“We like to fracture, distort and romanticize to see trauma but obliquely, abstractly. Frodon said.Īs Antoine de Baecque, a film historian, put it, “French cinema since Nouvelle Vague deals with reality in a certain way.” He was talking the other afternoon about the French New Wave of the late 1950s and ’60s, led by François Truffaut and Mr. Among these 220 movies, a modest number of high-quality documentaries or fictional dramas detailing poverty or immigrant life here are released, but they’re generally “small films made in the shadows,” Mr.
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That said, France likes to boast, for good reason, that with more than 220 films made here a year, the country’s movie industry lags behind only those of India and the United States. “Naturally television executives try to influence content,” Jean-Michel Frodon, the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, noted the other day. Public television is government-run, of course, and the country’s most popular network, TF1, happens to be owned by Martin Bouygues, a close associate of the president, Nicolas Sarkozy. This means that French movies now at the multiplex, like “Faubourg 36,” a nostalgic music hall story about bygone France, or “Le Crime Est Notre Affaire,” a nostalgic mystery based on an Agatha Christie story, are effectively supported by French revenues from American films like “Blood Diamond,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Syriana” and other news-hungry, Hollywood vehicles of precisely the sort that France doesn’t make. Like the promiscuously awarded “La Graine et le Mulet” (opening next month in the United States as “The Secret of the Grain”), directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, which is about a community of immigrants in a seaside town in the south of France, “Entre les Murs” is “l’exception culturelle.” A drama about schoolchildren from a multiethnic neighborhood of Paris, it has so far done well at the French box office. Benjo is a producer of “Entre les Murs” (“Within the Walls,” marketed in English as “The Class”), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. The problem, you might say, goes back to de Gaulle’s selling the country on the idea that it won World War II, along with the culture of denial that that mindset promoted. They cite a mix of politics, stylistic habits perpetuating the national “brand,” financing and a collective anxiety about postwar French identity. As for a French version of “W.,” any film skewering a sitting French president “would be nearly impossible to make here,” said Caroline Benjo, echoing what other French filmmakers contend. The closest thing to a French “Apocalypse Now” or “Platoon” about Algeria is “L’Ennemi Intime,” made last year, close to half a century after the war ended.
It was banned for many years after its release in 1966. “The Battle of Algiers,” the greatest film about that war, was an Italian-Algerian production, not a French one, directed by an Italian. The country has censored politically charged films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Petit Soldat” (made in 1960 but not released until 1963), a rare French picture about the Algerian war of independence. France hasn’t made a significant movie yet about the 2005 riots.
Meanwhile, never mind poor box office results, the United States keeps churning out ambitious pictures with big stars or directors, like “In the Valley of Elah,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition,” “Redacted” and “Body of Lies,” questioning American policy in the Middle East or otherwise seizing on the headlines. But “La Haine” was released in the mid-1990s. Contrarians will note “La Haine” (“The Hate”), a much-talked-about movie anticipating the violence that exploded three years ago in some of France’s poor immigrant suburbs. Serious-minded Americans traditionally love to idealize the French movie industry, but as French cinephiles tend to see it, it’s their own filmmakers, unlike those in the United States, who shy away from tackling head-on tough issues like contemporary French politics, scandals and unrest. France, it turns out, remains, even all these years later, not insignificantly caught up in the cinema spawned by the Occupation, offering diversion, self-flattery and escapist fiction about itself. Cultural gulfs can sometimes reveal themselves in these small details. The French movie hardly bothers with politics, dwelling on Coluche’s love life instead. So has a French film about Coluche, the country’s most popular postwar comedian, Michel Colucci, who became a kind of anarchic candidate for president in 1981, an opponent of anti-immigrant sentiment, a champion of the poor. PARIS “W.,” Oliver Stone’s biopic about the outgoing American president, has just opened here.