes 200 ml hot chicken stock 410g can chickpeas 40g pack fresh coriander, chopped 1 red pepper diced 1 cucumber diced 200g couscous Salt and black pepper to taste Optional: Crusty bread or pita bread

How to prepare: 1. Heat the oil in a large pan and add the onion, carrots, and celery. 2. Cover the pan and steam the vegetables over a low heat for about 8 minutes, stirring occasionally. 3. Scoop the vegetables out from the pan and set them to one side. Cover to keep warm. Now add the chicken strips and cook for a few minutes in the same pan until browned on all sides. 4. Stir in the spice mix or Harrisa paste and scallions and cook, stirring, for another two minutes. 5. Add the vegetables back to the pan, then add the tomatoes and the stock. Bring back to a boil. 6. Add the chickpeas, season and bring to a simmer for 20 minutes, covered, until the chicken is cooked through and there is no pink meat. Turn off the heat and stir in the coriander, peppers and cucumber, and cover to keep warm. 7. The cucumber should always be added raw to the mixture, however, the pepper can be added raw or cooked to taste. For sautéed pepper, include the pepper with the onions, celery and carrots in step one. For best results, peel if skin is blackened on the pepper. 8. To prepare the couscous, heat 25 grams of butter or two tbs oil in a heavy based pan. Add the couscous and stir over a medium heat for approximately two minutes. Switch off the heat and add 250 ml boiling water, and stir. Cover the pan and let the water soak into the couscous for at least five minutes. Switch on the heat again and warm gently for another minute, using a fork to separate the grains. For extra moistness add a splash of olive oil and stir through. 9. Serve the chicken and vegetables on top of the couscous, with a side of crusty or pita bread if desired. 10. Crusty bread and pita bread can be warmed under a moderate grill.

‘One Day’ is a bittersweet account of the lives of two people: Emma and Dexter, who start off as friends and end up as husband and wife.

The story begins when both are graduating from college, and follows them throughout the next twenty years as they mature, struggle with life, love and their respective careers.

The two main characters are good friends, but Emma has hidden hopes that their relationship might develop into a romance. Unfortunately, Dexter has other plans: an aspiring career as a TV presenter and a fast mover on the social scene. Emma realises this and decides to move on with her life. Just as she begins dating another man called  Jimmy, Dexter realises what a great girl she is and decides to pursue her, but its too late.

For twenty long years the two characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, until the moment finally arrives when they are both ready to commit to each other. Emma and Dexter get married, and it would appear that after many trials and tribulations, there is a happy ending in store for the newlyweds. Unfortunately, one day when Emma is riding her bicycle on the road, she is run over by a lorry and dies on the roadside. This tragic turn of events comes as a shock to the reader at the end of the book and is the subject of debate in many literary forums.

One of the ‘Five Good Emperors’, (Machiavelli, 1503, who noted all five succeeded as ‘adopted’ sons and seemed to rule more wisely and judiciously than those of ‘royal blood’), Hadrian was a ‘humanist’ and philhellene, interested more in art, architecture, public governance and jurisprudence rather than war, despite his formidable military campaigning. Of his twenty years as emperor, he barely engaged in military battle, and spent scarcely five in Rome: the rest were travelling throughout the empire, mostly overseeing construction and consolidation projects, collecting art and writing poetry.

This is the era of consolidation where Yourcenar indomitably quests to search out the humanist-philosopher, the Emperor who refines and consolidates the qualia of Rome’s greatest cultural achievements to pinnacled Greco-Roman heights as a man cum deity. 

‘Rome….was needed for the full realisation of what was for Greece only an admirable idea. Plato had written the Republic and glorified the Just, but we were the ones who were striving to make the State a machine fit to serve man….The word philanthropy was Greek,but we are the ones who are working to change the wretched conditions of the slave’.

A beautiful acclamation of Rome significant as ‘doer’ whereas Greece was Rodin’s ‘thinker’: and if Hadrian did not serve in terms of philosophical originality and advancement, surely his contribution, of making concrete the ‘ideal’, was no less an achievement. For what is a strategist without his tactician?

Who doesn’t know of his eromenos Antinous, a youth who effectively becomes Hadrian’s consort . His (debated) suicide at nineteen at the river Nile sparks Hadrian into occult and grief stricken endeavours to deify the youth, thus breaching some unspoken protocol about keeping the personal ‘private’ when you are emperor. Yourcenar handles this episode magnificently. At a moment in between Gods, when Hadrian conceptualises he is divine himself, as any other man might be, the issues of personal responsibility become acute and forefrontal. If human qualia takes on divine proportion, and if that qualia is underpinned by reveration of youth specifically, then its understandable if at nineteen Atinous conceives his currency as spent: by sacrificing himself in full bloom of youth he thus ensures his perpetuality ad infinitum: and perhaps it was this notion which spurred Hadrian into ‘conceptually’ immortalising him.

