French Cinema &  Society 50.376 [Course Materials]

"Somebody was asking the other day what the difference was between French and American films. American films are about plots, I said, and French films are about people. You can usually tell where a plot is heading, but a person, now - a person will fool you."   (Roger Ebert)

Films to be screened:
- 1. The Visitors replaced by Joyeux Noël
- 2. Au revoir les enfants (Good bye, Children)
- 3. May Fools  (Milou en Mai)
- 4. Hate  (La haine)
- 5. Bye-Bye
- 6. The Town is Quiet  (La ville est tranquille)
- 7. La cérémonie
- 8. The Dreamlife of Angels  (La vie rêvée dea anges)
- 9. Tatie Danielle
- 10. The Girl from Paris  (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps)
- 11. The Closet  (Le placard)
- 12. L'Auberge espagnole  (The Spnanish Apartment)
- 13. Amélie  (La vie fabuleuse d'Amélie Poulain)

 Website of Reference: Internet Movie Database (imdb.com)

A Brief Review of French History

Europe at the Eve of World War I

In 1914, at the eve of World War I, Europe counted five major powers, Great Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. France and Great Britain were democratic and liberal powers, while Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were three authoritarian empires. More importantly perhaps, the five great European powers were at a different stage of economic development. Russia and Austria-Hungary were just beginning to modernize with few important cities, a mostly rural population and an underdeveloped railroad system. France, conversely, had a modern industry, a very good railroad system, and a solid currency. On the negative side, France still had a large rural population. England and Germany were great producers of coal, pig iron and steel; they had a superb fleet, an excellent banking system, but Germany was ahead and threatening to become the first industrial power in Europe. Soon the Great War of 1914-1918 was going to erupt and become the first World Conflict.

A Conflict Brooding

Since 1905 war was brooding in the Balkans, with the growing Yugoslav nationalism, increasing tension between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and the formations of blocks of coalitions such as the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia and England (eventually). As these blocks were forming, the tension between them increased and led them to engage into an arms race. In 1913, France increased the length of military service to three years, while Germany increased its army, all the more because it was afraid of Russia's power, which was on the side of France. So William II of Germany, who had long wanted peace, had to change his mind, saying, "war is unavoidable and necessary" and "if we don't strike first, our situation will become worse." Peace was therefore hanging by a thin thread.

On June 28,1914, a Bosnian nationalist student assassinated the Archduke Francis-Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife in the streets of Sarajevo in Bosnia. The Austro-Hungarian government immediately sent an ultimatum to Serbia, but Serbia ignored it, so Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, thinking that it was a wonderful opportunity to eliminate Serbia from the political scene of the Balkans. Germany approved the move, thinking that Russia would not intervene, considering that it was hardly recovering from its 1905 Revolution. Poincaré, the French President of the Republic, promised France's assistance to the Czar, and Russia in turn promised its assistance to Serbia. On July 28,1914, the Austro-Hungarian forces attacked Serbia. Soon most of Europe was engulfed in a bloody war that would kill ten million men by its end in 1918. It was Austria, Hungary and Germany against Serbia, France, Britain and Russia.

Russia mobilized on 30 July, 1914, Germany declared war on August 1 and the same day France mobilized and on August 3 Germany after entering Luxembourg and Belgium declared war on France. On August 4 England went to war. Nationalist feelings on all parts were at their highest pitch and in France nationalism was fanned by the writings of Maurras and Barrès. The French wanted to recover Alsace and Lorraine and take their revenge for their defeat of 1870. In spite of some partisans of peace on each side, people resigned themselves to war as something inevitable.

The War

The Germans were ready, but France and its allies less. So Russia had many men, but their armaments were old-fashioned and mobilization was slow. England had no compulsory military service and therefore could only send a small expeditionary force. Under these conditions, France confronted the brunt of the German offensive and, unfortunately, its army and armaments were archaic. The men still wore terribly visible uniforms, red caps and pants, which made them easy targets for the Germans.

The German troops swiftly went around the French army and moved toward Paris. The situation was critical. Half a million Parisians left the capital and the French government moved to Bordeaux. The French troops, under the high command of Joseph Joffre, held the front on the river Marne, and on September 10 even forced the Germans to fall back.

But then began a very harsh, devastating period of trench warfare, with the use of gas, which by 1915 brought the number of French dead to 400,000 and 600,000 wounded. At the end of 1915 both sides were resigned to a continued war of attrition, but the Germans launched a powerful offensive against Verdun on February 21, 1916. The resistance of Verdun was fierce and by the end of 1916 the Germans were back where they had started. The soldiers on both sides were getting tired, and the only thing the governments could do to maintain morale was to use propaganda. The German press was saying that their troops were about to march on Paris, while the French press exploited the valiant resistance of Verdun. But then, as some pacifist movements were beginning to grow, the United States entered the war, on April 2, 1917. If the French troops were exhausted, Clemenceau, President of the Council (Président du Conseil) incarnated the spirit of resistance. He kept claiming that "In internal politics as well as in foreign politics, my formula is the same: 'Je fais la guerre, je fais toujours la guerre' (I am fighting the war, I am always fighting the war). From February to June the war continued to rage around Verdun with the French troops under Général Pétain's command. In France it was a time of great political instability with rapidly changing governments and with the Socialists asking for the end of the war. In Russia the Revolution began and since Russia was too busy with its revolution, the Germans were able to withdraw troops from the Russian front. In spite of its renewed strength, the German army was also exhausted and it was held back in Champagne. The arrival of one million fresh American troops suddenly gave the French an overwhelming superiority, so Ludendorff saw that the German position was hopeless and resigned. The emperor William II at first refused to end the fighting, but strikes and revolts broke out, and the allies of the Germans were making separate armistices with the French and their allies, so the Kaiser finally abdicated and fled. The Republic was proclaimed in Berlin and the new government accepted an armistice on November 11, 1918. It was celebrated on both sides with great relief and joy. Peace followed with the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919. According to this treaty, France recovered Alsace and Lorraine and Germany had to pay a hefty financial war reparation. Resentment against the conditions of the Versailles treaty grew at once in Germany, and with the economic crisis, Fascism emerged.

In France the price of victory was staggeringly high: almost one and a half million dead, three million wounded and many of them severely maimed. France had lost so many men that its birthrate fell sharply and foreign workers had to be hired to make up for the loss of the three million French workers. French finances had been seriously depleted and prices soared. The only winners to an extent were the farmers, whose farm prices increased, but mechanization was still very rare and farmers still used horses and teams of oxen to do their farm work.

But at least the war was over and the humiliating defeat inflicted by Germany on France in 1870 was avenged. France seemed to have regained some of its hegemony in Europe, but for this situation to last, France had to receive continued help from its allies, Russia had to remain isolated and Germany needed to be kept weak. However, Germany was to come out of the war stronger than France, and it would not be long before it tried again to defeat France and dominate Europe. In the meantime, Fascism was progressing fast and economic depressions and inflation fanned its rise in Italy with Mussolini, in Spain with the "Caudillo" Franco, and in Germany with Hitler and his Nazi party.

France after World War l

The French had put aside their political and social divisions during the war, but as soon as peace was signed the conflicts resumed between Socialists and Communists and the Right and Extreme Right parties. The opposition was made worse by their differences in matter of religion. The Left was traditionally anticlerical, while the Right was in favor of reestablishing relations with the Vatican. In addition the example of the Russian Revolution gave rise to movements of protest among workers who were joining trade unions. The legislative elections of November 1919 brought a coalition of the Right and Center called the National Bloc and the Horizon-Blue Chamber (La Chambre bleu horizon), with Raymond Poincaré and Aristide Briand. The Bloc National was really a nationalistic and pro-Catholic alliance promoted by the Church and Big Business and represented in the press by the extreme-rightist newspaper L'Action Française. However, France's economy was declining, the franc was losing much of its value due to the inflation, unemployment reappeared and multiple strikes took place at the end of 1919 and in 1920. Public opinion was divided.

There seemed only one solution to the worsening financial situation of France: make the Germans pay their war debt! So in 1922 Raymond Poincaré received the specific mandate to make the Germans pay up because they had so far craftily delayed and postponed their payment. But the Germans soon proved incapable of paying, even after having their debt reduced thanks to an American mediation. Raymond Poincaré fell in 1924 and was replaced by a coalition of Radicals and Socialists named the Cartel des Gauches. The current President of the Republic, Millerand, who belonged to the Bloc National, had to resign, and he was replaced by a moderate Republican, Gaston Doumergue, while a Radical, Edouard Herriot, became Premier. Unfortunately the financial situation of France was getting worse, the franc slid further down and prices soared. Herriot, when he saw that he could not count on Germany's payment of its war debt, raised taxes and cut government spending. But it was too little a remedy. Herriot resigned in April 1925, and so the only savior in sight was Poincaré, who returned as President du Conseil in July 1926. Poincaré's efforts following the last measures of Herriot redressed the situation. French industry started to grow, and by 1930 it would be 40% above its pre-World War I level, thanks particularly to the development of the automobile, of petro-chemical and electrical industries. Workers' salaries were low, but they obtained a reduction in work time to only eight hours per day. Women were also making progress in the work place, in industry and offices; however, they still did not have the right to vote. Exports improved too, but in 1929 an ill Poincaré resigned. A series of Center-Right governments followed and while France was enjoying prosperity in almost a state of euphoria, a terrible crisis was brewing.

A Terrible Crisis

In October 1929, Thursday, October 24, exactly, now known as Black Thursday, the New York Stock Market crashed and did not recover. In fact the crisis hit the whole world, with perhaps the exception of Russia. At first an international crisis, it soon turned into a world economic and social catastrophe. Unemployment grew and social as well as racial ten-sions grew. In Germany, the Nazis gained 107 seats in the Reichstag in 1930, then 250 seats. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany by Hindenburg. On March 23, 1933, Hitler obtained full powers. Then on August 2, 1934, when Hindenburg died, Hitler became both President and Chancellor under the title of Reichsfahrer: He was the absolute master of Germany, in fact a full-fledged dictator supported by the gigantic organization of the Waffen S.S. and Himmler's "Gestapo" (Geheime Stoats Polizei).

As Hitler was taking power, France's unemployment reached 1.3 million. The French economy was on a downslide and the nation's deficit growing. French governments fell one after another. There were to be forty-two governments in the interwar period, each one lasting no more than six months, and nobody knew how to put an end to the crisis. And then the Stavinsky scandal exploded: It was a financial scandal that ended with Serge Stavinsky's death (suicide or murder) in December 1933. Stavinsky was a plain swindler with protectors in high places. He issued large amounts of bonds with the minimal (not to say nonexistent) warranty of the Bayonne Municipal Pawnshop. The French, exasperated by the economic situation, used the Stavinsky scandal as an outlet for their frustration and anger. The Royalists of the Action Française encouraged a group of thugs to create confusion and to beat up Communists and Radicals. There was also the fascist Croix de Feu organization, a pseudo-Nazi association that organized anti-government riots. The Left faction of the government fought back, and as these two factions were at odds, France seemed close to a revolution. The worse was fortunately averted thanks to a leftist coalition that led the Popular Front to victory, a coalition of Communists, Radical-Socialists with the backing of the C.G.T. union,'in May 1936 with Léon Blum as its leader. Blum came to power under very difficult circumstances because the French had hoped for social progress and wanted more welfare, a more equal distribution of wealth— and they strengthened their demands with strikes. Léon Blum, unfortunately, was not able to realize the deep economic and financial reforms that were expected of him, and in 1936 the government had to devaluate the franc. In March 1937 Blum had to announce that he had to delay the promised and expected reforms. In France Blum was also confronted by the rise of secret organizations such as La Cagoule, and the Comité Secret d'Action Révolutionnaire (The secret committee of revolutionary action). Outside of France, Blum had to deal with the rise to power of Hitler, Mussolini and the Spanish Red Terror. Too few people supported Blum's policy and many did not want to pay more taxes to pay for the promised social services or to prepare for war. Blum was aware of the perilous international situation and wanted to start a rearmament program, but when he and his Popular Front asked the French to subscribe to national defense loans, many chose to take their money outside of France. The failure of Blum marked the end of the Popular Front in 1937 and many Frenchmen were heard crying: "Better Hitler than Blum!"

France's Decline at the Eve of World War II

Blum was replaced by Edouard Daladier, who chose Paul Raynaud as his minister of finances, who favored drastic fiscal measures, with new taxes and budgetary economies. In spite of some gains in industrial production, the economic situation of France remained bad, and to make things worse, France was experiencing a steep decline in its demography. From 1921 to 1936 the country had only gained two million inhabitants and in 1936 France still had to count on 2,200,000 foreign workers. There were more deaths than births and the French population was getting older, a dangerous trend for the future of the nation.

1938-1939

From 1938 on Europe began to be more and more at the mercy of Hitler's ambitions. The Führer was conscious that no one could seriously oppose him and that the time was ripe for carrying out his grand design of a powerful and supreme greater Germany. France and Britain wanted peace and people either did not see, or rather did not want to see, the menace of Nazi Germany. In France, people were mostly preoccupied by their social concerns and by their fear of Communism. Furthermore, part of the French people favored an alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. No one even blinked an eye when Hitler assumed the command of the German armed forces (February 4, 1938). Even the frightening moves of Hitler did not stir a patriotic nerve in France. The Anschluss of February-March 1938 or occupation of Austria by the Germans was not met by any reaction in Europe. So Hitler felt that he had a green light to pursue his conquests. He next sought to take Czechoslovakia. On September 12, 1938, Hitler, in a particularly violent speech, accused the Czechs of torturing the German minorities on their soil. Czechoslovakia was an ally of France and so when Czechoslovakia mobilized, France followed.

The Grand Illusion of Peace

Chamberlain in the name of England, and Daladier for France, wanted desperately to avoid a war, so they suggested a meeting in Munich with Mussolini and the Fürher. Hitler managed to throw powder in the eyes of the French and British, who accepted his demands. They thought that by giving in to Hitler they had served the cause of peace, but in fact it was at the expense of Czechoslovakia, which was not present at the conference. Nevertheless, when Daladier returned to Paris he was acclaimed as a savior of peace. The French were relieved and repeated "La Paix! La Paix! C'est la Paix! Nous allons viure. Nous allons donc vivre encore" (Peace, Peace, it is peace. We are going to live. We are going to live again). In England Chamberlain, upon his return from Munich, declared: "It is Peace for Our Time" and received a hysterical welcome. They and their countries were soon to pay dearly for this cowardly act and for the two men's blind confidence in Hitler's words. So Hitler had the green light. Now he was looking at Poland and in fact wanted to invade it, and with this in mind he concluded a pact of non-aggression with Russia (August 23,1939). Hitler's hands were free to attack Poland and it is exactly what he did without warning on September 1, 1939. This time France and England could not back off. On September 3, 1939, France and England declared war on Germany. The dream of peace turned into a horrible nightmare.

The Second World War (1939-1945)

Following the invasion of Poland, the French first remained on the defensive along the Maginot Line that they thought the Germans could never cross. The fact was that the morale of the French army was low, their armament antiquated and they had practically no aviation and few tanks. Unfortunately the famous Ligne Maginot, strong as it was, did not extend all the way to the sea, and so the Germans avoided this line of French defense, going around it. Rapidly, the German forces, which were well equipped and enthusiastic, invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and in front of their overwhelming superiority French troops kept retreating on roads which were already crowded with retreating civilians who prevented the movement of allied troops. The Germans moved swiftly toward Paris and entered the capital without firing a shot. By June 12, 1940, Maréchal Weygand proposed an armistice to preserve the honor of the army, and by June 16 Paul Reynaud, who wanted to continue the fight, resigned, in fact pushed out by a coup d'état headed by Pierre Laval. The President of the Republic then called Maréchal Pétain, who by June 17 announced his intention to ask for an armistice.

The armistice was signed on June 22 in Compiègne, a place chosen by Hitler because it was in Compiègne that the November 11,1918, Armistice had been signed by the defeated Germans. The conditions of surrender for France were severe. Germany was to occupy the upper three-fourths of France and the two million French prisoners would not be freed. On October 22, 1940, Pétain met Hitler in Montoire and shook hand with him, a symbol of the collaboration of the Vichy government with Germany. Pétain and his cohorts as well as many Frenchmen were not unhappy to bring to an end the war, thinking that it could be the beginning of a great Franco-German alliance. In fact many thought that the brand of German totalitarianism could be beneficial for France. The French, it is true, were on the verge of despair and confused, so they thought that Pétain was right and they sang "Maréchal, nous voilà!" (Maréchal, here we are) thinking only a day at a time, hoping to continue to live while blanking out the real situation, blinding themselves to the past, the present and future.

Pétain immediately initiated a government called L'Etat Francais, in Vichy, with the motto "Travail, Famille, Patrie" (Work, family, Fatherland). A government based on moral order and on the basic values of the land.

