April 16, 2003

By B. Ruby Rich

THE TIMES WE live in. French fries are renamed by people who evidently don't know they're Belgian. United "temporarily" suspends its nonstop flights from San Francisco to Paris. A friend stops by to tell me about a public-radio program interviewing a travel agent whose clients canceled their package tours to Paris – though one offered to go if the agency would provide armed guards to escort him to the Louvre. Meanwhile, a French friend in the Paris office of a U.S. corporation reports hate mail from the United States denouncing her "French" company and canceling business. As for the boycott of French wine, do the blusterers even drink it? Perhaps they could be convinced to boycott Saudi oil instead and leave the Humvee in the driveway.

Recently, even friends and acquaintances who drink French wine have begun to ask me whether the French have become anti-American in response to our consumer warriors and whether Paris has become an unpleasant or even dangerous place to visit. My credentials? I just spent a week in Paris, where my partner and I have been fixing up an apartment, and I am pleased to report that whether I was speaking bad French or excellent English, the Parisians were as friendly as ever. (Really, they are!) Being from San Francisco confers added status, as ours were the only protests shown on French television the day the war broke out. There wasn't a hint of anti-Americanism. Not unless you count the months-long, open-ended run of Bowling for Columbine, embraced by the French for its antigovernment line. Unlike my increasingly panicked compatriots on this side of the Atlantic, the French seem to be in complete control of their faculties and willing, even eager, to distinguish between a nation's people and its government. "Given what's going on in your country," one café-sitter said, "if you're here in Paris, you must be one of the good ones."

The San Francisco International Film Festival must also be among the good ones. It's a festival that's so friendly to French cinema that it invited an influential Frenchman to play guest curator this year (see " 'Positif' Space," page 47), thus boosting the number of French films way past the number of those from any other foreign country. Actually, French film has long been a mainstay of most big-league film festivals in the United States, whether the New York Film Festival's early reliance on a Cahiers du cinéma slate or the Telluride Film Festival's long embrace of French cinema via festival regular Pierre Rissient. "The French national cinema is the only one in Europe that has maintained itself consistently over the years," Telluride cofounder Tom Luddy contends. "And they still have stars!" But even Luddy says he's careful to stay out of the internecine wars that can pit Cahiers against Positif, Libération against Le Monde, each backing its own slate of filmmakers in some sort of cinematic runoff campaign with no end date in sight.

San Francisco's festival staff long provided its French cinema-loving credentials in the persons of Francophile ex-director Peter Scarlet (no wonder the Cinémathèque Française wanted him for a time) and former programmer Marie-Pierre Macia (currently launching the new Paris Cinema festival, scheduled for July). For years most major American festivals have been marked by Francophile loyalty. Ever since the nouvelle vague captured the world's attention, years after Godard moved to Switzerland and stopped making interesting films, cinephiles everywhere (even those of us who think we prefer Asian, Latin American, African, or Australian films) can't help looking toward France with high expectations. And those expectations are met often enough to keep us at it, waiting for the next film from Varda or Denis or Assayas, hoping to discover the next Kassovitz or Zonca.

In a way the French return the favor, and no, this is not a segue into that tired old Jerry Lewis argument. After all, it's the French, last time I looked, who own Universal Studios (at least for the moment), thanks to Vivendi's global-reaching, Hollywood-admiring ex-exec, Jean-René Fourtou. And it was the French who coined the term auteur and rescued Hollywood movies from the scrap heap (literally, as many were tossed or melted down for their silver). And it was the French who tilted the scales toward art when an earlier era branded as Hollywood hacks such directors as Nick Ray and Sam Fuller. Give them half a chance and they go even further: French director (and former Cahiers du cinéma critic) Olivier Assayas published a book on Kenneth Anger, for instance.

