Film for Film’s Sake
In a typical French film, so an LA joke goes, Marc is in love with Sophie, Sophie loves François, François has the hots for Charlotte, who is in love with Isabelle, but Isabelle loves Gérard, who has a crush on Florence, who loves Marc. And in the end, they all go out to dinner.
Yes, modern French cinema can be a soupçon predictable.
Even so, the French are right to be proud of their film industry. Not necessarily of their films, but of the industry that makes them. They have a massive stock of experienced directors, writers, cameramen and technicians ready to leap into action, which they do with almost as much regularity as the movie production line in Bollywood.
And the reason is money. If they want to make a French movie, they can get cash to make it from the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie), a state-run institution that creams off a percentage of the box-office takings from the country’s cinemas and dishes the money out to fund new films. A brilliant idea that enables small productions to get off the ground when they’d be doomed to failure in most other countries.
The trouble is that the system has also created a ‘film for film’s sake’ mindset in France – let’s make a film just to use up the grant money. The film doesn’t have to earn much at the box office. With its grants and subsidies, and a probable TV showing or two, the very fact of making it is a pretty safe bet as long as the director doesn’t blow millions on special effects. But then, who needs special effects when you can shoot a bunch of love scenes and marital arguments in a Paris apartment?
What’s more, making the film is doubly profitable for everyone involved. French film-industry workers qualify as intermittents du spectacle, or occasional show-business workers. Once they have done their minimum number of hours’ work for the year (507 in the previous twelvemonth period), they qualify for unemployment money. And not just a token sum but their hourly salary, paid for all the time between jobs. So a film director who makes one feature film a year can get paid full-time at the hourly rate he charged while he was making the film. The same goes for everyone else involved, from the actors to the guys who screw together the camera tripods. Spend, say, three months making one bad film and you can live like a movie star for the rest of the year.
Not exactly a motivation to make good movies.
France has, of course, made some truly great movies. And most of them are great precisely because they are so French. Directors like Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Blier could not have come from anywhere else on the planet. And France still manages to turn out the odd quirkily French art-house gem like Delicatessen, and the occasional unpretentious comedy like Les Visiteurs. So this system of keeping everyone in the movie industry on the national payroll has clearly paid off.
But these days, the industry seems to have lost its sense of experimentation and fun and decided to stick to filming its own navel. Here is a summary of a recent French film that shall remain nameless: ‘Xavier decides to become a novelist, but in the meantime he has to take on a variety of jobs – journalist, scriptwriter, ghostwriter.’ Yeah, right, very varied. In the sequel poor old Xavier will probably be forced (horreur!) to write short stories.
Directors who want to make something different go abroad. Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) are Hollywood operators now. And when Besson makes something French but different, like the incredibly popular car-chase movie Taxi, he is looked down upon by the art establishment as a purveyor of crude, Hollywood-style non-art that he cynically aims at the American market.
This is, of course, total hypocrisy. If you gave truth serum to the snootiest French film director, the head of the ‘I make French films and merde to everyone else’ campaign, he or she would eventually break down and start sobbing, ‘Why doesn’t Hollywood want to adapt any of my films?’
Art for Fart’s Sake
French artists can’t get it out of their heads that this is the country of Renoir, Monet, Manet and Cézanne, and the place where foreigners like Picasso, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Giacometti and so many others came to develop their art. Instead of inspiring today’s artists to follow their dream, though, this national heritage only encourages them to act like Picasso instead of painting like him.
Paris regularly holds studio open days, when whole quartiers of the city become artistic treasure hunts. You get a little map and follow directions to all the different artists’ studios in the neighbourhood. And in almost every case, you’ll find a place that looks like a real artist’s studio (splodges of paint, ink, plaster or other materials you don’t want to enquire about), and sounds like a real artist’s studio (the drone of a voice explaining the art on show – although the best art doesn’t need any explaining at all), but feels like a waste of time. The art on show will probably be either sub-Impressionist, supposedly ‘shocking’ or ‘inspired’ by a visit to some exotic corner of the world where the art is easily copyable.
I’m not saying that Damien Hirst sawing cows in half is the be-all and end-all of art, but at least it’s different.
In any case, these days the most inventive French artists are much more interested in comic books, or BD (‘bay-day’, an abbreviation of bande dessinée), than straight art. But these should never be called ‘comic books’. They are the neuvième art, and must be taken very seriously. And it is definitely not polite to