Général de Gaulle, in the meantime, had fled to England instead of submitting to the new collaborationist régime of Pétain. From London, on June 18, 1940, the Général made a famous broadcast begging the French not to accept the armistice and to resist the Germans, either by joining him in England or by organizing a Resistance in France.196 De Gaulle's task was not made easy because the Allies took a very long time in recognizing the General's provisional government, and the United States was still naively hoping that Vichy would abandon its collaboration with Germany. In fact, it was not until August 1944 that the USA, Great Britain and Russia recognized de Gaulle's French Committee of National Liberation.

From the Somber Years of Vichy to Victory (1940-1945)

Contrary to the Allies' expectations, the Vichy government, in the illusory hope of preserving a small amount of French sovereignty, collaborated fully with the Germans. It sent French workers to German plants under the label of STO or Service du Travail Obligatoire (compulsory work service), it tracked down and arrested Resistance fighters and Jews, and sent them to death camps in Germany. Vichy also sent French units to the Russian front to fight along with the Nazis. Both Pétain and Laval claimed that they collaborated with the Germans in order to pacify them and to save France from more severe treatment at German hands. There was unfortunately a deeper reason for the collaboration: they were quite convinced that the future of France was in a friendly association with Hitler's Germany, integrated within the Fürher's conception of a new Europe. And, hard as it is to admit, there were more French collaborators and Nazis than one would have imagined, people like Brasillac, Doriot, Darnand who created the Milice, a French Gestapo-type police at the service of the Nazis, Céline, Drieu de La Rochelle, etc.... The trial of Klaus Barbie and the trial of Papon (1997-1998) have opened many eyes today, uncovering the extent of the collaboration by the French and many ugly acts performed against their own countrymen. Fortunately, on the other hand, many Frenchmen refused to side with Vichy and continued to fight the enemy: they were the Resistance, the Free French, the Maquisards, so named because they were hiding in the mountains and in the forests.

Following de Gaulle's call, those soldiers and other Frenchmen who escaped to England gathered around the General under their symbol, the Croix de Lorraine (Cross of Lorraine) at the side of Winston Churchill and his countrymen. Inside France, the brave Maquisards, under the leadership of Jean Moulin, harassed the Germans, blew up railroads, killed Germans, gave London important information about German troop movements, about the location of ammunitions depots, and tanks. They blew up bridges, helped Jews to escape and rescued allied airmen who were shot down over France. At the time of the Normandy invasion, the Maquisards were extremely helpful attacking and harassing the Germans from behind. Many of these young men and women were unfortunately caught, tortured and put to death. Jean Moulin himself was caught by the infamous Klaus Barbie, rightfully called the Butcher of Lyon.

However, in 1943 the balance of power began to shift. The German war machine was out of steam while the war effort of the Allies increased. The Germans, however, had transformed Europe into a gigantic fortress with defenses, walls and pillboxes all around the French coasts, and in-deed it took two full years of intense fighting to break the fortress. While Stalin kept many Nazi divisions busy in Russia, the Anglo-Americans put general Eisenhower in charge of a major landing in Normandy. The inva-sion took place during the night of June 5-6, 1944, with thousands of ships, and men. In the meantime another landing had taken place in Provence and the tanks of the French general Leclerc were pushing in the direction of Paris, that had risen against the Germans (August 19-25). The Germans could only retreat toward the northeast, but by September 15,1944, most of France and Belgium were free. As they retreated toward Germany, the Nazis fought desperately, particularly in the Ardennes, the Vosges and in Alsace.'But finally, at the beginning of 1945, the Allies were able to undertake the final assault, the French from the west and the Russians from the east. Berlin fell to the Russians on April 19, and Hitler and his henchman Goebbels committed suicide: May 2, 1945, the Germans were at long last brought to their knees, and forced to sign their capitulation in Reims on May 7, 1945.

The Aftermath of World War II

The year 1945 found France and the whole world deeply affected by the war. In five years over fifty million men had perished and large portions of France, Germany, Poland and Russia had been devastated and their economies shattered. Following the Liberation, the French had found their will to live again, but they still needed to purge themselves from the evil acts perpetrated by some Frenchmen during the occupation under Vichy. So immediately after the end of the war, a period of épuration (cleansing) took place. Hundreds, even thousands of men and women, members of the Milice, officials of Pétain's Legion, informers, traitors, profiteers of all kinds, were summarily executed. Women who had been seen fraternizing with German soldiers had their heads shaved and were spat upon. While some cases were justified, others were often due to personal revenge. It was estimated that up to 10,000 persons were put to death during this period, thousands jailed. Pétain and Laval were condemned to death, but de Gaulle commuted Pétain's sentence to life imprisonment.

Then de Gaulle succeeded in establishing an interim Provisional government, including many members of the Resistance and two Communists. Right away all summary executions, street Iynchings were prohibited and the hectic hysteria of revenge was replaced by more orderly judicial procedures. De Gaulle also instituted reforms which had a lasting effecton France: he nationalized coal mines, airlines, the Renault automobile factory, electric and gas works, major insurance companies and many major banks. But France's economy, its industry, its towns had to be rebuilt. De Gaulle's task was enormous, but he thought that, in order to achieve France's recovery, it was first necessary to make a clean cut with the Third Republic. So he called for a referendum (plébiscite) and October 21, 1945, the French, with 96% of them approving, abolished the Third Republic.

The Fourth Republic: 1946-1958

First of all it must be understood that the Fourth Republic inherited most of the troubles of the Third Republic. Nothing much had changed in the constitutional structure of the government, except that women for the first time were allowed to vote. In the elections for the new republic the Communists won 265 of the votes, while the MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire) trailed with 23% of the votes. The Socialists received 23% of the votes, while the Radicals and Moderates received less than 15%. The three major parties confirmed de Gaulle as head of the government, but on January 20, 1946, he voluntarily relinquished the presidency because he could not accept the stricter controls the govern-ment wanted to impose on him. Some believe that he sought a more massive call from the country. With de Gaulle gone, the task of governing and working on the country's recovery fell on the shoulders of the major-ity parties. The Assembly replaced de Gaulle with the Socialist Félix Gouin. They drafted a new constitution that was immediately voted down by 53% of the voters. So the Assembly dissolved itself and on June 2 a new assembly was elected with a marked gain by the MRP (over 22%) over the Communists (less than 21%) and the Socialists (about 16%). Georges Bidault, head of the MRP (Popular Republican Mouvement) became the leader of the new government. But there followed a period of incessant ministerial instability with twenty-four governments succeeding each other between December 1946 and May 1958. None of these governments lasted more than six months.

Even after its victory France was exhausted. Its economy was stagnant or mixed at best. Destruction had choked every major sector of the economy: roads, railroads, harbors needed to be rebuilt, and there was a great shortage of coal. Inflation was high and food supplies were inad-equate because agriculture was slow in recovering from the loss in men and slow in modernizing. France was still terribly dependent on the aid of its allies, and whether it was admitted or not, France had placed herself under the umbrella of the United States, particularly when it accepted the Marshall Plan of economic recovery. Even with the Monnet plan that accepted the financial assistance of the United States, France was slow in modernizing its industry. Labor unrest persisted with major strikes in 1947, 1948 and 1950. Then internal problems were worsened by the situation in the colonial empire. In fact decolonization was gaining momentum with increasing demands for autonomy by North Africa, Madagascar and Indo-China. The Fourth Republic would prove impotent in containing the movement, and would finally collapse in the Algerian snare.

However, the Fourth Republic was not without positive achievement: It organized social security, insurance protection for the family, national and regional planning. It also moved ahead with the modernization of France, even if slowly, and improved the living standard of its citizens. It was criticized to justify its demise.

From the Fourth to the Fifth Republic

Even though governments were falling and rising at a fast clip, progress was made in several important areas. Women received the right to vote and a comprehensive welfare state was established. Demography was on the rise again with up to 800,000 births a year. Between 1946 and 1985 the population grew from about 40 million to 55 million. Surely the guarantees of social services and family allowances were contributing factors to this splendid recovery. France was changing, slowly perhaps, but surely. It was no longer a country of peasants; it was becoming a nation of city dwellers and industrial workers. Thanks to those factors, France was moving toward a new era of economic, technological and industrial boom that was nicknamed Les Trente Glorieuses (The Thirty Glorious Ones).

People started to live better, in more comfortable houses, with more modern conveniences (a refrigerator, a washing machine, modern kitchen appliances etc....). People were able to buy automobiles and be-cause of this they were more mobile, took longer vacations, farther away from home. But, naturally, recovery did not proceed without problems. One major problem for France was the growing process of decolonization. France, of course, wanted to retain its colonial empire, but nationalism was growing within native populations, a fact the French government was a bit too slow to understand, and that the French settlers refused to face at first. So France was suddenly engaged in a terrible war in Vietnam (Indo-China). It was to be a long, costly war and in fact a real nightmare, which ended with the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1955 and the withdrawal of France. Mendès France who orchestrated the Geneva treaty with Vietnam, gave the Tunisians and Moroccans their independence in March 1956. Mendès France, was thereafter the subject of ceaseless anti-Semitic tirades accusing him of having abandoned France's empire. Mendès France did nothing for Algeria because France considered it a part of the metropolitan country. When Jacques Soustelle was appointed Gouvernor-Général of Algeria, precisely to maintain Algeria as a part of France, he said: "We must not, at any price, in any way and under any pretext, lose Algeria." Immediately the Algerian nationalists who had formed the FLN (National Liberation Front) began a campaign of terrorism and uprisings that kept escalating. The French government began to pour men in Algeria in the hope of crushing the rebels, but it was in vain, and that sad period has left, to this very day, deep open wounds in France as well as in Algeria. As a matter of fact, the Algerian episode may be considered as one of the tragic events of twentieth-century history and its consequences still continue to haunt France and Algeria. In any case it brought down the Fourth Republic when the French government, afraid of a coup by settlers and paratroopers under the command of Général Salan, called back de Gaulle, who drafted a new constitution, thus burying the Fourth Republic and giving birth to the Fifth Republic.

The Fifth Republic

The new Constitution of 1958 gave vast powers to the President and to the Premier, while the Assembly's own powers were curtailed. This format corresponded exactly to de Gaulle's ambitions and, indeed, to many Frenchmen's desires. Both thought that a strong government was the only way to rebuild France and to finally bring the Algerian conflict to a close.

In October 1958 de Gaulle offered the Algerian rebels a cease-fire, but the Algerians, then, refused to stop fighting. They imagined that they could stand firm on their claim of independence because, even after pour-ing large quantities of men in Algeria, France was not even close to a victory. De Gaulle saw no end to the conflict, and after several failed negotiations, he decided that France should grant Algeria its indepen-dence. It was done on April 11, 1961. Immediately, a group of support-ers of French Algeria, the OAS or Organisation de l'Armée Secrète attempted a coup against de Gaulle. Negotiations went on anyway, and finally an agreement was signed in Evian, by which France recognized the independence of Algeria. By June 1964 practically all the French troops had left Algeria. This marked the beginning of the end of France's colo-nial empire. De Gaulle had understood that France could no longer resist the pressures of colonial nationalism. Following Algeria's example, one after another of France's colonies declared their independence.

After the Referendum of April 8, 1962, by which the French people ratified de Gaulle's settlement of the Algerian problem, de Gaulle made it clear that he alone exercised the executive power of the Republic. He subsequently replaced the Premier Debré by Georges Pompidou and started to implement a series of important political and economic reforms. On August 22, 1962, de Gaulle luckily escaped an assassination attempt by the OAS not far from Paris, at the Petit Clamart locality. After this failed attempt against his life, de Gaulle was able to push through a referendum proposing the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. There was strong opposition to this proposal by many politicians, but in the end de Gaulle’s referendum was approved.

At the Presidential elections of 1965, de Gaulle had to contend with another candidate on the ballot, Mitterand. But Mitterand was defeated and de Gaulle was reelected to another seven-year term on December 19, 1965. With this vote of confidence, de Gaulle felt that he could try and restore France's tarnished "grandeur." His first task was to work on the country's economy and on important issues of foreign policy. However, in 1968, de Gaulle was to face a very difficult period of social and political turmoil. Unrest started on the university campuses and spread, at least partially, to other sectors. This rebellion turned out to represent a deep conflict of generations, and from that time on, many traditional aspects of French society were rejected. Social conventions, family traditions, morality, dress, language even, music etc... were subjected to a complete and major revolution.

The May 1968 Student-Worker Uprising

In May 1968, a student uprising that soon became a student-worker uprising, rocked Gaullist France. Students, more and more frustrated by the poor conditions of universities, lack of contact with distant profes-sors, inadequate classrooms and, above all, the poor prospect of employ-ment after graduation, eagerly followed the call to revolt. Among their leaders was Cohn-Bendit or Danny le Rouge (the Red), who invited stu-dents and workers to set up barricades in the streets of Paris and to resist French police by throwing stones and molotov cocktails at the CRS. Confrontations became violent and many cars were upturned and burned. The police often reacted violently, however, to the surprise of all. There were only two deaths in the whole affair. Why the uprising? After years of war, occupation and apathy, the youth of France was seized by a remark-able excitement. They were fed up, they were weary of feeling useless, left aside by the older generation. At the same time they were bubbling with impatience to forge a new France, a new world for themselves. Most of their fathers still were anchored in the past, but they were concerned with their future. Their youthful impatience led to the events of May 1968. On May 13, 1968, the workers' unions declared a general strike in sympathy with the students, and over 750,000 students and workers marched through the French capital demanding major changes. The movement then spread to provinces, and before the end of May, France seemed ready for another major revolution. France was paralyzed for awhile: gasoline was scarce, banks were closed, students occupied university build-ings, no classes were taught. But after a record short speech of only three minutes on May 20, 1968, de Gaulle managed to quiet down the uprising and to pacify the strikers. Subsequently, half a million people paraded down the Champs Elysées in support of de Gaulle, chanting "De Gaulle does not stand alone!" It must be said that de Gaulle was helped in part by the Communists, who denounced the rebels as false revolutionaries and fascist provocateurs. So, almost by miracle, the strikes were over as suddenly as they had appeared. On May 29 the Communist party and the union CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) launched a powerful demonstration in Paris calling for a Popular Government. On that day de Gaulle was nowhere to be seen, and the reason was that without warning, de Gaulle had left for Baden-Baden in Germany, where Général Massu was in command of the French garrisons. To this day nobody can be sure exactly why de Gaulle left France for Germany. The most likely, according to Georges Pompidou and General Massu's testimonies, is that de Gaulle wanted to get away from a situation that he could not correct. He perhaps even thought of going into exile. In any case General Massu apparently convinced de Gaulle to return to Paris. And indeed de Gaulle returned and immediately showed that he was back and ready to govern.

On May 30, 1968, at 4:31 pm, de Gaulle announced the dissolution of the Assembly and called for calm and actions against anarchy. He asserted: "I will not retire! I will not replace my Prime Minister! I am dissolving the National Assembly!" On May 31, 1968, gasoline was flowing again and workers returned to work and the student protest died. In fact the student protest soon came under increasing criticism and the whole affair was finally forgotten. De Gaulle, it seemed, had won another victory. But not really! The May 1968 events had tarnished his image and weakened his authority. De Gaulle, perhaps as a gesture of strength, or perhaps to show his willingness to make changes, replaced his Premier, Georges Pompidou, even though he had coped well during the crisis. As if unaffected by de Gaulle's firing, Pompidou announced that he would be a candidate at the next presidential elections.

Meanwhile, Pompidou was replaced by a pale bureaucrat, Maurice Couve de Murville, who had served de Gaulle as foreign minister since 1958. Edgar Faure was put in charge of reorganizing education. Everyone at this point expected gradual changes as an answer to the demands of the students. But suddenly, without waiting, de Gaulle decided to put his plan of reforms of the Senate and of regional administration to a referendum. It was a tremendous gamble, all the more when de Gaulle announced that he would resign if his projected reforms did not receive the support of the nation. People were stunned and, unfortunately for de Gaulle, 54% of the voters rejected his proposed reforms on April 27, 1969. De Gaulle was disappointed and perhaps even angry, so on April 28, 1969, de Gaulle resigned with these brief laconic words: "I am ceasing to exercise my functions as President of the Republic; this decision takes effect today at noon!" Immediately after these words, the General went home to Colombey-les-deux-églises, where he died 18 months later on November 9, 1970, while writing his memoirs.

French Economy after the Second World War and under de Gaulle

When de Gaulle took office, the economy of France was on the brink of collapse and the country was on the verge of financial crisis with rising prices, inflation and decreasing exports. De Gaulle and his then finance minister Antoine Pinay established a policy of austerity, increased taxes, reduced state expenditures and even devaluated the franc. In the long run the reforms brought about an improvement in the economy; France became a major industrial power giving its citizens access to many con-sumer goods such as automobiles, television, refrigerators, modern bathrooms and kitchens. In addition, the French had longer vacations with pay: three weeks in 1966 and four weeks in 1969. Supermarkets began to replace many small shops and people could buy food, appliances, furniture, hardware and even books under the same gigantic roof. France's face was changing fast and the traditional rural society of yore was growing into a consumer society with all its advantages and pitfalls. While the rich became richer, the poor grew poorer and the abyss between classes widened. One does not have to look further to find in these problems the roots of the May 1968 insurrection.

