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film comment magazine:Paris JournalJean-Michel Frodon explains how France has fallen in love with French cinema all over again |
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The Walter Reade Theater presents its annual Rendezvous with French Cinema series, March 8-17The jury for the Louis Delluc prize, led by Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob, had a hard time choosing the best French film of 2001. There were plenty of candidates, and the diversity offers proof of French cinema's current state of good health. Out of 140 releases, over 40 were memorable, each one bearing the singular imprint of a distinctive creative identity. As I write, I find myself with a double dilemma. On the one hand, I don't want to come across as a dreadful nationalist and have to disprove it, though I am a fairly vigorous partisan of the kind of French cinema that offers so many varied felicities. To my knowledge, there's no national cinema quite like it. On the other hand, I don't want to reduce the past year to a mere catalogue. For this I excuse myself in advance.
At the other end of the generational continuum, there were just as many debut films. One of them came out of nowhere, made by first-time filmmaker Eugene Green. In Toutes les nuits, which won the Delluc prize for best first film, Green borrows from Bresson and Rohmer, and experiments with memory fragments and tonal ruptures to compose a singular and troubling cinematic song of an American in Paris. Just as astonishing, Damien Odoul's Deep Breath charges through the countryside, grounded in a naturalist evocation of rural France, and transforms itself through pure mise-en-scène into a cruel, dreamlike coming-of-age tale. And there's Orso Miret, whose De l'histoire ancienne places the filmmaker firmly in the lineage of young directors such as Arnaud Desplechin, Arnaud Des Pallières and Emmanuel Finkiel, who examine the present through a critical historical perspective. Among the other newcomers, you can pinpoint two groups: filmmakers who are products of the Arab immigrant experience, like Chad Chenouga (17, rue Bleue), and Tamina Benguigui (Inch'Allah Dimanche), and directors from the rural or provincial southwest, such as Phillippe Ramos and the Larrieu Brothers, joined this year by Alain Guiraudie (Du soleil pour les gueux), Yves Caumont (Amour d'enfance), and Frédéric Videau (The Son of Jean-Claude Videau).
Am I forgetting anything? Yes. First of all, the late, great American expatriate Robert Kramer's Cités de la plaine came to us after his passing, not to reaffirm anything (what would be the point?), but to put everything back in play, in crisis and in hope. Secondly, it's impossible not to note the two cinematic events of the year: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, which triumphantly recycles touristic and sentimental antiquities from French cinema of the Thirties with its paint-box color scheme; and another big hit, Christophe Ganz's Brotherhood of the Wolf, which presents a novel mixture of elements lifted from the Hollywood spectacle, cartoon culture, and the martial arts genre, all in the service of a story inspired by a legendary episode in French history.
Two other notable films were unveiled at film festivals last year, but were not released until 2002. The first is certainly one of the most anticipated French films of recent years. Four decades after the radiant inspiration of his first film, Adieu Philippine, and 16 years after his last, Maine Océan, Jacques Rozier's fifth feature had become the elusive temptress of French cinephilia, forever promised but never materializing. Expected at Cannes, Fifi Martingale finally appeared at the Venice Film Festival. Is it the extremely long intervals between projects, or a playful, deceptive radicalism that defines Rozier's essence? Or have too many false starts and interruptions killed the vitality that's so indispensable to his work? Either way, most viewers were disoriented. Setting his action against the backdrop of a light-comedy theater production, Rozier places actor Jean Lefèvre at the center of a long and creaking variation on the dark side of burlesque, moral uncertainty, and the mysteries that link spectacle with life. Another fine film, less anticipated (even if the director's first feature, Mange ta soupe, was a resounding artistic success), was Mathieu Amalric's Wimbledon Station. Keeping almost everything from the eponymous novel by Daniel del Guidice, Amalric makes one major alteration. In the film, it's a woman rather than a man whose travels bring both fiction and history to life as she investigates an obscure literary figure in Trieste. And it's not just any woman, but the magnificent Jeanne Balibar, lovingly filmed and freely inventing solos in this Concerto for Great Actress and Real World. In its extreme simplicity, the result is joyous.