The way these transatlantic issues of cinematic art versus junk play out actually has a great deal of relevance to the current denouement between the nations, for it was at the heart of a contentious dispute just a decade ago when France engaged the Unites States in an arm-wrestling match of haute diplomatique proportions in the midst of the final negotiations at the Uruguay Round of GATT (that is, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, predecessor of the World Trade Organization). In the battle of the Jacks – which pitted French culture minister Jack Lang against Hollywood's lobbyist for life, Motion Picture Association of America chair Jack Valenti – France led the charge on behalf of Europe against the Hollywood incursions it termed a "Trojan horse" by arguing successfully for a "cultural exception" to the trade rules that sought to open all markets to U.S. goods, free of quotas, tariffs, and other unacceptable obstacles. The fight was waged over the definition of cinema and television: were they goods or weren't they? If they were goods, then they were subject to the provisions of free trade from which they'd long been protected, but if they were a country's "cultural patrimony," then they required and deserved protection.

For the French, cinema is something special. The wonderful expatriate critic Joan Dupont, who has long written on film for the International Herald Tribune (and hopefully still will, now that the New York Times has absorbed the hallowed rag into its empire), reports that the average French person follows film fervently, often more passionately than she herself does. "I think it's a wonder, with what has happened in the world, that France remains the big production center for European film. In France film is taken seriously." It's even something worth fighting for. French citizens have been known to take to the streets over film quotas, determined to preserve their films from American domination. And the clever French tax on ticket sales ensures that every Hollywood blockbuster that manages to become a hit serves to channel more money into the production coffers for homegrown talent.

Nor does France hoard its cinematic riches at home. Instead, it has become a crucial source of coproduction funds, with the help of far-sighted producers and institutions such as television networks Canal+ and ARTE, which commission films that go into theatrical release. Especially active with francophone cinemas and former colonies, France shows up on this year's festival slate as coproducer on films from Cuba, Iceland, Mauritania, and Montreal, just to name a few. In Paris I had dinner with New York-Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni. His brave Palestinian-friendly documentary Local Angel has no U.S. distribution, but there's a major French producer eager to finance his next film. "Why aren't I living here?" he complained. In another meeting a French television executive outlined the idea for a touring program of films to U.S. universities. "So they'll be recent French films?" I asked. "No," he answered. "Films from all over the world, but ones that the French value." The Cannes Film Festival, obviously sharing that philosophy, has set up a foundation to provide four-month residencies in Paris for young talent from around the world. The chosen filmmakers share a glorious flat in Montmartre and take meetings with the French movers and shakers who can help them, all while toiling on their (presumably Paris-inspired) next screenplays.

"An image is never innocent," writes legendary screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, whose credits reach all the way back to Buñuel. "It is the vehicle of a world that ranges from material consumption to intellect. I believe that a nation unable to recognize itself in the 21st century fictions that are fed to it will disappear culturally. As for the American producers of these 'global' pictures that they would like to impose on the entire world, they too will have to pay a price. All they see is their own production."

Fighting planet Hollywood

The animosity between the French and American film industries dates all the way back to the very birth of cinema, as detailed in an oddly titled but meticulously researched study, Some Big Bourgeois Brothel: Contexts for France's Culture Wars with Hollywood, recently published by entertainment lawyer Bill Grantham. The book documents a surprising history, one in which French films dominated the U.S. market until pushed out by a nefarious cartel of patent holders led by Thomas Edison. French cinema didn't recover until the Vichy years, when, ironically, Hollywood films were verboten. In the postwar period, European nations were able to argue that their fragile film industries were in such weak economic and infrastructural condition as to require protection in the form of quotas, subsidies, and so on. Meant to be temporary, the protectionism became permanent; that's one of the things GATT was meant to end.

Of course, no such ending transpired. With France as the standard-bearer of European values against the American juggernaut, the exception culturelle was upheld and audiovisual products rendered exempt from trade negotiations for another 10 years. It was clear that France knew exactly what was at stake. Daniel Toscan de Plantier, the president of Unifrance who died so suddenly and tragically in the midst of this year's Berlin Film Festival, once declared, "When we have 10 percent of the U.S. market, we will suppress our taxes and levies." He knew perfectly well what a disequilibrium prevailed and which country benefited from it.

Grantham takes pains to point out that patent manipulations were not the only reason the French lost market share in the United States and eventually the rest of the world. While he cites managerial errors, too, he alludes to a difference in aesthetics as well. Now you're talking! To this day the French cinema is a laboratory of aesthetic strategies and narrative experiments. Just take a look at some of the films on hand this month in the festival.

Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy is a hilarious send-up of her own filmmaking practices as well as the public's fantasies about them. Restaging the seduction scene from Fat Girl with the same actress, she casts Anne Parillaud as the obsessive and manipulative director who talks uncannily like Breillat. Currently turning out a film a year, Breillat is a reminder of how strikingly a subsidy system benefits women by comparison to a box-office system. Somehow, protecting the national cinematic patrimony can be entrusted to women in France while protecting the investors' money can't be entrusted to women in the United States.

Since the success of Romance and Une vraie jeune fille, Breillat has not only become one of the most prolific of French filmmakers but has also given rise to a veritable lineage: women directors (and sometimes men working from women's scripts or stories) who push the envelope of gender and sexuality with the permission of Breillat's example. The most notorious of these is probably Baise-moi, the female revenge movie that set a standard for ultraviolence by girls. This year there's In My Skin, written and directed by and starring first-timer Marina de Van (a longtime François Ozon collaborator). Well, it's bound to cause a stir for anyone who can watch it (confession: I couldn't, and had to look away from the scenes of self-mutilation for much of the film). It's already a cult favorite in France. De Van may also be influenced by Claire Denis, whose allegorical cannibalism in Trouble Every Day caused a major stir last year on the festival circuit. Her earlier, intriguing, presumably less off-putting romance, Friday Night, is in the festival.

I wonder if there's a Ph.D. student somewhere at this very moment working up a dissertation on French women's cinema and the abject. Certainly the Breillat generation poses a conundrum: a veritable explosion of talented and powerful women directors with a propensity for films in which women are masterfully and sexily demeaned or manipulated in luxuriously explicit fashions. If Roger Corman were setting up shop in France today, his stable of directors might well be female.

It's not just women pushing the envelope, of course. Gaspar Noé is a master at it, manipulating the predictable shocked reaction into box-office dollars for his newest scandale, Irréversible. Even Assayas, known more for his good taste than for any brutal effects, found he'd succeeded even beyond his own intentions in shocking his audience with Demonlover, a screed on corporate greed and Internet pornography; he ended up trimming scenes he'd considered necessary to jolt the audience out of its complacency. To his surprise, viewers were easier to upset than he'd anticipated, and he had to lower the voltage.

Perhaps it's time to recall that épater le bourgeois is indeed a French expression. Back in the days when the United States was an even more puritanical society and married couples had to sleep in Production Code-mandated twin beds, French cinema offered the forbidden fruit of sexual sophistication – and Michel Reilhac's compendium of early silent pornography, The Good Old Naughty Days, reminds us of France's pioneering work in this, uh, field.

Today, when Hollywood suffers an equally crippling code of industry norms hobbling the imagination, it seems French cinema is still necessary, still a bracing corrective for what ails us. And not always through its gestures of shock or investigations of sexuality. Fear and Trembling is one of this year's best French films in the festival. Directed and scripted by Alain Courneau from Amélie Nothomb's best-selling novel of the same name, the impeccably restrained and immaculately paced film provides a subjective view of Japan through the eyes of a young Belgian girl who enters into a one-year work contract with a Tokyo firm. Allegedly she's to be an interpreter; in fact, she becomes the pawn of office politics, arcane hierarchies, and unwritten rules, all of which conspire to reduce her to a state of utter abjection. Given the autobiographical nature of the story by this Belgian novelist (whose father is ambassador to Japan), the character of Miss Amélie is yet another conundrum: the humbled yet ironically observant adventurer who lives to tell her tale (and, OK, to make it sexy and startling, too).

True, some French films are downright cheesy (The Devils, for instance, in this year's festival), and some are merely worthy or amusing without any staying power. In the background are the French commercial films, made for local consumption, tracked in Variety but never released in the United States or lauded on the festival circuit, and periodically there's even one of those would-be blockbuster movies made in English, a silly gesture since those films usually fail to reach the audience the language switch is meant to subdue.

Whatever its momentary failings, however, French cinema remains distinct from American cinema in its ways and means. Box-office success is less a prize than a liability. Careers are sustained on the basis of public attention as well as critical appreciation. Films aren't reedited by studios based on focus-group screenings. And seniority does not count against directors the way it can here in the hurly-burly search for the next hot kid to fit to the mythic young-man audience demographic. Further, French cinema is distinguished from a number of other national cinemas (the U.K. comes to mind, here in the movie theater as well as the theater of war) in its desire not to imitate the American model. As Cannes bears witness each year, the French carefully pick just which American films suit their tastes and choose accordingly.