NYU Professor Nouriel  Roubini is in Aix-en-Provence.

But the French countryside hasn’t cheered him up any.

In fact, in a new  video interview with Bloomberg’s Caroline Connan, Professor Roubini has  outdone himself, issuing a forecast so apocalyptic that even devout Roubini-ites  will be startled by its pessimism.

(It’s the smoothness, eloquence, and utterly matter-of-fact delivery that makes it so  alarming).

The fun starts at the 5-minute mark. Here are the highlights, which are delivered in perfect  bullet-point format by Roubini, one after another:

• “By 2013, the ability of policy makers to  kick the can down the road is going to run out of steam”
• “In the Euro-zone the slow-motion train-wreck could become a faster-motion  train wreck”
• “The US looks close to stall-speed and a recession, given the latest  economic data”
• “The landing of China is becoming harder rather than softer”
• “The other emerging markets are all sharply slowing down in terms of  growth–the BRICs, China, Russia, India, Brazil, and also Mexico, Turkey. Partly  it’s because there’s a recession in the Eurozone and UK, partly it’s because  they’re not doing their reforms.”
• “And finally there is the time bomb of a potential war between Israel and  the US and Iran. Negotiations have failed. The sanctions will fail. Obama  doesn’t want a war before the election, but after the election, regardless of  whether it is Obama elected or Romney, chances are the US is going to decide to  go and attack Iran and then you’ll have a doubling in global oil prices  overnight.”
• “So, it’s the perfect storm! You could have a collapse of the Eurozone, a US  double-dip, hard-landing of China, hard-landing of emerging markets, and a war  in the Middle East. Next year could be a global perfect storm.”

 The film operates in two distinct temporal dimensions: the beginning and end segments are fast paced and furious, sandwiching in between the requisite French moody dwelling on life discourse shared through a fog of cigarette smoke, enigmatic glances and languid stretches on an unmade bed. Which is what the main protags Michel and Patricia seem to do for a fair chunk of the film.

The opening sequence sees Michel travel down Goddard’s favourite road in France (the exact same one he features prominently later in the Weekend), a tree lined asphalt cut through sun scorched flat plane. Michel attracts the notice of police for a minor traffic violation and decides the best course of action is step on the pedal and play chase. When a cop does eventually catch up with him, Michel pulls out a pistol and shoots him dead. All of this transpires within five or so minutes, and I’m left wondering: but why? Why? Who does this? Why shoot the cop for nothing and bring down the long arm of the law on yourself? Well, my dear, I can hear Godard saying, we’ve got to start this movie somehow or other, just go with the flow, cherish the ‘rebel without a cause’ style of Michel.

Next up, Michel meets up with American Patricia, whom he’s known for three weeks and seems to have fallen for. Patricia stumble-bumbles about in her Twiggy hairdo, bobby socks and long pleated skirt and her poor French accent which we are blessedly spared from overuse, as she tends to be monotonic, mostly saying things such as ‘I don’t know’, or ‘Its all the same thing’. A blander non character I’ve never seen. What Michel sees in her remains a mystery, both to him and frankly to me. Patricia does, however, have some sort of avante-guarde visage for a 1960 film: she seems to be a slut, through and through, which would have been novel for the time. I can’t figure out if making her an American slut wasn’t a political machination on Godard’s part: in order to spare the ‘purity’ of French girls? In any event, as Patricia reels off various conquests, I’m doing mental calculations; when did the Pill debut? Surely it wasn’t around in 1960? How does Patricia get away with it, then? Well, she doesn’t, it turns out. She’s pregnant. Not entirely sure who the father is, but most likely candidate is Michel. Oh, and puffing on ciggies non stop. Maybe they didn’t know back then?….

Now follows the bed scene. God, the French love their bed mis en scenes, remember ‘My Night at Maude’s’ here. An hour of rolling around on the bed, chain smoking and trying to be brazen about love, life and everything under the sun. Just as I felt my eyes beginning to glaze over, the gruesome twosome finally decided to get out of bed and hit the Champs Elyzee, which is always a treat to see through out the ages as it were. Michel finds out he is a wanted man by the police, so he decides to run for it: next port of call:Italy. Can Patricia please come with him? No, Patricia can not. She likes all the bad boy antics, but when it comes down to it, she’s going to marry some straight and narrow guy, live in a house with a white picket fence and have 2.2 children.

All fine and good, but why, oh why does she have to call the police and give Michel away? This seemed an unnecessary tactic. Michel refuses to run because, he says, he is tired. Again, incongruous and out of character for him. He is in his early twenties and has so far displayed a casual devil may care attitude to life. How did he get tired all of a sudden? Is Godard in a rush to wrap things up and so throws everything into a one pot Massala for a grande denouement? Yes, he does. Grande ending ensues within next five minutes with gun shots and Michel prostrate in the ‘foothills’ of theEiffelTower, making funny faces at his beloved. In a rather powerful finale gesture he closes his own eyes pre-mortem and expires on cue for brilliant theatrical effect.

