The sound of music: The portrait of a French family in Bucharest

Starring: Casimir Pierret as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ondine Pierret as Françoise Hardy, Carole Vantroys as the Mother, Stanislas Pierret as the Father and Balthazar Pierret as the Future Football Star. The Saturday morning sun enters through the big windows of the living room, heavy as the floodlight on a movie set. It shines in Casimir’s direction, who just came into the room. His blond, silky hair gives him an angelic look and it takes a few seconds until you get to notice a shorter lock of hair, wildly cut, right in the middle of the head. “Casimir, your hair!” exclaims his mother, Carole, laughing. “Balthazar put toothpaste in his hair so he just cut it. We need to go to the hairdresser this week,” she adds. Casimir is a 12-year old French boy, whom I first saw about one year and a half ago in the Herastrau park on a very windy Sunday, as he was riding his bike together with his 18 months older brother Balthazar and his father, Stanislas Pierret, director of the French Institute in Bucharest. The photograph I took of Casimir somehow created a red thread between us and months later he was the one who convinced his parents to accept an interview. It was also his determination to become a movie star which made him understand the importance of the media at an early age, Carole later explained in her playful way. Ondine shows up a few minutes after Casimir, holding two books in French. She’s nine, speaks with a lisp and frenetically devours old French Music: Françoise Hardy, Edith Piaf, Dalida. Balthazar on the other side is a rap encyclopaedia. And because he is the oldest, he gets to choose the music they play in the mornings, when Carole drives the kids to school. Now he is absent, as he is training for a football match. “We expect he’ll be a football player,” Stanislas explains. “It is funny that now at the French school a lot of kids are listening to rap and I think it's really because of Balthazar. When Balthazar arrived he came with the French rap,” Carole, the kids’ mother, says with a voice as joyful and powerful as a melody or a day without clouds. A journalist and a writer, Carole Vantroys becomes the narrator of the family stories in the two hours I get to spend with them. She seems right from the beginning hugely connected to her kids and so present in the stories she shares. Stanislas has been living in Bucharest for three years, while Carole and the kids arrived two years ago, but they will be leaving in September, moving to another country. “When Balthazar was born we were in Prague, when Casimir was born we were in Budapest and when Ondine was born we were in Ankara,” Carole explains. But when Carole was her kids’ age, her life was quite different. She first moved when she was 20 years old and went to Paris for her studies. “I remember I was very anxious about the idea that we could leave our home. I was always thinking that if my parents moved, it would be a disaster. I was living in a very small town next to Lille.” Moving so often becomes really addictive, Carole says. “It's very strange. It’s a double feeling. It's difficult, because you lose your friends, but in the same time it’s very exciting, because you can live different lives. With the time, you learn to protect yourself, which is a pity maybe, but you are more careful.” “We know this area really well,” Stanislas says. “I was in Prague before the revolution and after the Revolution I returned there with Carole, as I was working for an international foundation. I had been working a lot with Romanians, Czechs, Russians and I also speak these languages. I don't have roots here, but I’m more Mittel-European than French. While Stanislas is around, Casimir stays behind him, holding him by his shoulders, but as soon as he leaves, he takes a sit at the table, next to Carole and takes part in the discussion, equally involved, just like an adult. He speaks in English and only sometimes switches to French to ask his mom, “How do I say that”. So when I ask him why he wants to become an actor, he says with a soft-spoken voice “My mommy always said I’m a born actor.” Carole laughs. ”Really? Hm… It's true actually. When he was very small, he was playing Mr. Bean all the time and he was so funny. There were also the two daughters of a friend of mine who always used to say, ‘Casimir is so beautiful, he looks just like Leonardo diCaprio.’’ “Casimir is a great player; it’s very interesting, because the children are very different. Balthazar stopped very early to play. But Casimir….he plays and plays and plays.” “I play with my little sister, we like to disguise,” Casimir adds. “They put on costumes and make-up and they play for hours and hours. If they watch a movie, afterwards they say, let’s play; kings and princesses, everything from books and films.” While we talk about all this, Ondine completely ignores us. She has her headphones on and seems absorbed by music. She watches videos on Youtube, takes bites from a baguette and sometimes writes down something on a paper: names of new songs. “Casimir is with the cinema and Ondine with the music. We sing together a lot, usually in the evening when I cook dinner. She has her repertoire, she knows Edith Piaf, Françoise Hardy, France Gall, the music I was listening to when I was her age actually. Usually I sing a song, then she sings a song. And we also have this game we play only when we are in car. We say a word and we need to find a song with that word. I say bleu and she needs to find a song with bleu.” « Maaaaaaaaaaman,” says Ondine.”Les deux garçons!” she shouts pointing to two blond almost identical boys from a video “No, they are not twins!” Carole tells her. “We are having a debate, she says that Claude François has two sons which are twins and I said, no, they are like Balthazar and Casimir. They have one year and a half between them. “ “Ondine sings beautifully and when she was younger, she wasn’t shy at all,” Carole tells me. “She was singing all the time with innocence, but now she’s older and she’s becoming shy “. “Would you like to show the video of you when you were little and you were singing?” “No no no no!!!!!” Ondine protests. Casimir plays more with Ondine now, but when they were smaller, Balthazar was his main play partner and at the time they were living in Hungary, the language they used when playing was Hungarian, Carole recounts. “It was crazy. They went to some Hungarian kindergarten, so they were speaking very well Hungarian. I remember Casimir was three years old, we went to France in the summer and my mom said: Carole you should watch out, Casimir is not speaking at all French. Then I realized he was talking in Hungarian while he was playing.” “So how did your life change after you became a mother?” I ask Carole. “Ohhh. A lot! Especially because I had my children relatively late, I was 35 when Balthazar was born, I had a life before. It was a big change, but nice. And also, what’s very interesting is that you go back to your own childhood, to the music you listened back then.” Carole doesn’t get to finish her sentence, because Ondine interrupts her to share a secret with her. “She says that Claude François was so famous and all the women were in love with him, so he didn’t want the people to know that he had a family and children.” Casimir calls me from the upper floor to show his Lego collection. After a long debate he managed to convince Ondine to let him keep his collection in her room, as there is more space. Ondine stays in the living room, watching videos. Next to her, there is the recorder, which I forget to turn off when we I go upstairs with her mother and brother. It continues to record our remote voices on the upper floor and a few other sounds which are indistinct at first, then become more clear: Ondine breathing, the sound of a pen on a paper- Ondine writing down new song names and then a louder sound- Ondine typing something, probably the letters of her favorite musician’s name.