De Gaulle's Foreign Policy

De Gaulle's first priority was to restore France's former prestige in the world. Unfortunately following World war 11, France had fallen under the umbrella of the United States. De Gaulle resented this situation and wanted to become independent from the Americans. To achieve this, de Gaulle closed the NATO bases on French soil and asked that the SHAPE headquarters be moved out of the Loire to Belgium. To further insure France's independence, the President started an independent nuclear force (Force de Frappe/Striking Force). It is only recently, in 1996, that President Chirac announced that France would no longer pursue nuclear tests. This announcement came only after years of loud protests by the French South Pacific natives, the Japanese, the New Zealanders, Australians and many other nations. De Gaulle wanted a non-Atlantic Third Force, and with this in mind, he pursued vigorously the development of the Common Market with Germany. Fearing that Britain would favor the United States and thus become a rival to France's leadership in Europe, de Gaulle blocked Britain's entry into the Common Market.

After de Gaulle

Immediately after de Gaulle's resignation presidential elections took place and Georges Pompidou was elected President of the Republic. Pompidou had obtained a comfortable majority and was prepared to continue de Gaulle's program. However, Pompidou, a jovial, intelligent native of Auvergne, was more liberal, less intransigent than de Gaulle, and more diplomatic. As a testimony to this, Pompidou's first measure was to allow Britain's entry in the Common Market. But Pompidou was sick with leukemia which incapacitated him more and more.209 The Socialist-Communist coalition headed by Francois Mitterand exploited the situation and won a good number of seats in the Assembly in 1973, mostly by criticiz-ing the President's laissez-faire economic policies. According to the Left, Pompidou was responsible for letting France drift into the same reces sion, inflation and unemployment that plagued the rest of Europe at the time. Pompidou did not have the time to fight the crisis because he died suddenly of cancer on April 2, 1974.2

Immediately two candidates faced each other: The Socialist Francois Mitterand and his coalition with Communists and, representing the Right, the candidate of the Independent Republicans, Valerie Giscard d'Estaing. With the first round of votes, Mitterand appeared to be the favorite, but the second round went to Giscard d'Estaing, who received 50.8% of the votes. Mitterand nevertheless received 49.19% of the votes, which meant that Giscard had won by a very narrow margin of less than 1% of the votes. Under these conditions the presidency of Giscard d'Estaing was made somewhat uneasy with Mitterand standing close in the wings, so to speak, and the fact that Giscard was not the leader of the largest party in Parliament. Giscard d'Estaing, however, was full of confidence; he prom-ised the French a bright future and an advanced liberal society. With these goals in mind, Giscard introduced important tax reforms, lowered the voting age to 18 and was even open to the demands of ecologists. He also continued de Gaulle's nuclear program and supported the Common Market while entertaining friendly relations with Germany and the United States. Unfortunately, the President's hopes were shattered by the world recession and a severe OPEC oil crisis, both bringing inflation up (13.4% in 1979) and increased unemployment figures to 1.6 million (1979), representing 10% of the active population. With 900,000 unemployed work-ers, production and exports declined. In order to solve the crisis, Giscard decided to appoint a new Prime Minister. He thanked Chirac and called Raymond Barre to the task, asking him to deal with France's economy.

Raymond Barre entered the arena with a great deal of energy, but his noble and honest efforts were unable to stop the rising unemployment (1.7 million in 1981) and inflation increased to 12%. Barre tried to stop the country's dependence on crude oil by speeding up the nuclear energy program. In order to control expenses he stopped many state subsidies, but it forced many companies into financial trouble and even into re-trenchment. The Barre Plan, as it was called, seemed a necessary rem-edy, but it did not produce the economic recovery sought. The situation grew worse with an onslaught of social problems, increased juvenile de-linquency and a declining birthrate. Over the years, Giscard had become more and more distant, and he was accused by his critics, Mitterand in particular, of being too haughty and authoritarian. At this point a "bomb" exploded: the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné (the chained duck) revealed that Giscard d'Estaing had accepted a gffl of a diamond from the African emperor Bokassa. Overnight Giscard fell in disfavor. His term ended in 1981, but even with the Bokassa affair weigh-ing on him, he announced that he would seek a second term. He did and even won the first round of votes. But a coalition of Socialists and Communists won the second round by 52% against only 42% for Giscard. So the Socialist Francois Mitterand, a charming, eloquent Machiavellian man, easily won the presidency. France had suddenly turned to the Left.

François Mitterand

First Socialist President of the Fifth Republic François Mitterand took office on May 21, 1981. His election was celebrated with unusual enthusiasm, by drinking champagne and by dancing on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. As he had promised his electors, Mitterand immediately dissolved the National Assembly in order to secure a new majority for the Left and thus be free to create his Socialist France. Among Mitterand's early clever gestures, he visited the tomb of the Un known Soldier under the Arch of Triumph and then he went to the Pantheon where he lay roses on several tombs carefully chosen by him for their political significance. On the tomb of Jean Jaurès, Mitterand honored the traditional values of Socialism; on the tomb of Victor Schoelcher, he honored antislavery, and on the tomb of Jean Moulin he honored the Resistance. Another clever move was Mitterand's appointment of four Communists as ministers (for transportation, health, professional training and civil service). The move was all the more clever since he already enjoyed an absolute majority in the Assembly. But this was a way to keep the Communists silent and no doubt under his thumb. Interestingly, during Mitterand's presidency, the Communist Party suffered a major de-cline, to the point of being marginalized. In 1986 the PC (Communist Party) was supported by only one in ten of all voters and by less than one out of five blue-collar workers. On the other hand, Socialists were gaining control of a good portion of the working class that used to be the traditional fief of Communists. Mitterand named a Socialist mayor from Lille to be his Premier, Pierre Mauroy. With all of this in place, the government proceeded to raise the minimum wage and social security benefits. It shortened the work week, adding an additional week of paid vacations (now five), taxed large fortunes, nationalized industries and private banks, abolished the death penalty and decentralized power from Paris to the regions.

In foreign affairs Mitterand tried to find a solution to the Bosnian-Serbian crisis and the Rwanda civil war. He inaugurated the Eurotunnel under the Manche (Channel) with Queen Elizabeth of Britain on May 6, 1994. During the first year of Mitterand's presidency everything proceeded at a fast clip, but already in the second year the pace of reforms slowed down. Mitterand's ideals were changing. His government was slowly drifting toward the Center, away from the Left. These changes in economic policy and in political stand damaged Mitterand's popularity and this helped the extreme Right party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Le Front National. This party was gaining votes particularly in large urban centers with an important immigrant population. As a consequence, in the Leg-islative elections of 1986, the Socialist party suffered a painful setback, bad enough to put Mitterand's government to the test of "Cohabitation" (1986-1988) when there was a Socialist president (Mitterand) and a Right-wing prime minister (Jacques Chirac). President Mitterand was no longer able to govern and was reduced to presiding. That is to say that Mitterand no longer had real power, though he retained enough to thwart at times Chirac's Conservative government, for instance, by refusing to sign government decrees. Mitterand, it is true, retained the prestige of the presidential office and, more importantly perhaps, preserved his desire to surface again with real power by winning the next presidential elections.

Mitterand, in 1988, did win a second term with a 54% majority against Jacques Chirac, and obtained the election of an Assembly with a relative Socialist majority, allowing the return of a Socialist government headed by Michel Rocard as Prime Minister. Rocard did not last long, but at first won some victories: Putting down the rebellion in New Caledonia by promising a vote on self-determination in 1998 was a major success. Rocard failed in Mitterand's eyes by moving toward the Centrists. Mitterand replaced him with Edith Cresson, a move that proved to be a serious misjudgment because Cresson, who was called the "Iron Lady" (mimicking Britain's Margaret Thatcher), did not prove more able than Rocard. She was basically inexperienced in politics and she turned many people against her following several unfortunate comments. Cresson's position became all the more untenable when some of her statements echoed too closely Le Pen's Front National discourse. She finally had to resign on April 2, 1992. Pierre Beregovoy was appointed, but he remained only eleven months in power. First, he was no more apt than Rocard or Cresson, and second, he committed suicide in May 1993 following a dire failure in the April 1993 elections. Beregovoy was replaced by Edouard Balladur, a neo-gaullist, who soon was under attack for some of his decisions and for not relating well publicly. Balladur began to slip sharply in opinion polls and at the same time the French economy kept declining and unemployment kept rising. Mitterand was in trouble; he fought with his Culture Minister over Eurodisney; the president was in favor of letting Eurodisney in France for economic reasons, while Jacques Lang opposed it as a negation of culture. Nevertheless, Eurodisney opened in 1992 at Marne La Vallée, not far from Paris.

Mitterand supported the European Union, but in spite of this, it was approved by the thinnest of margins. Mitterand changed prime ministers several times but without improvement. And so, in April 1993 the Right took 486 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly, thus obtaining the largest majority since 1958. Jacques Chirac, no longer standing in the wings, declared that Mitterand ought to resign. Mitterand, though, had no intention of doing that. He felt that, after all, Cohabitation was possible and that he could continue to handle the awkward situation. But in June 1994 the Socialists lost more ground and had to give up 6 seats out of 22 in the European Parliament. Meanwhile, something odd was happening with Mitterand's personality: He began to withdraw more and more, rarely leaving his residence, at least officially. Then France was made aware that the President had prostate cancer, a fact he tried to hide carefully to his very death.

At the beginning of 1995 presidential campaign, candidate Balladur was challenged by Jacques Chirac who was ready for another bid for the presidency. Chirac started a non stop tour of France, trying to appeal to i the small and medium businessmen. He cleverly centered his campaign on areas where the Left had failed, i.e., on unemployment and poverty. He promised profound reforms in these two areas and a total break with v the past. In order to beat his Socialist opponent Lionel Jospin, Chirac promised wage increases, more support for education and came back again and again on the Socialists' failures in matters of crime, immigration, poverty and unemployment. Chirac's program was not really a reflected political platform; it was general, vague, but it touched on areas that concerned the French. It was a way to win votes and it worked. Chirac was elected and, once in power, Chirac appointed Alain Juppé as his Prime Minister, an able, competent, ENA-educated technocrat. The two men faced many challenges, the hardest one being to fulfill all the electoral promises. They had to redress the economic and international status of France, they had to respond to the international outcry caused by the continued French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and they had to try to correct the outcry against the government for not delivering the campaign promises. In addition, they were faced by the monetary constraint of the Maastrich Treaty in order to enter the European Union, and tha task was made even more difficult because the French were still divided on the issue and skeptical about the outcome. According to a poll publishe by Le Monde on September 4, 1992, the French were 56% against Maastrich and only 44% in favor.

Jacques Chirac's Presidency under the Fifth Republic

Chirac, having achieved his long sought ambition, assumed the presidential office on May 17, 1995, after a campaign on the need to reduce unemployment and making a clear break with the past. His announced program was attractive and imaginative: He would reduce working hours, increase taxes on speculative earnings, take drastic measures against polluting industries and reduce the presidential terms from 7 to 5 years.

Promises are great if they can be kept; unfortunately Chirac had to change his focus almost immediately because France had to meet the criteria for entry in the Economic and Monetary Union requested by the Maastricht Treaty. So, instead of going ahead with the electoral promises, Chirac had to reduce the rather substantial budget deficit of France from 6% to 3% of the GDP by January 1999 and maintain the value of the franc. In order to carry out this revised program, Chirac appointed Alain Juppé as his Prime Minister, a well-educated product of the ENA, and at the same time Mayor of Bordeaux. Juppé was a competent civil servant, even if a bit distant and cold. Even with the help of Juppé, Chirac's reforms were slow to come, and he became unpopular as time passed without carrying out his electoral promises. In addition unemployment was still high and another huge problem had to be faced, the huge deficit of the French Sécurité Sociale (Social Security). Juppé announced some very strict reforms and he became terribly unpopular. The French were alienated by the Chirac-Juppé program and, meanwhile, Le Pen's party, Le Front National, was gaining momentum. Chirac was desperate, so much so that he took the improbable gamble of dissolving the National Assembly, thus calling for new elections and putting his party on the line. What was feared, but not expected—certainly not by Chirac—happened: the French electors veered to the Left, and voted Socialist.

Chirac's move was immediately qualified a "strategic blunder" and people kept asking "why did he do it?", why did he dissolve an Assembly which was comfortably on his side, and why did he dissolve the Assembly at a time when both he and his Prime Minister, Juppé, were so unpopular for not having fulfilled their electoral promises? The most probable answer to those questions is that Chirac feared a catastrophe in the elections which were going to be held a year later. It is not improbable therefore that Chirac wanted to stop the slide and cut short to any worsening of his situation; he wanted to change course radically and move ahead. Some also suggested that he wanted to out distance Le Pen's Front National before it attracted to its side more dissatisfied members of the Right. Will we ever know the truth?

After Chirac's Dissolution of the Assembly. A New Cohabitation with a New Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin

After the first ballot in the elections which brought back the Socialists, Juppé, who was by then the most unpopular Premier since the 1950's, decided not to run and the elections went, as stated, in favor of the leftist coalition. Lionel Jospin was elected with uncommon enthusiasm and the Socialists won 289 seats, the majority, in the 577-seat National Assembly. Along with the Communists and the Green (Ecologist party) the leftist coalition took 333 seats, while the Center-right coalition took only 243 seats and the National Front 1 seat. It forced Chirac to govern in a state of Cohabitation with an opposition party, that is to say, sharing power with a politically hostile government.

At the start Cohabitation went well. Both men smiled at each other and both went a long way to appear in agreement. Chirac made efforts to appear in charge, relaxed and working hand in hand with Jospin. Soon the relations between the President and his Prime Minister became less cozy and they have not recovered; in fact one can say that they are deteriorating slowly, though as peacefully as possible.

Lionel Jospin after his victory was considered the man of the hour and his plans of reforms were applauded. He felt that he had the support of the nation and so, as a hard conscientious worker, Jospin announced that he was going to revise controversial laws on immigration and nationality, and after a fight, he did. Jospin's honeymoon did not last too long; there was the rebellion of the unemployed, the opposition of Communists against Jospin's plan to sell the national airline Air France, and even more seri-ous problems, the two major ones being unemployment and the demands of the Maastrich Treaty. Some 500,000 workers were unemployed and living on benefits of $400 to $550 a month (considered the poverty line in France). Militant jobless workers demonstrated en masse in January 1998 unsatisfied by the stopgap measures of the government. Jospin's Communist allies began to drift away and Robert Hue, leader of the Communist party, even called for a referendum on the single European currency, the euro, claiming that the government should "reorient Europe toward social issues, employment, another way of using money." Jospin was caught between the hammer and the anvil; on the one hand he had to apply constraints imposed by the euro and on the other hand he had to satisfy the demands of the jobless workers. In order to placate protestors, Jospin promised an across the board increase in benefits for the jobless and needy persons in 1999. Jospin then also promised to cut the workweek to 35 hours by the year 2000 in order to create jobs, a proposal that passed after many debates. Teachers and students followed the unemployed in expressing their discontent. Jospin seemed to be constantly on the qui-vive (on the alert), but he managed to control the situation by giving in a little while remaining firm and determined.  © France : Past and Present (pp. 80- 103)

Profile of France: http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/france/gb/histoire/index.html

Some important dates:

Republican France (1880-1981)
1880-1900: Expansion of colonialism
1905: Separation of Church and State
1914-1918: First World War. France is destroyed
1936-1938: Government of the Popular Front; first socialism regime
1939-1945: World War II; France is occupied by Hitler's armies
1940: France defeated by Germany and divided into a northern zone and a free southern zone governed by the Vichy régime of Marshall Pétain
1946-1958: Instauration of the IVth Republic
1954-1962: War of independence in Algeria
1958: Institution of the Vth Republic by General De Gaulle
1960s: Period of reconstruction. Independence of several French colonies
1968: "May events". Revolt of students and general srikw by workers
1969: De Gaulle resigns. Georges Pompidou is elected President
1974: Death of Pompidou. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing is elected President

Contemporary period (1981 to present)
1981: François Mitterrand is elected President (Socialist regime)
1986: National elections. Victory of the Right. Government of Jacques Chirac (first "co-habitation")
1988: Presidential elections: Miterrand is reelected President
1993: National elections. 2nd victory of theRight> "2nd 3cohabitation"
1995: Presidential elections. Jacques Chirac is elected President
2002: Chirac is reelected President (for a 5-year term), Victory of the Right after a scary upsurge of Right extremists who voted for presidential contestant, Jean-Marie Le Pen
2007: Presidential elections

FILMS TO BE SCREENED

00. The Visitors

Film Review

"Time Travelers With Bad Breath and Worse Manners"   By STEPHEN HOLDEN

When a pair of time travelers from 12th-century France find themselves accidentally deposited in the year 1992, what do you suppose it is about them that most horrifies the fastidious French? Of course, it is their rotten teeth, their horrible breath and their tendency to get violently car sick when riding around in what they refer to as "chariots."