Still, what the hell just happened here, apart from a Frenchified homage to Bonnie andClyde? Godard is so much better later on.

Shot in black and white (1967), perhaps to accentuate the despair and and hopelessnessof the theme, is a tactical  mistake.
I’m sure there are things you can do with black and white to accentuate
particular objects, emotions, situations: as in Hitchcock’s movies. Here, we
are treated to a washed out monotone of colour which does nothing for the many
scenes shot in apparently verdant woods. Contrast was poor throughout,
sharpness non existent: colour was a mismanagement.

NadineNortier is miscast as Mouchette.  She has
presence, but no qualia. Utterly emotionless throughout, even when she is
crying, less of an enigma and more of a non person. What is she thinking, what
is she about, what makes her tick? The blank canvass of her acting output
throws up no answers. Marie Cardinal as her mother, in only a few short scenes
with few words does a much better job of fleshing out a character: we, as the
audience, get what she is about: a disillusioned, weary woman: physically and
spiritually ill. Mistreated by life and men, she is ready to depart this life.
Her agony , in fact her life story is played out beautifully in an understated
way by Cardinal. Nortier does not come even close with her performance.

Mouchette issupposed to be a suffering martyr of some kind, but ‘m not sure why. Yes, the family is poor, mum is sick and dad goes out at night to deal in contraband,
but is that enough to warp your mind and deaden your soul? Why does she refuse
to sing in school and throw mud at her schoolmates? Bresson is just sloppy
here: a few more psychological angle shots wouldn’t have been amis, just to
really set the background on Mouchette’s despair.

A plot development sees Mouchette out in the woods late at night, huddled under a
tree. She is found by Arsene, the village daredevil, who first ‘rescues’ her
from the rain, then walks her back to the village, and to his house, where a
little incongruously because there was no build up to this, rapes her. And
Mouchette likes it. In fact the next day she alludes to him as ‘her lover’.
Yes, she is sadly misused here.

Then, one hour into the film, a host of secondary characters start popping up for the
first time. Mouchette’s mother dies on the morning after her rape, and as
Mouchette walks about town to get milk, various personages make an appearance.
All of them presume to help her with hand me downs and end up calling her a slut
and wicked. For no particular reason at all. This grated on my nerves a bit:
first, the glut of personalities piled up all at once: what about pacing,
Bresson? Then, their allegations towards Mouchette. If she is indeed a slut,
why weren’t we shown it, why wasn’t it alluded before: why spring it up out of
the blue. Of course, this may be a subtle reference to the fact Mouchette
enjoyed her rape, but of course the townfolk can’t know this.

The only thing this film had going for it is the ending. As Mouchette tumbles down a
river bank and literally plops into the river, the camera stays put for about
thirty seconds on the water, before fading out. Does Mouchette resurface, or is
she dead?

Reminiscent
of his Pierre le Fou, but only in a Queaneu ‘Exercises in style’ sort of way: e.g.
how many different ways can you do ‘road trip’. More politically charged and if
possible, more saturated in metaphor, the ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ travel in a ‘dark’
landscape of wanton destruction, chaos and societal breakdown.

The build up
is nicely done: incremental accretion of horrors, so that just as the frog in
the gradually boiling water feels it not, so the viewer here is gradually
lulled into a quasi-acceptance of the most grotesque and horrific of
ontological qualia. The travelling couple (off to see Madames dying father and
collect an inheritance) first encounter traffic, a long, tedious, monotonous
pile up which is accentuated (rather ironically) by a slow moving class of
children by the road side; no matter how much the couple intercut and by pass,
the children are always there, shuffling along. Moral of the story: things are
going no where fast. The traffic quee itself is a harbinger of the absurdism in
store going forward, as well as the initial stages of social breakdown.

Following this,
a dystopian landscape littered with  burned out cars and dead bodies lying in pools
of blood. Any living humans exhibit behaviour which led to the killing of the
corpses to begin with. Not only that, but now heavy symbolism descends: all
characters appearing mi en scene are personifications: of political, social or
philosophical trope. Literary characters bemoan the death of intellectualism,
immigrants offer a diatribe on French colonial exploitation, and finally,
revolutionaries charge on to the scene: and they, of course, are just as bad as
their opponents.

In this
nihilistic display of murder, violence and desecration of human spirit and
flesh, I am reminded a little of Pink Flamingos, another film which crosses the
rubicon. But here, its so much better. Godard is careful to explain away the
monstrosities with rather longish monologues, where the injustices of the world
are highlighted. Thus, one can’t miss the message that violence begets
violence.

Not that
thats the only message, of course. Goddard is like a butterfly here: he skips
from idea to idea til the viewer is dizzy with overexposure.