Here are some photos of Natalie Portman outside of ABC Studios yesterday. She appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night to promote A Tale of Love and Darkness, which isn’t getting the best reviews. People don’t flat-out hate it, they just think the film is sort of depressing. Still, it’s got a 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is better than I was expecting. Anyway, as we discussed earlier this week, Natalie is back in America, seemingly for good. Her husband left his job in Paris, and I think they’re splitting their time between New York and LA. That’s what Portman discussed with Kimmel last night: what it’s like to come back to America after living abroad for a few years. As we already know, Portman thinks Parisians/French are judgmental (too judgmental) about clothing and fashion. She tells Kimmel that she just thinks Americans are nicer and more hospitable in general too.
She says: “Everyone smiles a lot here. It’s so nice. They’re more cool in France. I didn’t realize I got used to it until I got here and I was so surprised.” She says she was startled when she arrived back in LA and people would smile at her for no reason, or say something nice about her son. She also says that in Paris, “I feel there’s a lot of rules of politeness and codes of behavior there you have to follow. It’s a lot looser here….[in America] You care about making the person next to you comfortable because you want them to feel good.”
She says that there are all of these rules about shopping in the fancy Paris stores too, that you have to say hello to the sales people or they will be rude to you. Which reminded me of that Oprah kerfuffle several years back, when Oprah claimed (and I believed her) that she was mistreated by a clerk in Zurich. People in those fancy boutiques really don’t want Americans to spend money, I guess. Because I don’t give a sh-t if I didn’t say “hello/bonjour” to a clerk, if I get sh-tty service, I’m not spending the money. Customers are not there to be polite to sales people. Sales people are there to be polite to customers. Is that super-gauche-American of me? Sure. But I’ve worked sales before and I would never be rude to a customer if they didn’t say hello to me, or they just asked for a different size or whatever.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.
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