"The Visitors," which is being touted as France's highest-grossing film ever, is proof that Hollywood has no monopoly on the market for farcical grossness, with all its attendant belching and tooting sound effects and scrunched-up noses. This rollicking but exceedingly dumb comedy begins in 1123, when King Louis VI rewards Godefroy Le Hardi (Jean Reno), the knight who saves him from being massacred by the English, by betrothing him to Frénégonde, the beautiful daughter of a French nobleman.

On his way to the wedding, an evil witch whom Godefroy has arrested in the woods for conducting a black mass casts a hallucinatory spell in which he mistakes his fiancee's father for a bear and shoots him dead. The only way he can undo the curse, advises a friendly wizard, is to travel several minutes back in time to relive the shooting, using willpower to change the path of the bullet. But the noxious time-warping potion that Godefroy and his vassal Jacquouille imbibe lacks a crucial ingredient derived from quail eggs, and they find themselves hurled 869 years into the future.

As they clomp around the manicured French landscape in their ancient costumes, complaining about everything they see, Godefroy and Jacquouille suggest a kind of Gallic Laurel and Hardy. The pair are taken in by Béatrice, Godefroy's distant descendant, who strongly resembles Frénégonde and is married to a dentist. Béatrice, who is strangely attracted to Godefroy, believes him to be her crazy cousin who disappeared years ago on a trip to Borneo.

The movie's funniest scenes find the time travelers inadvertently trashing the interior of Béatrice's well-appointed suburban home. An umbrella becomes a spit on which the ravenous Jacquouille attempts to roast a lamb in the fireplace. Advised to wash their hands before dinner, the duo, unfamiliar with modern bathroom fixtures, get everything wrong and create a flood.

The butt of much of the movie's humor is Jacquart (Mr. Clavier), the prissily foppish owner of the chi-chi country hotel that was once Louis VI's castle. A descendant of Jacquouille, he is a toadying arriviste with a taste for garish, expensive clothes that Godefroy and Jacquouille are continually ruining with their antics.

"The Visitors" has a streak of European class-conscious humor that may play well in Paris but will mean little to American audiences. Jacquouille, who was brought up to be slavishly worshipful toward the aristocracy, is outraged that a commoner has taken over the King's castle. As the action accelerates, he teams up with Ginette, an unkempt shopping-bag lady with a shock of red hair who teaches him the principles of the French Revolution. When it comes time to make the trip back to the 12th century, he doesn't want to return. But for all its touting of liberty, equality and fraternity, "The Visitors" treats the raucous coupling of two smelly "peasants" as a comic mating of grotesques.

Mr. Reno and Mr. Clavier make an entertainingly well-matched pair of buffoons. As Godefroy clanks around the French countryside, appropriating a horse when need be, he exudes a bizarre, grandiose gallantry. Mr. Clavier's Jacquouille is one dangerously mischievous (and amusing) hellion.

The actor plays his two caricatures off one another with a glinting-eyed zeal that recalls the heyday of Peter Sellers.

The movie, despite the subtitles, finds some humor in its contrasting of ancient and contemporary language. The moment you realize that Jacquouille could never go back to the 12th century is the same moment his face lights up and he beams with exultant comprehension savoring both the sound and meaning of the exclamation "Freaky!"

"The Visitors: a feel good movie for uncertain times" By Anne Jäckel

The most popular film of the decade

At the beginning of 1993, in a France already anxious about the outcome of the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] negotiations, nobody imagined that Les Visiteurs, the new comedy by Jean-Marie Poiré and Christian Clavier, would become the biggest French box-office hit of the decade and the second most successful French film of the post-war era. One has to go back to the mid-1960s to find a film which achieved more than the 13.6 million admissions of Les Visiteurs. The record is held by La Grande Vadrouille (1966), the most popular French film of all time. (1) In contrast with Gérard Oury's much awaited wartime comedy of the 1960s, the time-travel farce of Poiré and Clavier received little attention from French film critics when it was first released on 27 January 1993. Its 220-copy launch in France (45 of which were in the Paris region) was modest compared to the heavily promoted releases of Claude Berri's Germinal and Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (370 and 450 copies respectively) later that year. However, after winning over one million fans in its first two weeks, Les Visiteurs not only went non to beat Spielberg's dinosaurs (Jurassic Park was number one in most countries in 1993) but, in France, the film became the most talked - and written - about of the year, attracting the attention of politicians, historians, psychologists, and educationalists alike. Deeply rooted in national mythology and cultural traditions (language and humour), comedy is the genre most prone to stereotypes, and Les Visiteurs is no exception. This chapter explores the complex network of determinants, both textual and contextual, that have contributed to make this French comedy the most popular French film of the last quarter of the twentieth century. The plot On the face of it, the adventures of a twelfth-century knight, Godefroy de Montmirail, and his loyal serf Jacquouille la Fripouille, transported to contemporary France, follow a somewhat facile and familiar tale of culture clashes and mistaken identities. The film opens with the return of the two protagonists to their native Languedoc after years of fighting abroad. The chivalrous knight is to marry his betrothed, Frénégonde, but, under a witch's curse, he mistakes his intended father-in-law for a bear and kills him with an arrow. He drinks a magic potion hoping to travel back in time and undo his deed but instead he and his servant find themselves in 1990s France where they meet their respective descendants, the effete Béatrice de Montmirail, married to a dentist, and the insufferable nouveau-riche Jacquart, who runs the former Montmirail estate, now an up-market château-hôtel-restaurant. Finding an ancient spellbook in the dungeon of the castle, Godefroy drinks a second potion which allows him to successfully return whence he came, while Jacquouille manages to stay in the 1990s with Ginette, a colourful homeless woman he met in a car park. Jacquouille-the-serf drugs Jacquart-the-hôtelier and, via a last minute switch, sends him to the Middle Ages in his place. Les Visiteurs ends with Godefroy de Montmirail and his beloved Frénégonde reunited and their lineage assured.

An unexpected success?

With hindsight, French producers Patrice Ledoux and Alain Terzian believe the film1s success is not difficult to explain. According to Ledoux, the male duo was able to synthethise, in the two protagonists, the noble hero and the resourceful commoner ('le prolo débrouillard'), what is essentially 'the French character'. As for Terzian, he believes that Les Visiteurs has turned into a social and cultural phenomenon in France because it thrives on something which belongs to th French psyche, something both simple and fantastic, like a cartoon character. 'To children,' he explains, Jacquouille has become a character as basic as Mickey Mouse!' (Ferenczi 1998: 24).

A year after the release of Les Visiteurs, the Communist newspaper, L'Humanité gave other reasons for the film's enormous success at the box office: people's need to escape the current recession, their search for identity and, above all, the socio-political function of humour. They quoted a certain Robert Ebguy, Director of Research at the Centre for Advanced Communication (CCA), explaining that laughter has always been used to expose society's failings in order to make them more acceptable

Comedy has a function. It is one of social reintegration. Watching this film, the French are laughing at themselves and at the society in which they live. What is the first symbol of modern France in Les Visiteurs? A Guadalupian, in a Post Office van: the idea of a France sold over to foreigners. It is not innocent, and the fact that so many French people have been laughing is rather a good sign. In this respect, one of the reasons for the film1s popularity is that the film sends us back our own image, one which is ridiculed, almost as in a huge mass psychotherapy. (Quoted in Capvert 1994: 18)
In April 1993, the French magazine L'Evénement du Jeudi had already consulted a psychoanalyst, Gérard Lassalle, for his expert opinion on the matter. Lassalle, too, believed that the search for identity was one of the key elements of the film and the main reason for its success: 'In the film, identity is affirmed in the strength of the family clan and its perenniality throughout the ages, and reinforced by phantasms of immortality.' According to Lassalle, such archetypes and phantasms of France1s brave ancestors, 'defenders of the land and of their noble heritage', inform on the deeper feelings of the French nation towards Europe: 'However obsolete those values may be, however much they make us smile,' he said, 'they also enable us to dream of a former glory. In all this, Europe is the target' (Berthemy 1998: 99).  While one may disagree with Lassalle and argue that the mass-appeal of ancestral heritage (as shown in the film) is not peculiar to the French but common to most Europeans, it is nevertheless true that Les Visiteurs belongs to a long tradition of popular culture anchored in national mythology, the presence of which still pervades the French imagination, from the portrayal of Vercingétorix, the Gallic hero of schoolchildren1s history books, to the Astérix theme park outside Paris.

A film genre: French comedy

Humour relies on familiarity. Innovation has rarely been a strong point of (French) comedies, and Les Visiteurs presented domestic audiences with many traditional features common to the genre. The use of the male duo, for instance, has proved a recipe for success almost since the beginning of cinema (e.g. Laurel and Hardy). In France, it was particularly popular in the 1940s, when the Franco-Italian Don Camillo series - starring the French comic Fernandel, who plays the eponymous priest opposite Gino Cervi in the role of Peppone, the village Communist mayor - dominated the box office both at home and in Italy. It continued in the 1950s with Bourvil and Jean Gabin (La Traversée de Paris, 1956), in the 1960s with the Bourvil-de Funès team, in the 1970s with the Jean Poiré and Michel Serrault duo (La Cage aux folles, 1978), and even in the 1980s - a time when comedies and thrillers tended to be relegated to television - some of the most popular films were the action comedies of French director scriptwriter Francis Veber starring Gérard Depardieu and Pierre Richard, La Chèvre, (1981), Les Compères (1983) and Les Fugitifs (1986) later to be turned into American remakes. Today, Depardieu may be one of the few French stars known outside France but, in the wake of 1968, France developed a substantial pool of comedians whose reputation was an almost guaranteed source of success at the domestic box office in the 1970s and early 1980s.

A well-established tradition of comic actors

Among these comedians, Christian Clavier - who plays the hilarious Jacquouille and Jacquard in Les Visiteurs - had alread enjoyed a long career in comedy. Clavier and Jean-Marie Poiré, the director of Les Visiteurs, share a close relationship to the café-théâtre movement which developed in the 1970s. This style of alternative comedy, based at the Café de la Gare and Le Splendid theatres in Paris, was brought to film-goers in 1973 by Bertrand Blier with his notorious Les Valseuses (starring Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere and Miou Miou). In addition to the trio of Les Valseuses, the café-théâtre movement produced some of the most popular actors of the post-1968 era. They include Coluche, Josiane Balasko, Gérard Jugnot, Michel Blanc and Thierry Lhermitte. In the early 1980s, three performances from Le Splendid theatre were directed for the cinema by Jean-Marie Poiré: Les Hommes préfèrent les grosses (1981), Le Père Noël est une ordure (1982) and Papy fait de la résistance (1983). All three films were extremely popular with French cinema audiences. In Le Père Noël est une ordure, Christian Clavier is the Father Christmas of the title, a drunkard and a tramp who pairs with a bag-lady, Josette, played by Marie-Anne Chazel (the friendly vagrant lady who befriends Jacquouille in Les Visiteurs). Valérie Lemercier, the kind-hearted snob Béatrice of Les Visiteurs, was also a member of Le Splendid. The name of the theatre points in a mocking way to its marginal relationship to conventional French theatre. Members of the group showed a predilection for social satire, popular language and clichés.

Social satire and class differences

Contrasting the medieval heritage with present-day values, Les Visiteurs makes it clear that social differences have dramatically changed. Godefroy de Montmirail is scandalised to learn that his lands have been shared out democratically and that the owner of his castle is now the descendant of a serf. As far as the master-servant relationship is concerned, there has almost been a reversal of roles. Once Jacquouille realises that the French Revolution has abolished feudal servitude, there is no way that he would willingly return to the Middle Ages. Even though the film clearly plays on stereotypes, and its characters are treated with little nuance or finesse, as a social satire Les Visiteurs does allow for social commentary on the foibles of the provincial bourgeoisie of the 1990s.(2) In a four-page article examining the film1s steadily growing performance at the box office in August 1993 ('10 million spectators in just under seven months!'), Le Parisien pointed out that Les Visiteurs was a film in which the rich were ridiculed, a film made by the common people for the common people:'It1s Molière in the year 2000,' wrote Le Parisien's film critic, 'Valérie Lemercier as a Précieuse ridicule against Jacquouille la Fripouille as a merry Scapin' (Vavasseur 1998: 11). Yet, while there are times when the film shows a sense of irony verging on irreverence, on the whole and as far as politics is concerned, Les Visiteurs sends conflicting messages, in turn pleasing right-wing and left-wing movements (with both its anti- and pro-Revolutionary statements) and ecological groups (by showing the pollution and the ugliness of the twentieth-century landscape).

In the film, the conflict between medieval customs and modernity is also linguistic. The serf, transported to modern-day France, rapidly discovers that using the language of a certain class brings membership of that class. On the one hand, he learns Ginette's coarse language in order to stay with her, on the other, he is literally fascinated by the 'super', 'hyper' and 'cousin Hub' of Béatrice. He senses that the use of such expressions will enable him to enter the circle of people he wishes to join. To acquire this new system is to move up the social ladder.

Language

Unconventional in its use of social satire, the Splendid team purposely used popular language to comic effect. All the stock in-trade of the café-théâtre tradition - clichés, slogans, catch-phrases, aphorisms - are present in Les Visiteurs.

Valérie Lemercier gives a particularly memorable performance as Béatrice, combining to perfection a bon chic bon genre [bcbg] appearance with a haughty form of speech which incorporates 'franglais' and an upper-class accent reminiscent of the language spoken by some of 'Les Bronzés', the Club Med members in Patrice Leconte's 1980s popular comedies of the same title. Marie-Anne Chazel (Ginette) excels in her cameo role of Josette (the bag-lady of Le Père Noël est une ordure). She uses back slang (verlan), slang (argot) and bad grammar, with a coarse Parisian accent reminiscent of the popular films of the 1930s and 1940s. The courtly speech of the valiant knight (played by Jean Reno - the favourite actor of Luc Besson), is a peculiar mix of formal speech and anachronistic vocabulary which contrasts with the mixture of slang and rejuvenated old French spoken by Jacquouille (whose vulgar-sounding name, containing the French word for 'balls', has been fittingly translated into English as Jacquass-e). The serf's speech has also much in common with the stylistics and the scatological witticisms of medieval literature.

Many of the expressions used by the characters of Les Visiteurs have become catchwords in France. Whether in schools, universities or offices, 'Ça puire' (it stinks), was soon to replace 'Ça pue'; 'les fillotes' (girls), 'les filles'; 'charriotes' (cars), 'voitures'; and the word 'sarrasins' is now often used to refer to people with any shade of skin colour darker than white. Christian Clavier's aping of Lemercier's clipped and snooty pronunciation of '0K' (Okkaayy!) or 'C'est dinnngue!' and weird expressions such as 'mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ce  bins'? have become national catchphrases. The fascination of the French for such a way of speaking may seem odd in a country which has always been prone to defend its own language. After all, the year of Les Visiteurs was a time when the Minister heading cultural affairs bore the title 'Minister of Culture and Francophony' and Bernard Pivot's dictée (a particularly difficult dictation broadcast nationally) was one of the favourite programmes on television.

Yet the 1980s and 1990s have also been, for France, a period when deviations from the norm (verlan, Americanisms, the use of slang words and local colloquialisms) have proliferated. On the one hand, deviations from the French standard, so blatant in Les Visiteurs, may appear subversive to such guarantors of the purity of the French language as L'Académie Française or Le Haut Comité de la Défense de la Langue Française but, on the other hand, the re-appropriation of old forms and the interest in - if not the obsession with - the French language may further reinforce the argument made by Robert Ebguy that Les Visiteurs is a film which uses national mythology to foster social reintegration.

On the Middle Ages and 'Gallic humour'

Some of the language spoken in the film may be coarse and several of the jokes crude, but they belong to a medieval tradition of short stories claimed to have been written to entertain the common people. Under the title Les Visiteurs appears the caption 'they were not born yesterday'.(3) The so-called 'Gallic humour' of Les Visiteurs draws on a tradition of coarse realistic comedy which is found in medieval literature in general and in the 'fabliaux' of Rabelais (1494-1553) in particular. Such a form of humour has been described as 'characteristic of the lower orders of society and thus inevitably concerned with the baser instincts' as well as 'the inferior relative of the comic genius of French people'! (Trotter 1993: 71). David A. Trotter gives a fascinating account of 'Gallic Humour' in an article entitled 'L'Esprit gaulois: Humour and National Mythology', in which he argues that it is only in the middle of the nineteenth century - a period when considerable efforts were made to create a national consensus in France and when 'medieval literature, decent or indecent, was drawn on as a source of national and nationalistic inspiration' - that this inferior form of Gallic humour became a national signifier. Today, a parallel can easily be drawn between the appropriation of 'l'esprit gaulois' [bawd Gallic humor] as a national signifier in nineteenth-century France and the 1993 public acclaim and subsequent critical reappraisal of Les Visiteurs at a time when France was, on the domestic front compelled by economic forces to redefine its identity in popular terms and, on the international scene, determined to fight to the bitter end to obtain the exclusion of cultural productions from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Jäckel 1996).

