France on the crest of a new New Wave

[DB7]

France on the crest of a new New Wave

A series of acclaimed gritty urban comedies and thrillers reflecting the realities of modern, multicultural France is rejuvenating French cinema - and challenging its bourgeois arthouse image...



* Jason Solomons



When director Laurent Cantet accepted the Palme d'Or at Cannes last May, he took to the stage surrounded by a large cast of children. African, Caribbean, white, Arab, Chinese - these French faces were the young stars of his film Entre les murs (The Class). It was a stirring, televised spectacle for the host nation - not only was it the first time in 21 years that a French film had picked up cinema's most prestigious trophy but it was a film about youth, hope and multi-culturalism that had achieved it.



The Class is a magnificent film tracing a state school year in the lively, racially mixed classroom of one teacher, François Bégaudeau. A winning blend of documentary style and improvised drama, the film reflects the changing nature of French society in microcosm, using these 14-year-old Parisian kids' identities and personalities to touch on themes of race, postcolonialism, language and law. Cantet's film is not typical of traditional French cinema, but does its success at Cannes mean that, finally, France's film-makers are opening up to the possibilities of reflecting the new world around them?



Perhaps the cosy, traditional French bourgeois drama is becoming a thing of the past. Such films have tended to fall into two categories: the country house affair, with large family gatherings on sun-filled terraces; or the urbane Parisian comedy, packed with bistro meetings, girls in summer dresses, chic women in Chanel suits, fabulous apartments overlooking the Seine and strolls in the Jardin du Luxembourg.



Perhaps the optimism inspired by France's victory in the football World Cup that it hosted in 1998, when the 'rainbow nation' team of Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry and Youri Djorkaeff paraded along the Champs-Elysées, has now filtered into French culture. 'All I know is that this film struck a chord with this particular jury at Cannes in this particular year,' says Cantet. 'I greatly enjoyed making the film and spending a year with these wonderful young people, so, personally, I think there is great cause for hope in the future of our country and it is encouraging to see that hope reflected in French cinema.'



These are heady times for French film, which seems finally to have found a new voice after many years spent emerging from the long shadows of the Nouvelle Vague and battling the influence of Hollywood. French films are taking centre stage around the world and the names of French directors are once again rolling off the tongues of cinephiles: Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, Olivier Assayas, Agnès Jaoui. Is this the start of a new New Wave?



This group of directors is disparate but certainly brings a new edge to French film. Cantet has been building a distinctive career with socially aware films such as Human Resources and Time Out, films about men caught in suffocating systems and workplaces. Kechiche, born in Tunisia, has also - in films such as L'esquive (The Dodge) and last year's César-winning Couscous - concentrated on a social realism more in tune with the films of Britain's Ken Loach than anything in the French tradition. The films of Assayas, a former film critic, range widely, from twentysomething Parisian bourgeois angst in Fin août, début septembre, to a spin on period drama among a porcelain-producing family in Les destinées sentimentales, to doom-laden global futurism in Demonlover.



'We're not a family, that's for sure,' says Agnès Jaoui, the writer, director and actress whose new film, Let's Talk About the Rain, is now playing in UK cinemas. Jaoui - known for polished ensemble comedies such as the Cannes-winning Comme une image (Look at Me) and The Taste of Others - was brought up by poor immigrant Tunisian Jewish parents in Paris. 'I don't feel that we're part of a new school or fashion or movement. But, yes, we are, we must be, united by something - the fact that, somehow, 15 years or so ago, French cinema survived.'



Jaoui is referring to 'la loi Toubon', the law introduced in 1994 by culture minister Jacques Toubon which protected French language and production. Two out of every five songs on the radio, for example, must be in French. The laws on film production led to tax breaks and levies pouring money into French productions and keeping French films playing in multiplexes.



According to Jaoui, all European countries would benefit from such laws. 'French cinema was nearly destroyed by the weight of its own history and by the power of Hollywood on its young people,' she says. 'Maybe even film-makers were against these laws at first, but now I would say that, among us all in the current generation, there is a general feeling, a mood, of survival and of diversity.'