Reading between the subtitles

Americans would do well to review the words of the late François Mitterrand, speaking in the tense days of the GATT negotiations in 1993, when he argued that cinema is "very different from an industry; it is the image which a country offers of themselves." Outraged by the claim that films should be seen as "just commodities," he spoke for the rest of the world: "What is at stake is the cultural identity of all our nations, the freedom to create and choose our own images. A society that abandons to others the way of showing itself ... is a society enslaved."

Just as it has done this year in its unsuccessful attempt to stop the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, France in 1993 more successfully sought to unify the European community as an association of common interests in opposition to the ultrapowerful U.S. movie industry. Ultimately, the tactic hasn't been any better at beating back Hollywood's intrusions into the French imaginary than United Nations diplomacy was at stopping the U.S.-U.K. forces from cashing in their military options. But that doesn't mean France isn't right. (And, by the way, if statistics can be trusted, it has the highest audience share for domestic cinema of any Western European country.)

I hope Americans don't start boycotting French cinema next. Honestly, though, I've noticed that they already are, and were – prior to the current wars, prior to Sept. 11, 2001. Foreign-language films do so badly in the U.S. marketplace that companies like Miramax have begun to market them with crafty trailers designed to give the appearance of English-language soundtracks. Americans, we're famously told, just won't read subtitles. (How these same viewers manage to read their e-mail and incessantly Web-surf is, I guess, a mystery.) Recent statistics have revealed that only 14 percent of Americans even have passports. It turns out there's been a silent boycott of France in place for ages, long before this attack on Iraq.

I remember the parents of a good friend who used to vacation only in countries that spoke English. They'd been to Canada and the U.K. and Bermuda, and they were preparing a trip to Australia when I lost touch. If what people want from the world is a lulling lineup of mirrors reflecting America back to itself, then I guess France isn't the place. French cinema, like French culture and French cuisine, resolutely goes its own way, perfecting its genres, nurturing its star system, and protecting its auteurs.

Flying home from Paris last month, I reflected on how right the French were to exercise their due diligence against the encroachments of what Jack Lang once called "Coca-Cola satellites ... attacking our artistic and cultural integrity." Marin Karmitz, the powerful French producer and cinema owner, spoke in words that seem drawn from today's exchanges, not 1998, when he said them in an interview with Label France. "I believe we are in a situation of war," he said, "a very modern war, one that is being waged through a new industry, namely the communication industry. It happens to be the United States' leading export industry; not only is it very profitable, but it is also a means of exporting ideas and products, a way of life and a way of thinking. And, as in any war, there are those who resist, in this case artists from all over the world, a handful of intellectuals, some people in power, etc."

No one then could have predicted that France's valiant battle with the United States on behalf of France's – and Europe's – cultural patrimony would end up as a rehearsal for the real-world war now in progress, nor that its success then would be succeeded by this year's reversal. Lang termed GATT's exemption for audiovisual services "a victory for art and artists over the commercialization of culture." In an eerie echo of current events, he went further and called for "a crusade" against the "cultural imperialism" of the U.S. film industry. As it's turned out, the crusade started on this side of the Atlantic. Before takeoff on that flight home, the flight attendant handed me a copy of the newspaper Le Figaro. The words "George W. Bush's Jihad, American-Style" headlined its two-page article on the bombing of Iraq. And that's the view at the conservative paper.

I confess, my love of France and the French is terribly recent. I avoided the place for decades after testing the waters as a schoolgirl with a backpack in the anti-American Vietnam War days when, treated meanly, I vowed never to return. Only in the '90s did I go back, and only then was I smitten. I wondered why I'd changed my mind so radically. Now I think I know. Somehow my heart knew what my mind couldn't yet fathom: that in the strange politics of the new millennium, it is France that has become the political hope for much of the world. How sweet it is, solidarity with a culture of couscous and quiche and good cheap wine. Now if only I can improve my French.