Les Visiteurs and popular film genres

Since 1983, Jean-Marie Poiré has written exclusively with Christian Clavier, and the subversion of standard genres has been a thread running through their work. Les Visiteurs also borrows from various popular film genres: the French burlesque comedies of the 1960s starring Bourvil, Fernandel. and Louis de Funès are one, slapstick comedy is another. The misunderstandings arising from the knight and his servant1s arrival in the twentieth century generate numerous slapstick gags and a great deal of the film1s humour is grounded in Godefroy and Jacquouille running up against modernity (their discovery of electricity, telephone, motorways, cars, meat wrapped in clingfilm, and so on). The film successfully mixes silent cinema gags, Pythonesque one-liners and a reputedly German scatological sense of humour. Montmirail and Jacquart washing their hands and face in the toilet bowl, or the bowl of soup landing on the businessman1s head, are hardly new gags, but the film's frantic pacing and extreme camera angles, along with the actors' frenzied performances, make them work.

Guy Austin (1996: 139) argues that the film is also 'related to three other genres beside popular comedy: fantasy cinema, poetic realism and the heritage film'. He finds the former connection 'manifest above all in the time-travel plot, the Gothic scenes concerning the Witch of Malcombe, and the action sequence in the dungeon, which,' he writes, 'recalls Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)'. Other critics have mentioned the obvious references to Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985; 1989; 1990). Jean-Marie Poiré would certainly agree with Austin since he has often stated that, as somebody who 'likes films which tell stories, he is a great admirer of Hollywood popular genres such as American adventure films, comedies and westerns. The French director even admitted that he found his inspiration for Jacquouille in the character of 'the Bad' in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1967) (see Baudin 1993).

Austin, however, is less convincing when he argues that the medieval scenes of Les Visiteurs 'tend to pastiche the historical settings of such poetic realist films as Jacques Feyder's La Kermesse héroique (1935)', even though Les Visiteurs, comparing as it does, the responses of one social group to those of another, has a structure reminiscent of that of many 'poetic realist' films of the 1930s.
As far as heritage film is concerned, the medieval heritage had already made a successful comeback in France in the 1980s with Daniel Vigne's Le Retour Martin Guerre (1984) and Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 adaptation of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. The two films received public and critical acclaim both at home and abroad (unlike Les Visiteurs, whose performance outside France was, with a few exceptions, generally poor).' According to Camille Nevers, the film critic of Cahiers du Cinéma, Annaud's influence on Les Visiteurs even extended to L'Ours, the film Annaud made in 1989: basing her argument on the scene at the beginning of the film when Godefroy de Montmirail inadvertently kills Frénégonde's father as the knight's vision becomes blurred and a bear takes the place of the old man, Nevers suggested that the knight's killing of his future father-in-law represented an overturning of Annaud's 1989 film. Guy Austin offers a more persuasive reading of Les Visiteurs'connection to the heritage film - and one somewhat different from that of Cahiers. Building on Nevers' contrasting of 'the film's vigorous but culturally low humour with the high culture of the expensive décors and the historical setting', Austin contends that Poiré uses the film's reliance on the heritage genre to take on the French cultural policy of the time:

The film in fact begins by conforming precisely to the conventions of the historical drama, with period costume, spectacular landscapes shot from high and wide angles, lush music and an authoritative voice-over which situates the action in 1123. First undermined by the loutish violence of the English soldiers in the credit sequence, the heritage code is placed under increasing strain by the burlesque energy of the subsequent scenes. Les Visiteurs thus engages in combat with the values of Claude Berri's Germinal (1993), its major French box-office competitor, and with all the 'cultural' projects which Poiré and Clavier protest are better supported by the State, easier to finance and easier to cast than popular comedies. (Austin 1996: 140)

Austin certainly has a point. One only needs to recall the two extraordinary French premières of Germinal, one attended by François Mitterrand in northern France, where VIPs from the political and artistic (overwhelmingly) Parisian élite had been brought by a specially hired TGV, and the other, in the new Pathé twelve-screen multiplex in Thiais on the outskirts of Paris, in the presence of the Minister of Culture and Francophony, Jacques Toubon, not to mention the thousands of tickets the French Educational Authorities had bought for schoolchildren to receive Berri's cinematic lesson in French history. In the wake of Jack Lang's stance on popular culture and France1s rigorous defence of its film industry, the cinematic climate of the time favoured largescale films. Even though Les Visiteurs did not qualify for France's selective aid - l'avance sur recettes, an interest-free loan reserved forfirst films or Auteur films - Poiré's and his producer Gaumont1s previous successes at the box office guaranteed Les Visiteurs a substantial sum from the automatic aid. A '100 per cent French film', Les Visiteurs was co-produced by Gaumont and France cinéma, the cinema arm of the French public television channel. According to trade industry figures, it was the sixth most expensive French production of the year (Germinal came first with a reported budget of FF 172m) The FF 60 million budget of Les Visiteurs allowed for high production values (special effects, spectacular landscape).

Today, Les Visiteurs is often cited as a case-study and a pedagogical tool in the study of 199os France. In Britain, Martin Bright (1993: 62) has suggested that: 'Les Visiteurs could easily be shown to British school students as a guide to the French class system. It demonstrates better than most audiovisual aids that it is the lumpen-bourgeoisie who are the dominant class in France today and that the aristocracy is just a subculture among many.' All crosscultural exchanges involve a minimum of mental effort on the part of people coming from different cultures. Noting the extent to which each side remained convinced of their own righteousness in Poiré and Clavier1s film, Françoise Ploquin (1993: 11) ended her review of Les Visiteurs in Le Français dans le Monde by recommending it to all those teaching civilisation and languages.

It is not coincidental that a film confronting class differences appealed to the whole political spectrum of the French population in the year when the French economy was particularly hit by the recession and the Socialist government of François Mitterrand lost the elections. It is also ironic that the year which ended with the exclusion of film and other audiovisual programmes from GATT saw Les Visiteurs, a comedy made with American (production) values by a fervent admirer of Hollywood popular cinema, become 'a national icon' and the most popular film of recent times in France. Decades of low esteem for a genre considered at best as a lower form of entertainment prevented the French establishment from making more than a token gesture toward a film conceived by its creators as a crowd-pleasing fantasy: in December 1993, the French authorities granted Poiré and Clavier's comedy a special derogation allowing an early vide release. Still, the pre-Christmas exemption was well-timed, families rushed to buy the film and, with over 2 million cassettes sold, Les Visiteurs became the best-selling French film on video.(5)
 

The French historian and film critic Jean-Pierre Jeancolas likes to remind his readers that Renoir1s masterpiece La Règle du jeu was a flop when it was first released in 1939. Jeancolas wrote extensively on the popular cinema of the 1950s, and particularly on a special type of comedy, an 'inexportable cinema' which he calls 'franchouillard', comedies 'based on pre-existing forms of entertainment, well-known comics and a parodic view of national history, poor films without "auteurs", aimed solely at national consumption and that involve a connivance with an undemanding audience' (1992: 62-3). Over the years and in a climate increasingly referring to film as part of the 'culture industries', the great works of cinema released in various outlets under different forms have also become commodities. It would certainly be a sign of the times if, in France1s increasingly mercantile cinematic climate, the most popular French film of the 1990s - however 'franchouillard' it may be - were to enter the pantheon of the great French films of the century.

Notes
1. La Grande Vadrouille sold more than 17.2 million tickets in 1966. It starred the two greatest comics of the period, Bourvil and Louis de Funès, and built on as well as pastiched the wartime settings of such contemporary successes as Paris brûle-t-il? (René Clément, 1965) and La Nuit des généraux (Anatole Litvak, 1966).
2. This applies to all types, 'aristo' (Béatrice), nouveau-riche (Jacquart) and 'prolo' (Ginette).
3. 'ils ne sont pas nés hier'
4. For a survey of Les Visiteurs's performance abroad, see Jäckel (1996: 42): the film made 400,000 admissions in Germany. The version dubbed by Mel Brooks was not found satisfactory in America and Les Visiteurs was subsequently released with subtitles - and with little success - on the art circuit.

Addendum to The Visitors

The French prefer to use the word "Republic" rather than "State" because l’État français was the official name of the Vichy régime. But État  and République are really just two names for the same thing. République here doesn't have the same meaning as the five Republics, in plural, referring to the five constitutions France has lived under and their corresponding political regimes. République here carries a meaning closer to its Latin origin - res publica meaning the "public thing." The République Française refers to the territory of France, to the assets of the State, to the conduct of public affairs, to political life, to law making, and to the gigantic apparatus of six million fonctionnaires [i.e. civil servants].

[...] French children learn about the contributions many former absolutists rulers made to the State, including François 1er (1515-47), Henri IV (1589-1610), Louis XIV (1643-1715), and Napoléon (1799-1815)- three kings and an emperor who were not democrats by any stretch of the imagination. The four of them have retained their status among the great men of French history because each incarnates an aspect of the République. François 1er was a patron of the arts. Henri IV was a Protestant who renounced his faith to take the crown, setting the example for the assimilation of all differences into one French whole. Louis XIV was not only a protector of the arts and a builder of the State,he used the arts to impose his vision of the State. And Napoléon built the modern State.

Historians still debate exactly how the État came into place. Yet they do agree on some of the main features of the process. First is the fact that over the centuries the State bulldozed every obstacle that thwarted its goal of becoming the sole source of legitimate power in the unity known as France. France looked much like the Balkans through most of its history. A thousand years ago it was a galaxy of quasi-independent fiefs organized around a weak center, Paris, without a common political, cultural, or linguistic identity. What linked it was an assortment of local chieftains-counts, dukes, marquis, and princes-all vying for power. In 987, these petty lords chose the count of Paris, Hugues Capet, to be king, mainly because he was the weakest among them. None of the lords ever acknowledged Capet's authority over their own affairs.

Meanwhile, the dukes of Normandy became so powerful that one of them, William (the Conqueror) took over England in 1066 and imposed a form of centralization that had up until then been unknown even in France. At the time, "France" merely referred to the region around Paris, the Kingdom of the Franks. The region is still called Ile-de-France, [Island of France] a vestige of those times. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, half of the population of what is now France didn't speak a word of French. They were Breton, Occitan, Catalan, Basque, Alsatian, Flemish, and Provençal.

Some date the beginning of the État to Louis VI le Gros (the Fat, 1108-37), who established his authority in the Paris region by breaking the power of all the petty lords and vassals. That still didn't make much of a kingdom. When Louis the Fat married his son Louis VII to Eleanor of Aquitaine, she brought a dowry one-third of the size of present-day France, making her fifty to one hundred times weightier than her husband. After Louis VII divorced her, she married a Norman duke, Henri Plantagenêt, who became king of England a couple of weeks later. Then most of "France" went back to England - it reverted to France over the next century.[...]

The French value power and privileges, and prerogatives are considered a natural complement to it. If France seems like a democracy of aristocrats at times, that's because to some extent it is. During the Revolution, the French National Assembly stripped the aristocracy and the clergy of their privileges, but instead of abolishing privileges altogether, they just assigned them to another class: politicians. Today, the President of the Republic has virtual impunity and cannot be tried for anything during his mandate except high treason. [...]

A note on French Guadeloupe

Guadeloupe is an archipelago in the pearl string of islands in the Caribbean. From the mid-seventeenth century on it was a slave colony, producing rum and sugar for France. After slavery was abolished once and for all in 1848, Guadeloupe remained a French colony with a proletariat of former slaves who still produced sugar and rum. In 1945, Guadeloupe went from being a colony to being a French overseas departement, and former slaves became French citizens.

 [...] The relative poverty of the islands, and their dependence on Paris for salaries, subsidies, and welfare, threw a crude light on how the French State treats local communities. In Guadeloupe, we really saw the nuts and bolts of the République.

On the whole, Guadeloupeans are better off than most of their neighbors, and the islands make up a little tropical paradise. The standard of living is relatively high. Infrastructure like roads and public buildings are in impeccable shape. Malaria has been completely eradicated. When a destructive hurricane flattens buildings, the préfet  [State-appointed representative] sees to it that the infrastructure is repaired promptly.

But not all is perfect under the sun. Guadeloupe's prosperity is totally artificial. Subsidies, grants, social transfers, and civil-servant salaries account for 80 percent of the island's income. All civil servants receive a 40 percent indemnity in addition to their salary to compensate for the high cost of living, whether they are native or from continental France. Most of the money that comes in from la métropole (continental France) is spent on imported goods and goes back to Europe. Guadeloupe still hasn't succeeded in transforming a plantation economy into something else. Agriculture and tourism are the only industries, and the local economy is just too small to provide a base for developing any manufacturing. Unemployment hovers at around 28 percent. Entire neighborhoods in Guadeloupe's capital, Pointe-à-Pitre, are shantytowns. There is an average of a strike per day, and they are generally violent. In short, the legacy of a slave colony has never been shed.

Bananas are Guadeloupe's only significant domestic industry. Forty thousand Guadeloupeans - a quarter of the workforce - depend on the oblong fruit for their livelihood, as workers in plantations, offices, and processing plants. But banana wars with the U.S. government are making even this industry less viable. When the United States has challenged the measures the French government takes to protect Guadeloupe's banana production, the World Trade Organization has systematically ruled against France. But because of the high standard of living in Guadeloupe and the small size of the plantations, Guadeloupe can't compete against the Banana Republics of the Americas and Africa, whose production is controlled by Chiquita, Del Monte, and Dole.

01. Joyeux Noël (2005)

A Film by Christian Carion
With Diane Kruger, Guillaume Canet, Benno Furmann, Danny Boon

December 1914.  World War I is not even five months old, and already the high spirits with which it started are eroding.  Generals and leaders still voice the opinion that it's going to be a short war, but the men in the trenches doubt this.  Yet, following days of bloodshed and in advance of a brutal struggle of attrition that will lead to millions of deaths, there is a brief respite when all truly is quiet on the Western Front. For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1914, enemies ceased their hostilities and acted toward each other as comrades trapped in the midst of the ultimate, tragic absurdity.  This story, based on true events, is what Joyeux Noel relates.

When it comes to war films, World War I is underrepresented.  There are some very good movies out there - The Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front , and A Very Long Engagement leap to mind - but the list is short when compared to the library of titles devoted to World War II.  The reason may have something to do with the motivations of the struggle.  While many considered the second world war to be a moral crusade, the causes of the 1914-1918 conflict were less noble, fueled as they were by nationalism, stubbornness, and a tangled web of alliances.  The Kaiser wasn't the only culprit.

World War I was fought using tactics of the 19th century and weapons of the 20th.  France's major assault was halted when its troops were mowed down by machine guns.  Germany's main offensive bogged down in Belgium when the army became overextended and the British joined the fray.  Trenches were built and troops dug in.  What was initially expected to be a short and jaunty war turned into a long, horrific struggle in which the price of advancing one hundred feet was measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.

On Christmas Eve of 1914, caroling in the French, German, and Scottish trenches led to a sense of mutual understanding and a temporary truce that lasted through the next day.  The dirty, disheveled men emerged into No Man's Land to exchange small gifts - cigarettes for chocolates or champagne - and share pictures of their wives and children.  They buried their dead and played soccer.  On any day in any city, the activities would have been considered normal.  In the midst of a battlefield, they were surreal.  That's the mood director Christian Carion wanted to capture, and he does so effectively.  For Joyeux Noel , he has created a number of fictionalized characters, but the historical events in which their stories unfold are accurately portrayed.

Before the war, Anna Sorensen (Diane Kruger, The Face That Launched 1000 Ships in Troy and Nicolas Cage's sidekick in National Treasure ) and Nikolaus Sprink (Benno Furmann) were lovers.  Now, he's a member of the German army and she is visiting with a day pass to entertain the troops.  Sprink's commanding officer, Horstmayer (Daniel Bruhl, Good Bye Lenin! ), is against the idea of her being there - until he hears her sing.  Meanwhile, in the French trenches, Audebert (Guillaume Canet, Love Me if You Dare ) worries about his wife. Pregnant and trapped behind enemy lines, her fate is unknown.  In the Scottish trenches, Palmer (Gary Lewis, the father in Billy Elliot ), an Anglican priest, tries to divine God's will for him in the midst of so much suffering and carnage.  Once the truce occurs, these individuals meet between the trenches and discover that war need not leech away all humanity.

Carion's first goal is to exploit the absurdity of war - how people can be shooting at each other one day, joking around and playing soccer the next, then once again picking up their rifles.  In war, it's necessary to think of the enemy as sub-human (this makes killing easier), but Carion goes to great pains to remind us that the only difference between sides are the uniforms.  Nationalism brought countries into the clash of World War I, but there is no nationalism in No Man's Land on Christmas Day.

The movie's weakness comes late in the proceedings.  The story concludes 20 minutes before the movie ends.  The final portion of Joyeux Noel is rambling and long-winded.  Ian Richardson shows up as an Anglican bishop whose purpose is to give a sermon that hammers points Carion has previously made in a more eloquent and subtle fashion.  Attempts occur to give each little drama a coda, when such things are unnecessary.  Ultimately, Joyeux Noel is more about the event than it is about the participants.