In France, 2008 has been a landmark year. Not only did The Class win the Palme d'Or but Marion Cotillard won a Best Actress Oscar - the first French language performance ever to do so, propelling her film, La Vie en Rose, to impressive international box-office figures (£1m in the UK). France also produced its most successful film ever in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks), a culture-clash comedy based in small-town northern France, which brought 20 million French people into cinemas, grossing more than $200m and, so far, racking up more than two million DVD sales. No film, French or American, has been more popular.



In the UK, French film dominates the foreign language releases. The number of French films in 2008 stands at 42, with receipts expected to be above £15m. According to Unifrance, which promotes French film abroad, the number of tickets sold in the UK for French films in the past three years has increased fivefold.



What we are seeing, in other words, is a new wave of commercialism in French cinema. Rather than wowing the world - as the New Wave did with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle or Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups - with a new style or a new film grammar, France has positioned itself as a powerhouse of production, cultivating a domestic scene that also feeds international reputation and demand. For instance, it is not seen as a commercial risk to have French actor Mathieu Amalric as the latest Bond villain.



French cinema is using this new internationalism wisely. Guillaume Canet, for instance, is perhaps best known for starring with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. But he is also the young director behind Tell No One, a stylish thriller that enjoyed a long run in British cinemas last year and is now enjoying cult success in New York and Los Angeles. You would not call it traditional 'arthouse', but it does trade on being more upmarket simply because it's in a foreign language.



It also depicts a grittier, urban France, which is also reflected in one of the most anticipated French films, Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One, an epic, two-part crime saga starring Vincent Cassel as one of France's most notorious gangsters. This year's current stylish French mystery - complete with bluesy guitar slides reminiscent of Tell No One - is I've Loved You So Long, which looks likely to earn several awards nominations for its leading lady, Kristin Scott Thomas, who also appeared in Tell No One, and is, of course, familiar around the world.



The global reach of French cinema is both a blessing and a curse, according to a veteran observer of such things. Agnès Varda, often labelled the 'grandmother of the New Wave', is now 80 but has just completed a beguiling personal film called Les plages d'Agnès. 'Nowadays, French cinema has to be international to survive. There is so much competition, so much pressure. Now you have films from a dozen other countries. We never had that. Our only competition used to be from the Italians.'



Varda thinks highly of Abdellatif Kechiche whose La graine et le mulet (Couscous) is a wonderful film which follows an elderly Arab immigrant, Slimane, as he tries to build his dream: a fish couscous restaurant on a disused boat in the town of Sète, near Marseille. Again, like Cantet, using improvisation and documentary techniques in a realist tradition, Kechiche's masterly work brought to the fore a cast of characters - mostly Arab in origin - ignored by French cinema for too long. An unexpected commercial success at the French box office, Couscous introduced the actress Hafsia Herzi and she is now on her way to becoming French cinema's first female Arab superstar.



France's leading Arab film star is Jamel Debbouze, who first became known through TV comedy but who has now moved to the big screen in films such as the Asterix adaptations starring Gérard Depardieu, Amélie opposite Audrey Tatou and, most significantly, the fine revisionist Second World War drama Days of Glory, directed by Algerian-born Rachid Bouchareb, about the contribution of African troops in liberating France from the Nazis. Debbouze is now starring in Let's Talk About the Rain. 'Jamel is a phenomenon in France, not just a star,' says Jaoui. 'But would you believe we still got some sniping in the press, that we were seeking bigger audiences by working with Jamel, that we were somehow dumbing down our usual ensemble to include him. That's just rubbish, but it shows how hard it still is to change things around in France.'



