Bill proves to be extraordinarily moving, though, in the role – presenting the officer as a sort of eager, faintly eccentric and trusting toff who responds to the dour hostility with unfailing graciousness and who fills the awkward silences with gabbling rhapsodies about French culture or unguarded personal revelations.
For years Mr. Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and archivist of all sorts of eccentric entertainments, has been collecting historic equivalents of the circus broadside, some dating back to Shakespeare's day.
He was a nice, intelligent, charming sort of eccentric individual.
It is a perfect conceit: the Modernist period as a mad artists' colony, a sort of Provincetown of teetering, eccentric cottages constructed from debris of the past, each defiantly different from the other, but connected by a common debt to the first settler.
Being licensed to EMI, a surviving corporate major, draws accusations that they are some sort of eccentric girl group, a kind of folked-up Girls Aloud.
When you two were together, there was a public fascination with you as this sort of eccentric couple who made these quirky movies together and lived in adjoining houses.
In Ms. Dayan's version, the famously difficult Duras comes off as a grumpy but lovable eccentric, a sort of Auntie Mame with bad moods, who encourages the puppyish Yann to find his own voice and follow his dream.
"He looked sort of eccentric," Faison says.
"There is no point making that sort of eccentric character likeable.