The film was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2006, but lost to Tsotsi .  Nevertheless, it's impossible to deny the power of the story and the way the themes resonate across the ages.  The messages of Joyeux Noel apply not only to World War I, but to wars of all kinds from the dawn of history until today. War is one of the central conundrums of human existence.  Carion does not attempt to explain it, but he shows that, under the right circumstances, human beings are capable of overcoming their base instincts and rising to a higher level, if only for a short time.  Historically, the Christmas truce of 1914 was a curiosity that had no lasting repercussions.  It makes for a fascinating exploration of the human experience. © 2006 James Berardinelli

And more:

World War I produced astonishing casualty rates: 36 percent for the  British, 65 percent for the Germans, 73 percent for the French and 90 percent  for the Austro-Hungarians. Getting sent to the front was practically a death  sentence. "Joyeux Noel," arriving nearly a century after hostilities began, reminds us of the vitality stolen from the world by that conflict.

In the deceptively simple screenplay written by the director, the exploration of the characters and the ideas of patriotism and fatherland (which are so important in keeping up the troops’ morale) are cunningly entwined. Our group of protagonists is a miniature version of the cosmopolitan and completely interconnected European patchwork of countries and the European motto “In varietate concordia” (United in diversity). Mutual respect and -violence have always dominated European history. Carion’s treatment of these grand themes is alternated with the careful observation of small details (including the ever present lice and the endless waiting for battle rather than continuous fighting) which rings true and adds a layer of authenticity often lacking in period films. A small scene involving Anna running into the French owners of what is now the German headquarters at the front underlines the tragic nature of war perfectly: the husband wants nothing to do with Anna (while she is not even German, though he does not know that) while his wife tries to look past the war to see the human being, despite the fact that the war has robbed her of her own home. (European-films.net Boyd van Hoeij)
 
It's hardly subtle in its debunking of the "romance" of war, as the men mostly appear to hate it and welcome the chance to leave it behind, briefly. They also face some due punishment from anxious, fancy-suited superiors for their "fraternization" with enemies. In an effort to explain themselves and perhaps head off severe reprimand, the Scottish and French troops write protest letters to the "bastards, sitting pretty, who sent us here to slug it out." (The Germans have no such illusion of reprieve: they're locked in trains and sent off.)

But at the same time, the movie succumbs to its own mythology. The more simplistic angle here has to do with just who is able to come together in this "everyone's really the same" revelry. Certainly few war zones today (or before, for that matter) would allow for such communal religious touchstones, given that religious belief is more often than not the impetus for war. Pressing the obvious point -- war is absurd, cruel, politically motivated -- Joyeux Noel overlooks complications to achieve another sort of romance. Cynthia Fuchs PopMatters Film and TV Editor

Writer/director Carion comes from a part of northern France occupied by German forces during WWI. As a boy on his father’s farm he found shells, rifles and other remains of the men who fought and died. He is also a member of a group called Noël 14 which is documenting the incidents of fraternisation and currently building a different sort of war monument, one to peace, honouring the memory of those who defied their military commanders and made contact with the “enemy”.

Commenting on those who fraternised, Carion says: “At the time, they were considered cowards. For me they were neither cowards nor heroes [but] ... men who accomplished something incredibly human.” “[T]he dividing line was not between the camps,” he noted, “but between those who made war and those who wanted it to be made.”

According to Carion’s research, “Ninety percent of cases of fraternisation came about because people sang, were heard, and acknowledged with applause.... I love the idea that culture, singing and music silenced the cannons,” he said.

Christmas 1914, however, was not the only fraternisation of troops during the four-year slaughter. The political truth—that the rank and file soldiers of the opposing armies had more in common with each other than with “their” generals or governments—broke through the war propaganda on several other occasions. After getting to know their opponents, the soldiers refused to kill each other and these regiments had to be split up and/or relocated. Fresh, more naïve troops were required to recommence the killing.

Moreover, what is true of the soldiers that fought in WWI is also true of many American soldiers in Iraq today. The US military is made up of the poorest and most oppressed section of the population—men and women who face low paid insecure employment, if any, and no prospects for a reasonable living standard in the US. They have more in common with the Iraqi people now bearing the full might of the US-led occupation forces than with the American billionaires ordering them into Iraq to kill and be killed.

Joyeux Noël has been accused of being amateurish, simplistic and overly sentimental. While there may be some truth to these accusations, the film’s subject matter and its dramatisation of one of the most socially potent but little-known events of WWI still speaks to us across the generations, even though it could have been more complex or the themes developed more powerfully.

Most importantly, 33-year-old Carion, a relatively inexperienced director, demonstrates art’s potential to preserve and heighten our humanity. Joyeux Noël shows how, on Christmas 1914, the gift of music and the beauty of the human voice in song allowed the degradation of war to temporarily fade into the background. Soldiers could recall life outside the trenches and what was human in them, which had been so brutalised by war, was stirred and lifted. This is a moving and necessary reminder of what is great in the hearts and minds of ordinary people. Ruby Rankin wsws.org

2. Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children) 1987 - A film by Louis Malle (1932-1995)

Summary During WWII, in a Catholic boarding school in the French countryside, two boys become friends. One is a French boy, Julien Quentin, and the other is a Jewish boy, Jean Bonnet, who is being hidden from the Nazis by the Carmelite friars who run the school. Louis Malle directed this film based on what actually happened when he was at a boarding school himself during the war.

To help situate the film in its historical context:

Between 1940 and 1944, France was invaded, then occupied by Germany. This is the period called l'Occupation, during which the government of Maréchal Pétain, established in the free zone at Vichy, became more and more subsurvient to the Germans, in particular when it came to denouncing the Jews. As shocking as it may seems, French Jews living in France (or in Algeria at the time) were not considered as French citizens. This explains why Gestapo Müller, referring to Louis Malle's young Jewish friend hiding in the Catholic school under the pseudonym of Jean Bonnet, could say to his schoolmates: "This boy is not French." In addition, young Frenchmen, who were 20 in 1944, were required to go to Germany to work. This was called "STO" (Service du Travail Obligatoire). Many young men refused to comply and had to hide. This was the case of Moreau ("not his real name"), the physical education instructor.

• Childhood, adolescence and the difficult transition to adulthood are common themes in Louis Malle's works.

• The film underlines his thesis of the omnipresence of evil, be it, for example, when the two boys (Quentin and Bonnet) are lost in the woods and Bonnet is asking whether there are wolves in the forest; or the evil of Nazi Germany with its Gestapo (i.e. political police of the Third Reich) persecuting the Jews.

• This being said, it is a film that avoids any form Manicheism, in the sense that the Germans would be all bad and the French all good. In Malle1s eyes, the nun in the infirmary, where the other Jewish boy is hiding in a bed, is as evil as Joseph, the handicapped kitchen helper, who denounced Père Jean to the German authorities. In the scene at the restaurant, the young German officer orders the milice (French soldiers who collaborated with the Germans) to leave Mr. Meyer alone, the older Jewish gentleman.

• The moral center of the film remains with the priest, Père Jean, the director of the school. The film's two crucial decisions are his: 1. of hiding Bonnet and the two other Jewish boys under false names; 2. of punishing Joseph, who had been engaging in petty black market with some of the boys, Julien and his older brother in particular, while not expelling out of school his accomplices, out of consideration for their parents (an injustice that causes him great plain.) We also see him refusing communion to Bonnet, without fearing to distinguish him from the others. We witness how he preaches against the rich in his Sunday homily on parents' day. Finally, see him reject the interest expressed by Julien to become a priest, telling him that he doesn1t think he has a religious vocation. At any rate, he adds, it's a lousy job.

• Although there is a strong touch of autobiography in the film, it is not a work of pure autobiography. "My imagination has utilized memory has as a springboard. I reinvented the past beyond the historical reconstruction, searching for something both timeless as well insistent. Through the eyes of this little boy, I tried to rediscover this first friendship, the strongest, which was so brutally destroyed and this first encounter with the absurd world of the adults, with all its violence (wars) and its prejudices (racism, hatred, persecutions of the Jews by the Nazis. "

• It is important to note however that this IS Louis Malle's own story, which is signified by the very first shot of Julien at the train station leaving Paris and his mother for the college, and the very last one, where, Julien, tears in his eyes, waves goodbye to his friend.  Toward the end of the film, there is the unforgettable scene of Julien looking in the direction of Jean Bonnet, a look that his caught by Gestapo Müller, through which involuntarily Louis malle betrayed his Jewish friend, whose real name was Hans Helmut Michael, and who died later on at Auschwitz.  "{I will never forget this incident," says Louis Malle.

•  Malle endeavored to render the authenticity of the unusually cold January 1944, by means of, as he said, "colorless colors".

Film Review

By Rita Kempley

Set in the winter of the Third Reich, Louis Malle's "Au Revoir Les Enfants" is more than his wartime memoir; it is an epitaph to innocence. In this season of boyhood remembrances, Malle's is the most devastating -- an inspired elegy to little boys lost. This farewell takes place in January 1944 at a Catholic boarding school in the occupied village of Fontainebleau. Classes drone on monastically but for the occasional air raid, and at recess the schoolyard is an anarchy of boys. Malle's alter ego, 12-year-old Julien Quentin, is just returning for his second semester. Some of the boys delight in giving the Nazis wrong directions, while the headmaster deceives them by sheltering three Jewish refugees. The youngest, Jean Bonnet, becomes Julien's classmate, rival and finally closest friend. Both Julien and Jean are exceptional scholars, renaissance preadolescents. Their close relationship is forged one night when they are lost in the woods, then rescued by German soldiers, who gently bundle them in a blanket and drive them back to school. Delicacy overlies dread. "Are you scared?" asks Julien. "All the time," says Jean. Like the other boys, Julien knows nothing of Jean's true identity, but snoops till he learns that Bonnet is a pseudonym. Then one day the Gestapo arrives, and Julien's childhood vanishes along with his friend. Malle created this as a moving portrait not only of the boys, but of their promise. And the earnest child actors embody all the hopes that are invested in every new generation. Malle chose them for their artlessness, and they are uncommonly touching, though sometimes they haven't the skill to carry the lengthier scenes. Malle has written and directed with the compassion of an adult and the simplicity of a child, setting the pranks of seventh-graders against the prejudices of adults, juxtaposing grade-school bullies with a Gestapo goon who tears the Allied flags out of a map in a schoolroom. But Malle never oversimplifies; not all Germans are brutes, not all Frenchmen are noble. When French collaborators harass a Jewish gentleman in a restaurant, a German officer throws the collaborators out. All the while, Julien's mother, chatters on about "some of my best friends are ..." Julien has never known a Jew, or for that matter heard of one, though all around him, neighbors are dying. "What is a Jew?" Julien asks his brother François. "They don't eat pork," explains François. Thunderstruck, Julien asks, "But what is their crime?" In Malle's view, France's crime, and Julien's sin, was ignorance -- the ultimate and all-too-familiar defense of complicity. Ignorance is not innocence. But for Malle, even innocence is not enough. "Au Revoir Les Enfants," his first French film in 10 years, marks a rebirth after a spell of weak and meaningless films. Clearly, something needed to be said. © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

Two Imdb user comments:

a. (From Israel) - This is a very moving film, most likely based on an actual event. The Carmelite priest, Lucien Bunel (1900-1945, "Père Jean") was founder and director of the Petit Collège d'Avon, near Fontainebleau. He was arrested on Jan. 15, 1944, accused of hiding 3 Jewish boys among his students, and was deported to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp. He died in Linz, Austria on June 2, 1945. Malle's film depicts the intense trauma of Jewish children who were separated from their families and forced to take on a new identity in hiding, always afraid of being found out. They also faced the dilemma of how to maintain their Jewishness in the setting of a Catholic school. So, not just another war movie, this film depicts some of the real struggles facing hidden children, many of whom were saved by courageous Christians in Europe. (22 June 2003)

b. Slow tedious movie with anticlimactic end I've just seen the movie and have read the universally admiring comments made below - and I'm afraid I didn't have the same reaction. First, it's not a BAD movie at all - it's obviously made with care, and has a very realistic feel throughout - it seems almost as if a camera were simply rolling at a school and the film was then edited. The details of dress, of horseplay, of conversation all sound quite realistic. Unfortunately for me, that didn't mean they were interesting. The movie seems almost formless - until the uninteresting climax we expected throughout. If I had found either the central character or his brother appealing, I might have a different reaction - but I don't. They are very realistically presented - and quite unlikeable. The whole movie feels very episodic - with one episode having little to do with the subsequent episode. I suppose much of life is this way - yet in a drama, I want to see something that's more shaped into a story. I kept wanting to fast forward the movie to see how much longer it would go on. Nor is the story very original -- from TheTwo of Us (which may have been the first French movie I ever saw) to The Angry Harvest to A Love in Germany (though that time a Polish POW instead of a Jewish civilian), we are used to The Pianist to Enemies to The Diary of Anne Frank, the hiding of Jews during W.W. II is very well-trodden ground. No subject is ever entirely plowed - and if there were some particular insight this time, I might have been more intrigued. Alas... I actually regret the reaction I had - because this movie apparently means so much to so many - but although the review stating that it felt "lived in" is completely true, that didn't make it interesting. One may have a remarkably accurate memory of something - and more remarkably be able to recreate it on screen, but this meandering story simply didn't hold my interest. (New York, 29 June 2003)

3. May Fools (Milou en mai, 1989)  - A film by Louis Malle (1932-1995).

May 1968  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968

In May 1968, student strikes broke out at a number of universities and high schools in Paris, France, following confrontations with university administrators and the police. The de Gaulle administration's attempts to quash those strikes by further police action only inflamed the situation further, leading to street battles with the police in the Latin Quarter, followed by a general strike by students and strikes throughout France by ten million French workers, roughly two-thirds of the French workforce. The protests reached the point that De Gaulle convened a military operations headquarters to deal with the unrest, dissolved the National Assembly and called for new parliamentary elections for June 23, 1968.

The government was close to collapse at that point, but the revolutionary situation evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, urged on by the Confédération Générale du Travail, the leftist union federation, and the Parti Communiste Français, the French Communist Party. When the elections were finally held in June, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before.

Most of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, be they Communism, Anarchism or the rejection of the Vietnam War. Many saw the events as an opportunity to shake the "old society" on many social aspects, including methods of education and sexual freedom. A small minority of protesters, such as the Occident group, espoused far-right causes.

The Events of May

Following months of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre, the administration shut down that university on May 2, 1968. Students at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris met on May 3 to protest the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students at Nanterre. Prominent student activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit rose to the limelight.

The Sorbonne administration responded by calling the police, who surrounded the university and arrested students as they tried to leave the campus. When other students gathered to stop the police vans from taking away the arrested students, the riot police responded by launching tear gas into the crowd. Rather than dispersing the students, the tear gas only brought more students to the scene, where they blocked the exit of the vans. The police finally prevailed, but only after arresting hundreds of students.

On Monday, May 6, the national student union and the union of university teachers called a march to protest the police invasion of the Sorbonne. More than 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to create barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time. The police then responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again. Hundreds of more students were arrested.

High school students started to go out on strike in support of the students at the Sorbonne and Nanterre on May 6. The next day they joined the students, teachers and increasing numbers of young workers who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand that: (1) all criminal charges against arrested students be dropped, (2) the police leave the university, and (3) the authorities reopen Nanterre and the Sorbonne. Negotiations broke down after students returned to their campuses, after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover the police still occupying the schools.

On Friday May 10, another huge crowd congregated on the Left Bank. When the riot police again blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades, which the police then attacked at 02:15 after negotiations once again foundered. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following day. The events were broadcast on radio as they occurred and the aftermath was shown on television the following day.

The government's heavy-handed reaction brought on a wave of sympathy for the strikers. The PCF reluctantly supported the students, whom it regarded as adventurists and anarchists, and the major left union federations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO) called a one day general strike and demonstration for Monday, May 13.

Over a million people marched through Paris on that day; the police stayed largely out of sight. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou personally announced the release of the prisoners and the reopening of the Sorbonne. The surge of strikes did not, however, recede.

When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Approximately 400 popular "action committees" were set up in Paris and elsewhere in the weeks that followed to take up grievances against the government.

In the following days workers began occupying factories, starting with a sit-down strike at the Sud Aviation plant near the city of Nantes on May 14, then another strike at a Renault parts plant near Rouen, which spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes at Flins in the Seine Valley and the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. By May 16 workers had occupied roughly fifty factories and by May 17 200,000 were on strike. That figure snowballed to two million workers on strike the following day and then ten million, or roughly two-thirds of the French workforce, on strike the following week.

These strikes were not led by the union movement; on the contrary, the CGT tried to contain this spontaneous outbreak of militancy by channelling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic demands. Workers put forward a broader, more political and more radical agenda, demanding the ouster of the government and President de Gaulle and attempting, in some cases, to run their factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a 7% wage increase for other workers, and half normal pay for the time on strike with the major employers' associations, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work and jeered their union leaders, even though this deal was better than what they could have obtained only a month earlier.

On May 29 several hundred thousand protesters led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting, "Adieu, de Gaulle!"

While the government appeared to be close to collapse, de Gaulle chose not to say adieu. Instead, after ensuring that he had sufficient loyal military units mobilized to back him if push came to shove, he went on the radio the following day (the national television service was on strike) to announce the dissolution of the National Assembly, with elections to follow on June 23. He ordered workers to return to work, threatening to institute a state of emergency if they did not.