Even more traditional French films have been given a twist. It's interesting to note that idiosyncratic director Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale and Olivier Assayas's recent hit, Summer Hours, starring Juliette Binoche, are both about old French families coming to terms with the death of their matriarch and the divvying up of the family home. Let's Talk About the Rain has similar themes. All three films show a big French family shaken up by modern life, with its taxes, globalism and multiculturalism. For Assayas, a return to making bourgeois drama was, ironically, the route for him to say more about the future of French culture. In the film, family members (including Binoche, Jérémie Renier, Charles Berling) meet to discuss what to do with the valuable art collection left in their family summer house after the death of their mother (Edith Scob), once the lover of a great artist. The film borrowed many fabulous artworks from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.



'I was surprised how easily this kind of bourgeois story was the canvas for talking about issues that obsess me,' says Assayas. 'Namely, how to respect the past yet also to embrace the future and appreciate its styles, fashions and ideas as much as what came before. I was surprised, too, by how popular this type of story still is with audiences, particularly abroad.'



It's interesting that this generation of film-makers see themselves as reacting to the New Wave. 'The films of Godard and Truffaut are fine,' says Jaoui, 'but I think it took the new generation so long to come out of the shadow of the Nouvelle Vague that they did as much harm as good. You know, the Cahiers du Cinéma [France's leading intellectual film magazine] and the critics, that sort of snobisme held back film-makers for too long - it made us scared, lacking in experimentation to find our own voice to say: this is who we are, this is how we want our films to sound, to look, to be about.



'I'm French but I'm the child of Tunisian parents, so I don't know if I would call my film French in any typical way. What is that now? Is it sophisticated comedy or realist social drama or big budget action? What we see now is very talented film-makers realising, hey, we're all still here, we're all alive, so let's just make the films we can and enjoy it. If that's a movement, then that's what we're all part of.'



• The Class opens in February



What do you think? Email us at review@observer.co.uk

New classics: Cinq to see



Irreversible (2002) Violent stunner from Argentinian-born director Gaspar Noé, a long, dark Paris nightmare about Vincent Cassel seeking revenge for the rape of his lover, Monica Bellucci. Prompted

walk-outs and fainting at Cannes.



The Beat My Heart Skipped (2005) Career-making performance by actor Romain Duris in Jacques Audiard's urban thriller about a property repo-man among immigrant squatters who really wants to be a concert pianist.



Hidden (2005) Directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, Hidden gripped audiences with its unsettling mystery about a couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) sent incriminating video tapes - a brilliant film about post-colonial bourgeois guilt and the first to mention a police massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961.



La Vie en Rose (2007) Olivier Dahan's biopic of Edith Piaf earned Marion Cotillard the first-ever best actress Oscar for a French language performance. Controversially skated over the Nazi occupation of Paris, and Piaf's performances for German officers.



Couscous (2007) Released in France as La graine et le mulet, it was the surprise winner of four Césars earlier this year. The long family Sunday lunch is one of the great food scenes in film.

[Bernardo]

Sacre Bleu! That is a long read DB. Had to print it off in large print to read it. Had to smile at this:-

Couscous (2007) Released in France as La graine et le mulet, it was the surprise winner of four Césars earlier this year. The long family Sunday lunch is one of the great food scenes in film.

There could be a thread on the number of French films without a dining scene!



I am a huge admirer of the French Film Industry, for one they maintain their culture, and two, like their cars they are innovative. Plus of course there is a good story.

World Cinema Channel on Sky has some good examples and so often repeated they are easy to catch.



Riffi http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi830734617/

is amongst my favourite films, it showed Hollywood how to do a robbery sequence. La Cage aux Folles, another I love.

It is a great shame that we always look West for entertainment product (ugh horrible word) when Eastwards to our Gallic roots may be preferable.

Lets hope this new phase may make it so.

[rbrooks2008]

I saw Rififi just last week and like Bob le flambeur (1956), the story-telling is in the interaction and the action, the director not having the film scream out at the audience with every little move and fill each silent space with noise or chatter.



Look East, it's the only way!

[batman]

name='rbrooks2008']I saw Rififi just last week and like Bob le flambeur (1956), the story-telling is in the interaction and the action, the director not having the film scream out at the audience with every little move and fill each silent space with noise or chatter.



Look East, it's the only way!

Two superb films .... I can highly recommend both of those.