Artistically fertile, economically dynamic: is everything just getting better and better for French cinema? It's hard to say. Right now, it's reaping the benefits of an informal, partly state-supported system of film production currently being challenged by major entertainment conglomerates. And its strength is founded on the solidarity of all its constituent parts. During lean periods the commercially inclined need the validation of the most creative in order to justify the existence of the sector as a whole, but this solidarity falls apart whenever the situation improves, at which point an every-man-for-himself mentality takes over. To listen to the attacks on directors who ignore commercial considerations, you'd think they were a threat to the very existence of French cinema. Meanwhile, declarations by Vivendi Universal's Jean-Marie Messier such as "French cultural exception is dead" threaten to topple a tree that has borne much delicious fruit.
Jean-Michel Frodon is the film critic for Le Monde.*Another important aspect of French cinema in 2001 was its financial contribution to non-French films, some of which wouldn't have been made at all without its support, including Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo, Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There?, Youssef Chahine's Silence!· We're Rolling, © 2002 by Jean-Michel Frodon |
Generational diversity was 2001's hallmark. To begin with, there were films by veterans who have been active for as long as 40 years - Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Straub and Huillet (Workers, Peasants), Lanzmann (Sobibor·), and even Jean-Daniel Pollet (Ceux d'en face), all of them as inventive as when they began. One might add to this group the doyen of world cinema, Manoel de Oliveira, whose magnificent I'm Going Home is truly a French film, even if the filmmaker himself is Portuguese.* In 2001, as we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Cahiers du Cinéma, all the directors from the magazine's founding generation, save Truffaut and Demy, were still with us (the year before, both Varda and Chabrol demonstrated that they too were still at the top of their respective forms).
The generations between the old guard and the new breed held their own, and no two films were alike. What connection can be made between the following? Consider Philippe Faucon's attentive realism in Samia; Jean-Marc Barr and Pascal Arnold's joyous, unruly freedom in Too Much Flesh and Being Light; the novelistic aspirations of Xavier Beauvois in Selon Matthieu and those - deliberately hidden - of François Ozon in Under the Sand; the extreme and disconcerting consistency of Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, Robert Guédiguian's The Town Is Quiet, and Philippe Garrel's Sauvage innocence; the dramatic and aesthetic intelligence of Benoît Jacquot's version of Verdi's Tosca; Vincent Dieutre's profitable exploration of cinematic modernity through the lens of contemporary art in Leçon des ténèbres; the abrasive melancholia of Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer; the thematic richness and sensuality of André Téchiné's Loin; the powerfully unsettling naturalism of Philippe Le Guay's Night Shift; Patrice Chéreau's audacious and delicate reinvention of his mise-en-scène in Intimacy (which won the Delluc prize for best film of the year); risk-taking openness to the world in Sébastien Lifshitz's La Traversée; the sense of justice and the hyper-clarity of Raymond Depardon's vision in Profils paysans; Jacques Audiard's ability to escape from the limitations of his own cleverness in Read My Lips; Marie Vermillard's stubborn and solitary courage as she searches out and brushes against human madness in Imago; Laurent Cantet's dramaturgical intelligence in Time Out; Cédric Kahn's passionate inquiry in Roberto Succo; Michel Piccoli's balance between genius and madness in La Plage noire; Michèle Rosier's supreme cinematic confidence in Malraux, tu m'étonnes.
Three other films deserve special mention. First, for its inventive plasticity, its tragic and physical sense of beauty, there's Eric Rohmer's irreducibly singular The Lady and the Duke, a film combining digital technology, tricks from Meliès, and a sense of space and action borrowed from theater. Then there's Trouble Every Day, a disturbing plunge into the abyss of body and soul in which Claire Denis, operating within the parameters of genre filmmaking but guided by her plastic instincts, discovers the most obscure and intimate territory - enriched by Béatrice Dalle's magical performance. Finally, Alain Guiraudie's That Old Dream That Moves was inventive and original in every respect: theme, tone, performance, shooting, production.
As it happens, 2001 was also a very good year for French cinema in economic terms. Amélie's domestic and international triumph is emblematic of a season that saw both an overall increase in admissions and French films accounting for more than 40 percent of the year's box office, up 10 percent from the previous year. The Jeunet film's public success (eight million tickets sold), as well as that of La Vérité si je mens-2 (7.8 million), The Closet (5.3), Brotherhood of the Wolf (5.1), and eleven other films that drew over a million filmgoers, highlights the importance of this commercial improvement. It's due to a number of factors: the increase in multiplexes, followed by regulation of booking, subscription cards, greater financial support for ambitious "spectacle" films, and, most importantly, the competition between two rival multimedia giants, Canal Plus (part of Vivendi Universal) and TPS-TF1.