The Events of June

From that point the revolutionary élan of the students and workers ebbed. Workers gradually returned to work or were ousted from their plants by the police. The national student union called off street demonstrations. The government banned a number of left organizations. The police retook the Sorbonne on June 16. De Gaulle triumphed in the elections held in June and the crisis had ended.

Slogans and graffiti

It is difficult to pigeonhole the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre. While not exhaustive, the following graffiti give a sense of the millenarian and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers:

L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

Pas de replâtrage, la structure est pourrie.
No replastering, the structure is rotten.

Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui.
We don't want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié ne font que se creuser un tombeau.
Those who make revolutions half-way only dig their own graves.

On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera.
We will claim nothing, we will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy.

Plébiscite : qu'on dise oui qu'on dise non il fait de nous des cons.
Plebiscite: Whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.

Depuis 1936 j'ai lutté pour les augmentations de salaire. Mon père avant moi a lutté pour les augmentations de salaire. Maintenant j'ai une télé, un frigo, un VW. Et cependant j'ai vécu toujours la vie d'un con. Ne négociez pas avec les patrons. Abolissez-les.
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life has been a drag. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui.
The boss needs you, you don't need the boss.

Travailleur: Tu as 25 ans mais ton syndicat est de l'autre siècle.
Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.

Veuillez laisser le Parti communiste aussi net en en sortant que vous voudriez le trouver en y entrant.
Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho.
I am a Marxist of the Groucho tendency.

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible.
Be realistic, ask for the impossible.

On achète ton bonheur. Vole-le.
Your happiness is being bought. Steal it.

Sous les pavés, la plage!
Beneath the pavement, the beach!

Another Note on the events of May 1968

They were two distinct groups with distinct motives and aspirations involved. On the one hand, there were the young people (students and others). Their social and economic importance had massively increased in France as it had in most other Western countries as a result of postwar demographic changes and of influence. The phenomenon of 'youth culture' had arisen in France, the United States and elsewhere, but changes in social relations had not occurred at the same time. On the other hand, there were the 'workers' who had not benefited as much as they felt they ought to have done from France's postwar economic success, particularly the expansion recorded in the ten years since De Gaulle had returned to power, either through an appropriate rise in their living standards or through new styles of management or labor relations. The analysis of the May Events in the cinema and elsewhere frequently turned on the relationship between these two groups and on the mise en scène of what have been called the new social actors

Synopsis of Milou en mai - May Fools

The portrait of an upper middle-class provincial family living in Southern France at the height of the lovely month of May 1968.

While Parisians are rioting in the streets, the wealthy, patrician Vieuzacs gather at their ancestral home to bury the family matriarch. Mirroring the social revolution occurring in the French capital, the Vieuzac clan stir up trouble between the generations and, in the process, unconsciously destroy the last vestiges of their aristocratic way of life. While national news can be heard on the radio, including De Gaulle's message and word of his departure from Paris, some family members want immediately to discuss what will happen to the estate. While waiting for the striking grave diggers, the group leaves the corpse in the house and goes out for a picnic. The sad family situation begins to seem like a party or a provincial version of the free-love and marijuana-smoking fun going on in Paris. Milou en Mai is a satire as well as a pantheist ode to nature. Milou quotes Voltaire: "J'ai décidé d'être heureux, parce que c'est bon pour la santé." (I've decided to be happy, because it's good for your health.)

Of course, are exalted the liberties of 1968, namely the rejection of sexual taboos. There are moments that remind us of classic scenes from Renoir's The Rules of the Games (1939), one of the most beautiful scene is, as in Renoir1s, an outdoor picnic. Yet, all this is caricatured: every character is a sort of archetype: Milou the sexagenarian in communion with nature; his niece, the lesbian Claire, who brought in her girlfriend; his sister, the doctor's wife, the reactionary little bourgeoise, ready to frolic in the hay with her former boyfriend while her husband-doctor is away; the pontificating journalist overcome by the events and whose wife of the moment is a de luxe hippy; there's also Pierre-Alain, Georges's son, the exalted student... Louis Malle is a keen observer of French society and the "values" reflecting the hedonistic bent of what is called la France profonde ('quintessential France' to copy the American simile, le fric (money), la bouffe (food), la "baise" (sex -  a word that must not to be confused with un baiser - a kiss).

We'll note  Malle's environmental concerns and the importance that he gave to the scenery and the countryside. Malle is also a satirist with provocative tendencies, leading to caricatures and clichés. To be noted as well the influence of his co-scenarist, Jean-Claude Carrière, with his Buñelian heritage (fable and onirism).

Film Review

Louis Malle's "May Fools" has a quality of mellow contentment. You feel in its images a sense of sunny embrace, a feeling of comfort and leisure and warm sensuality. You absorb it, the way you do the dappled light in the paintings of Renoir, or a clear, vivid day with a blanket laid out in the grass and wine rising in your blood. You bask in it. The movie is Malle's homage to those pleasures we think of as particularly French, and in making it, he is working out of the most affectionate, the most humane part of his nature; it's his most easy-flowing,bountiful movie. The film's spirit is one of affectionate satire, and its style suggests a commingling of Chekhov and Mozart and both Renoirs -- the filmmaker, Jean, and his father, Pierre Auguste.

The story it tells is projected against the events of May 1968 when, all over France, a wave of radicalism threatened to leave sweeping social changes in its wake. The film's setting, though, is far away from the strikes and the riots and the free-thinking students who led them. At the rather ramshackle old country estate where the movie takes place, these upheavals are threatening only in a distant, abstract way. Life for Milou (Michel Piccoli), the amiable older son who presides over the house with help of the family matriarch (Paulette Dubost) and their meager staff, is as it has been for most of his 60-odd years -- peaceful, unstructured and geared to the rhythms of nature. But with the mother's death and the gathering of the clan for her funeral, Milou's world teeters as precariously on the edge of revolution as the rest of the country. Everywhere, change is in the air.

Though Malle and his co-writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, draw these comparisons for us, they don't force them. Most of the information about what's happening back in the city comes by way of broadcasts on a battered old radio that sits irreverently close to where the body of the old woman has been laid out, or from members of the family as they arrive. For years, most of the family has remained distant from the family home, paying little attention to the estate or Milou, its ne'er-do-well custodian. Each one, though, has his own designs on the place. Most of them are united in the feeling that for too long Milou has benefited from their generosity. His daughter, Camille (Miou-Miou), the pampered wife of a doctor and mother of three, begins immediately to go through her grandmother's jewelry, while his brother, Georges (Michel Duchaussoy), and their niece, Claire (Dominique Blanc), plot the sale of the house and the division of the profits. Milou, meanwhile, looks on with horror, powerless as his way of life is systematically dismantled. Yet in the face of all this, a kind of giddiness overwhelms him. When Georges's son, Pierre-Alain (Renaud Danner), shows up, full of radical ardor and tales of a new order where people make love openly in the streets, "just for the pleasure of it," Milou's worries melt away. And the others are swept up in euphoria as well. Suddenly, new alliances are being forged. The casual flirting that Milou has indulged in with Lily (Harriet Walter), Georges's younger, liberal-seeming English wife, takes on a new urgency. Claire's lover (RozennLe Tallec) takes up with Pierre-Alain, and Claire with the randy trucker who gave Pierre-Alain a lift. For a moment, they all lose their inhibitions. Picnicking under a tree, they drink wine and smoke pot and let their fantasies soar. And in that idyllic instant, something new seems to be dawning. These sun-licked afternoon scenes have a dreamy lyricism and beauty; they're masterful in a quiet, understated way.

Malle and Carrière poke gentle fun at the fatuity of this bourgeois play-acting, but they don't begrudge the characters their kicks. There's a marvelous scene in which the group, flying high from their indulgences and all that talk of free love, treat themselves to a rambunctious conga (which just happens to snake around the mother's body). And another in which Claire, as the militant front line in the new sexual revolution, takes off her blouse (in front of everyone) and offers her body for experimentation. Malle has called "May Fools" a "divertimento," and throughout, his touch remains musical, delicate and precise. All the elements -- including Renato Berta's luxuriant images and Stephane Grappelli's kicky jazz score -- are kept in perfect balance. The acting too. At the center of it all is Piccoli's Milou, the rumpled hedonist, and this graceful, resonant actor gives him just the right touch of charming laziness and self-absorption. Piccoli is marvelously ingratiating in the role. Milou has never quite grown up, and there's a paunchy innocence in his simplicity that makes him seem compatible to the new shifts in the culture. He's a natural flower child.

Ultimately, though, what he comes to represent is the resilience of tradition and the status quo. After the storm clouds of radicalism have passed, very little of real consequence has changed. And earlier in his career, this might have provoked rancor in Malle. But there's a generous acceptance in the director's point of view. With age (and perhaps the distance of living part time in America), he seems to have come to peaceful -- though clear-eyed -- terms with his Gallic roots. The last section of the movie falters; at just the point when we need some resolution for his ideas, some sense of closure, the picture dribbles away into vagueness. But the movie's spirit is infectious; its effects are the same as those of Grappelli's music -- it makes your limbs hang looser, your soul unclench. If this isn't a great movie, it's a radiant, pleasurable, nearly great one.  - © Hal Hinson

Another Review

The month in which Louis -Malle's "May Fools" ("Milou en Mai") takes place isn't just a any old May. It's May, 1968, when, for a few chaotic weeks, French society seemed on the verge of remaking itself ?radically, comprehensively, and for good. Students were rioting: ripping up the ancient, narrow streets around the Sorbonne to create barricades of paving stones; occupying buildings that represented to them the official culture of which the French are so inordinately proud; filling the air with insistent demands for the reform of the national educational system, for the fall of a the conservative government of President Charles de Gaulle and Premier Georges Pompidou, or simply for anarchy. Seizing on the momentum of the students' protests, the unions and the parties of the left took the opportunity to bring the country's normal commercial life to a stand off. Most of France went on strike: banks closed, deliveries stopped, trains didn't run ; gas for cars was almost impossible to come by. This amazing convulsion signalled to its participants the beginning of a revolution, yet many ordinary Frenchmen perhaps the majority?experienced it as a novel kind of entertainment: an unscheduled holiday, a few weeks of roughing it without the comforts (or the tedium) of bourgeois routine. They had the thrill, too, of feeling that great drama was unfolding around them, that the everyday reality of France was turning into the ultimate New Wave movie?heady, intense, exciting even when it wasn't as quite coherent, like something by Godard. (In our terms, France in May '68 was a bizarre hybrid of the stark confrontation of the 1968 Democratic Convention and the idyllic noble-savagery of Woodstock.)

When the dust cleared, De Gaulle was still in power, and France, with its usual unshakable self-confidence, went on about its business. The characters in "May Fools" are far removed from the stirring street theatre of May 68, but, like everyone else in France, they're affected by it nonetheless. All the action in this film takes place in and around a rather shabby estate somewhere in the countryside: a big, musty old house stuffed with antiques of dubious value and surrounded by land that was once a vineyard and is now just land. The lord of this spacious and useless property is Milou (Michel Piccoli), a genial man in his sixties. He has the look of someone for whom life has always been serenely uncomplicated. Under his extremely casual supervision, the family's fortunes have run downhill, but his relatives don't bother him much; they're scattered all over, escapees from the rural boredom that suits Milou so well, and they're glad to let him take care of his aged mother, the rambling house, and the unproductive land. Contentedly free from scrutiny, Milou lives the life of a lazy country sensualist: he keeps his bees, browns in the sun, and gropes the housekeeper. (When the roof needs fixing, he sells a Corot.)

On the sunny May day when the story begins, his mother dies taking her last breath while she is slumped on a bench where children's dolls sit and Milou summons the rest of the family for the funeral and the reading of the will. As the relatives arrive, bringing cars, kids, lovers, and their own noisy personal agendas into the peaceful oasis of Milou's little world, the movie starts to take shape. There's a sense that things are about to change, both on the large scale of French society and on the infinitely smaller one of Milou's life; everything that has been allowed to bask, unchallenged, in happy inertia is going to be shaken up, forced to account for itself. Malle and his co-writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, don't push the parallels too far. They use the upheaval of May '68, very deftly: it intrudes on their comedy like distant thunder on a sunny day, and the threatened downpour of Meaning never develops - we get a cooling shower of light ironies instead. The movie sometimes evokes Chekhov (especially "The Cherry Orchard" and "Uncle Vanya") and somtimes the Jean Renoir of "The Rules of the Game." (Milou's mother is played by Paulette Dubost, who, fifty-one years ago, was the flirtatious maid Lisette in Renoir's film.) But it doesn't - really strive to be great. Malle and Carrière keep the tone airy and relaxed.

"May Fools" just bounces along to the musical rythm of its remarkable score, composed and played by the eighty-two-year-old jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli; the movie, like the music, has a delicate, joyful swing to it. And the revolution that is apparently in progress all over France is part of the texture. Everyone who arrives at Milou's house has been closer to the events than he has, and has something to tell him about the historic turmoil beyond the boundaries of his estate. He listens, although he isn't terribly interested in the outside world: he doesn't even own a television?only an ancient radio, which is invariably switched on by someone else. His daughter, Camille (Miou-Miou), turns up fuming about the demonstrating factory workers she had to drive through to get to the house. A savagely uptight bourgeoise, with a doctor husband and three chidren, she believes that what the protesters need is "a firm hand" to slap them down; speaking of her grand-mother's death, she proclaims, inanely, "The revolution did her in." His brother, Georges (Michel Duchaussoy), a journalist, is a news junkie, who keeps his ears glued to the radio and talks only about politics. (He's a Gaullist, so he's nervous.) The arrival of Milou's niece, Claire (Dominique Blanc) - she's the daughter of his late sister - is delayed by the gas shortage. Late in the movie, Georges's son, a student named Pierre-Alain (Renaud Danner), drops in, having hitched a ride from Paris; he gives the family a fervent, lyrical eyewitness account of the revolution in the streets of the capital. "You can't know what's going on," he says. "It's completely new." Camille and Georges argue with him; Claire's young lover, Marie-Laure (Rozenn Le Tallec), is transported by Pierre-Alain and his tales of heroism, and becomes an instant convert to revolution (and hetero-sexuality). Milou doesn't look very attentive until the conversation turns to the sexual revolution. Pierre-Alain announces, "At last, people are making love for the pleasure of it," and the old satyr is all ears. He has been flirting seriously with Georges's young second wife, a hippie-ish Londoner named Lily (Harriet Walter); this is just the sort of talk he likes to hear.

The movie's central joke is that this aging, apolitical landed gentleman is in some sense an embodiment of the spirit of May '68 - not an enemy of the revolution but an unlikely comrade. (At one point, he belts out a full-throated rendition of the "Internationale.") He responds instinctively to the irresponsible, anarchic aspects of the students' revolt: he has lived his whole life with the sole purpose of remaining a child?free to take his modest pleasures where he finds them, in the open air and the cool, familiar rooms of his boyhood home. When the other members of the family, led by his greedy daughter, express their eagerness to sell the property and divide up the contents of the house, Milou throws a tantrum. "I want to die here!" he shouts. "It's my right! No one can rob me of my childhood!" His innocence could be pathetic, but it never is. Piccoli, in one of the best performances of his long career, is so vigorous and radiantly good-humored that we can't feel sorry for him; and Malle, although he treats Milou with some irony, is always unmistakably on his hero's side. This sympathy is a large part of the picture's charm; sometimes, though, that charm feels a bit too easy. When "May Fools" is at its best, it seems to vindicate the childlike spirit of Milou and to give the youthful ardor of May '68, a poetic glow.

Malle aims for, and mostly achieves, a graceful, drifting style, a mood of blissful sun-dazed inconsequence. When his touch falters, as it does in a few sequences toward the end, the movie verges on triviality: its concerns seem too small, its humor seems too cozily "Gallic," its point of view seems too mild and noncommittal. Its refusal to come to much could be taken, perhaps, as an ironic reflection of the ultimate lack of consequence of the May '68, revolt - France returned to the (slightly reformed) status quo with alarming speed and efficiency. But that's strictly an intellectual justification: the film doesn't have to blow away like dust just because the revolution did. As determinedly minor as "May Fools" is, it's enjoyable throughout. It's all moments, lovely flashes of intelligence and observation, and some are exhilarating: a closeup tracking shot of Milou riding his bike through the overgrown fields; a scene in which, for the entertainment of a grandchild, he catches crayfish by sticking his hands in a stream and letting the creatures clamp onto his fingertips; a beautiful scene in which Milou, on the night after his mother1s death, cries quietly in his bed and a small owl appears on his windowsill; a leisurely picnic on the grass, under a spreading tree, with the characters sprawled in a wide circle, and Milou announcing, a little drunkenly, "I haven't felt so young in thirty years?long live the revolution!" The gentle sort of liberation that Louis Malle proposes in "May Fools" seems, for an instant, to bridge the gap between 1938?when Milou felt young, and Renoir made his Popular Front film about the real Revolution, "La Marseillaise," and Grappelli was hitting his stride - and 1968, and even the gap between 1968 and our not very hopeful present. In this picture we can almost hear Malle, as he strolls through his memories of that May, singing to himself "Allons, enfants," very softly, a tender anthem.  - Terence Rafferty. © The New Yorker  66: 73-75 (July 16, 1990)

4. Hate (La Haine, 1995) - A Film by Mathieu Kassovitz

The initial story for La Haine came from a real-life fait divers: the shooting of a sixteen-year-old Zairean youth called Makomé Bowole in police custody in 1993. Unlike the Rodney King affair (a black man beaten by LAPD police officers was caught on videotape) which received wider public attention, Makomé's death went relatively unreported and unnoticed.

La Haine follows one day in the lives of three young banlieusards: Vinz, of Jewish descent, Saïd, a Beur, and Hubert, of African origin. Kassovitz replaces the bleu, blanc, rouge of the tricolore with the beur, blanc, 'black' of the banlieues. The three friends are shown living by their wits, surviving on petty crime and small-time drug deals on a low income housing estate outside Paris. It's no ordinary day for them however, as a riot has just taken place on their estate, a friend has been assaulted in police custody and lies in hospital in a coma. To make things more explosive, Vinz finds a police revolver (un flingue) dropped, or stolen, during the rioting. As the three hang out together, picking over the aftermath of the riot and discussing the condition of their comatose friend, the tension mounts

The film is about the interracial solidarity of a small gang of friends, divided by race, religion and ethnicity but joined by the common bonds of geographical and economic isolation. Living a life far removed from the far away from affluence of middle-class or tourist Paris, the three eke out a living by dodging and diving, working small-scale scams like dealing dope and handling stolen goods. Kassovitz is not so much interested in inter-racial violence - this is only touched upon briefly as part of a broader antagonism between young banlieusards and the police - but on a specific class (or underclass) and generation.

Comments - By Jill Forbes

Since its initial screening at the Cannes Film festival in 1995 where it was awarded the director's prize, La haine has become a cult movie inside and outside France, attracting large audiences and generating websites and electronic discussion groups - a success which is based on its ability to appeal to widely different audiences. Its subject-matter is parochial, but it addresses all those who live in large, cosmopolitan conurbations; it appeals to generational solidarity beyond distinctions of race, gender or nationality; it refers to the traditions of French cinema and culture and depicts a social context which is French, but its citation of American filmic and musical material gives it an international dimension. It is a highly wrought and meticulously planned work of art, but it looks like a television current affairs or documentary program.

Like Godard's A bout de souffle or Blier's Les valseuses, La haine is a zeitgeist film which sums up the mood and preoccupations of a particular time and place, but in a way that is internationally appealing. The film depicts twenty-four hours in the life of three unemployed young men, Vinz, Said and Hubert - a Jew, a Beur (child of North African immigrants) and a Black - who live on a housing estate called the Cité des Muguets (lilies of the valley) and who hang out together. It is distantly inspired by events in April 1993 when the seventeen-year-old Makomé (Mako) M'Bowole from Zaïre died in custody, allegedly as a result of police brutality. In La haine the fictional Abdel Ichaha is in a coma in hospital because of a police blunder (bavure) and the inhabitants of the Cité have protested by rioting, causing a great deal of damage to property and totally destroying the gym where Hubert used to train.

La haine is divided into segments, each representing roughly two hours, by digital time-checks flashed onto a black screen. These are accompanied by a ticking sound, as though the film were a countdown to an explosion, which builds up dramatic tension and creates a powerful teleological movement. As in so much French newspaper and television reporting of 'les quartiers chauds' (problem districts), the Cité is presented as a powder keg made up of a lethal mixture of drugs, unemployment, racism and police brutality. At the beginning of the film we see the image of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a globe and breaking into flames, prefiguring the lethal outburst of violence at the end. The image is given an allegorical dimension by a parable, heard first in voice-over at the beginning and repeated twice, about a man who jumps from a fifty-story block of flats and who, as he falls, repeats to himself 'sofar so good', with the punchline 'what's important isn't the fall but the landing'.

What propels La haine is the irony and creative tension which derive from this contrast between the film's structural purposefulness and the aimlessness of the protagonists' lives, between the inevitability of the explosion of violence and the friends' essential innocence and naïveté. The unemployment, racial tension and rioting in several large cities, which contributed to the rise of the extreme-right National Front in France in the 1980s, provide the film's social backdrop. Under electoral and media pressure from the Front, the right-wing government of the late 1980s tried to enact new nationality laws which particularly targeted Beurs like Saïd and required them to 'prove' that they were worthy of being French. This gave rise to a national debate about citizenship, integration and multiculturalism which set the French tradition of 'universalism' (whereby immigrants are seamlessly incorporated into the national community through an education system which does not recognize ethnic, religious or racial diversity) against a 'multiculturalist' tradition, seen as originating in America.

The three protagonists were all born and brought up in France but because they all belong to minority religious or ethnic groups, it would be customary to refer to them as 'immigrés' even though they are not technically 'immigrants' at all. Though they reject the cultures associated with their families - Vinz's grandmother complains about him not attending synagogue - they have not been integrated into the national community in a way that community accepts. Their language is 'verlan', a kind of back slang that has become the fashionable dialect of young people, rather than the standard French heard on the television, and their values are those of homo-social, cross-race, generational solidarity. Whatever the public rhetoric about universal values, these young men are excluded from the national community by unemployment and poverty and by their geographical relegation to a housing development outside the narrowly defined boundaries of central Paris.

La haine seizes brilliantly on a metaphor which is a commonplace in French novels and films about the city, and re-interprets it for the 1990s. From the nineteenth century onwards many writers, such as Baudelaire whose blown-up image adorns a wall of the Cité, embroidered on the distinction between Paris and the surrounding area, known as the 'zone', which was supposedly populated by gangs of criminals and prostitutes, and was richly invested with imaginative possibilities. One was that the bourgeois inhabitants of Paris could visit the outlying areas as tourists in search of visual or sexual thrills; another was that the denizens of the outlying districts, the 'zonards', might invade the city and cause havoc of one kind or another. This notion was exploited by many of the French reviewers of the film who described how hordes of young people from 'la banlieue' were swarming into Paris to see themselves represented on screen. Axiomatic to this convention was the idea that the rules and codes of conduct of one area did not apply and, indeed, were often inverted in the other, just as the 'verlan' used in the Cité inverts standard French; and this can be seen in the films of Marcel Carné or Jacques Becker which are the distant ancestors of La haine.

La haine uses the relationship of inversion between the city and its outlying districts as a structuring trope and combines literary and filmic convention with contemporary social discourse that is itself influenced by such clichés. The latter are evident in the gallery owner's comment on the friends' behavior as the 'malaise des banlieues' ('housing estate' sickness) as well as in the stream of slogans and proverbs the friends cite, with some irony, to pass the time before they can go home. In this way, the friends' trip into Paris and their adventures in the city, which occupy most of the second half of the film, combine social comment on the difference between the values of the banlieue and those of the metropolis, a critique of the exclusion of one group from the center of culture and civilization, a critique of that civilization, and a calculated evocation of artistic conventions which are based on the distinction between Paris and the zone.

La haine succeeds in espousing the values of the outlying districts, keeping the viewer's sympathies firmly with the three friends, even when they are shown behaving badly, whilst at the same time transforming their adventures into spectacle and entertainment for bourgeois consumption by the use of recognizable conventions of French literature and cinema. The credit sequences are a telescopic montage of most of the themes and techniques in the film. We see a Molotov cocktail thrown onto a blue globe which explodes in flames that change from color to black and white, marking a transition from the high-gloss world of the advertising hoarding where the globe originates (as we discover later in the film), to the gritty reality of documentary film-making. A man in overalls with his back to the camera shouts to a distant line of armed police that the workers' only weapon is stones. Shots of CRS [Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité] riot police fitting metal screens over the windows of their vehicles alternate with footage of demonstrators in central Paris. We then see the police lined up in riot gear, confronting young people dancing in the streets. Gradually the images of confrontation become more violent: the police fire tear-gas grenades and flares; the demonstrators overturn and set fire to a car, break the windows of shops, hurl stones at the CRS. Finally we see the neon sign of a shopping centre illuminated by a conflagration. The Bob Marley song Burnin' and Lootin' is dubbed over these images, replacing the original soundtracks attached to the footage, and it is not until the end of the sequence that sound and image finally coincide when we see glass being broken and hear it as wen. As the song ceases, a female newsreader's voice reports the riots in the Cité and we cut to her face on the TV screen. We realize that this montage is a brief history of urban protest which has taken us from the relatively peaceful student demonstrations of May 1968, through the hippy street parties of the early 1970s, to the gradual importing into France of race hatred and police brutality - it is implied, from America. One poster reads 'Don't forget the police kill'; another 'Remember Mako'.

The sounds of violence and what the Marley song calls 'the music of the ghetto' come together to underline and problematize the coincidence of art and reality. The use of the newsreader is an economical way of informing the viewer about what is happening and it also introduces a major theme of the film which is the power of the media. The friends depend on television to know what is going on in their community, and hope to see themselves 'making the news'. Vinz tries to watch the news when in Darty's store, as does Hubert when he calls in at home, and it is while they are sprawled in front of a giant, silent TV screen, waiting for the first train to take them home, that they learn from a newsflash that Abdel has died. But in the Cité communications are distinctly low-tech, the televisions don't work properly and when Said wants to get in touch with Vinz he shouts up to an open window. In Paris, on the other hand, Astérix's flat is entered via a high-tech intercom and video screenand all the hoardings and screens in the metropolis convey their messages with smooth efficiency, exacerbating the sense that the Cité is dispossessed.

The film criticizes the patronizing approach of much television reporting of 'la banlieue' and the way television seeks to sensationalize confrontations between the police and young people. Thus the friends accuse a TV crew, who are too frightened or too lazy to get out of their van, of treating them like animals in the safari park at Thoiry, dangerous beasts to be looked at from the safety of a car. At the same time, they long to see themselves on television because it is a form of legitimation, a confirmation that they exist for the world outside. In this society it appears that people are constantly being filmed. This can be for security reasons (Astérix's flat), for comic effect (Saïd's brother's virtually incomprehensible story about the candid camera), or because of an almost prurient curiosity about how the other half live (the TV crew).

At various points the film asks who owns images, how images relate to reality, and how they take on symbolic significance. Vinz mimics Travis Bickle, the hero of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, leading the audience to wonder if he will adopt Bickle's gun-crazy persona. Hubert's image as a boxer appears on a poster for a match, perhaps recalling that of De Niro in Scorsese's Raging Bull, but its implied violence is at odds with Hubert's reflective, sober and essentially non-violent character. Abdel, who is, ironically, the only member of the community to achieve the legitimation of television, has ceased to be real and has become an image on countless TV screens and a symbol of police brutality. In general in the film, the media transform reality into theatrical spectacle. They dramatize events such as the riots, or the loss of the policeman's gun, which turns into a suspense narrative that requires a tragic dénouement. Theatricality is emphasized by the three-part structure of the film, which might be thought to emulate the protasis, epitasis and catastrophe of Greek or Racinian tragedy. Television transforms the Cité into an entertainment in which people do not act naturally but perform predetermined roles which inevitably lead to a final, tragic shoot-out. Against this we are given glimpses of more spontaneous or authentic creativity in the apparently irrelevant story told by Grunwalski in the toilet, or the various forms of expressive activity open to the friends. Vinz is an actor and dancer, or would like to be; Hubert is a sportsman; Saïd is an artist who embodies the anarchic spirit of the Situationists by spraying graffiti on a police van or altering the message on a billboard. By leaving his mark in this way and changing the slogan from 'the world is yours' to 'the world is ours', Saïd is momentarily able to repossess the public sphere which is otherwise regulated by strenuous but pointless efforts to dominate the people by physical or ideological means. An immediately striking aspect of La haine is the very minor role women play in the film.

The central characters are male, the police are almost all male, the children hanging around the estate are male and almost all the people encountered in Paris are men. Women are referred to with a combination of exaggerated respect and contempt, and put in only brief appearances as sisters, mothers and grandmothers. Hubert, Vinz and Saïd discuss women so as to valorize their masculinity, but in practice they are bossed around and often intimidated by their female relations in a manner which underlines their disempowerment. Vinz, for example, is verbally abused by his sister, and is scared of his grandmother's reaction when he brings red peppers rather than green ones back from the shop. Likewise Hubert's mother asserts her dominance of the domestic space by chasing him from the kitchen. On their rare appearances outside the home, young women, in pairs or in groups, are not impressed or intimidated by the boys' aggressiveness. Saïd is teased by his sister and her friends as he tries to police her sexuality, while his attempt to chat up two girls in the art gallery in Paris falls extremely flat since they had expected an intellectual rather than sexual approach.

The virtual elimination of women from the action emphazises the fact that space in the Cité des Muguets is divided on gender lines. The exterior belongs to the men, who compete to dominate the available space: the roof where the barbecue takes place is a prized vantage point which the young men, the security guards and the plainclothes police all fight to control with a degree of primitive territoriality; the walkways and piazzas are places where Vinz, Hub, Saïd and their contemporaries wander freely, as do the male children. The interiors are dominated by women, who are shown in the stereotypically female pursuits of cooking and sewing. The women uphold traditional moral, educational and social practices reflected in child-rearing (Hubert's mother is pregnant), domestic labor, and religion (Vinz's grandmother's attachment to synagogue), which are all the domain of the females on this estate. Spatial relations are initially disrupted by the riot. Saïd puzzles over how a car managed to get inside the gym, transforming the interior into an exterior.

Surreal moments, such as Vinz's vision of a cow, or the literal flight of fancy over the rooftops which is apparently induced by a sound-mix of rap and Edith Piaf, turn into acute disorientation when the trio arrive in Paris. Their sense of dislocation on arrival is underscored, for the audience, by a shot that combines a dolly-in and a zoom out, flattening the perspective and distorting the relationship of the planes of the image. Such spatial dépaysement is echoed in the polite behavior of the Paris policeman who, to Saïd's astonishment, treats him respectfully. In Paris the friends find that they cannot map gender onto space as they can, for the most part, in the Cité. The simple and easily understood spatial relations in the first part of the film gradually turn into a metaphor for exclusion as the friends attempt to enter various spaces and find either that their presence is not acceptable, or that the space is not decipherable, or that the spaces become prisons of one kind or another.

The Astérix episode is a case in point. 'Astérix' is an ironically assumed French identity (Astérix the Gaul); he does not own the apartment, he has borrowed it; his gestures and body language are aggressive not because he is male but because he is on drugs, and his sexual preferences are ambiguous since it is implied that he is attracted to Saïd. The loin cloth he is wearing also contributes to the uncertainty about whether this space is inside (female) or outside (male). One of the girls in the gallery is a Beur but she has more in common with the gallery owner than with Saïd; another is sporting an extravagant décolleté which, like Astérix's clothes, creates confusion about interior and exterior space and which Saïd misreads as an invitation to seduction. This confusion is compounded by the gallery owner, who is not only precious in speech and manner but also sides with the girls instead of with Vinz, Hub and Saïd, as male solidarity ought to have dictated. Other spaces are equally difficult to decode. The shopping mall is half interior and half exterior (unlike the shop on the estate in which Vinz does not feel at home and which the queue of women codes as interior); the hospital is an interior which the friends cannot penetrate, while the police station is an interior that they enter literally at their peril. Sometimes only violence will force a way inside, as when Vinz sees, or imagines he sees, a Black trying to shoot his way into a nightclub.

The culmination of this confusion is the way Paris itself becomes a prison. By deliberately holding Hub and Saïd too long in custody the police make the friends miss the last train home, with the result, as Saïd puts it in another graphic inversion, that they are 'enfermés dehors' ('locked in outside'). Just as the music is a montage of reggae and French rap, so the cast of characters in La haine provides a métissage, or mixing, which derives from a complex set of references to both French and American film traditions. The threesome is a dramatic device used in films as various as Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961), Blier's Les valseuses (Making It, 1974) and in the more farcical Tenue de soirée (Evening Dress, 1986) or Balasko's Gazon maudit (French Twist, 1995) to explore heterosexual rivalry and homosocial attraction.

La haine differs from such films in having no 'love interest, but it shares this characteristic with many French films of the 1990s which center on friendship among young people, women as well as men, but are not based on the heterosexual romance which was the staple of New Wave films about young people in the late 1950s and early 1960s or the homosexual version that became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The French vogue for films about men can be traced back to the 1970s, but the friendship and solidarity that links Vinz, Hubert and Saïd is more directly reminiscent of American buddy movies and gangster films.

In some respects, therefore, La haine appears to have an answer to French intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu or Alain Finkielkraut who denounce multiculturalism as a form of American imperialism, appearing to consider it an attempt to dilute the principles on which French republicanism is based. The giant TV screen which announced that Abdel has died defaults to an image of the old France associated with the traditional 'blue, white, red' tricolor and the slogan 'liberté, égalité, fraternité' . It is a motto Vinz, Hub and Saïd quote ironically when hanging out in the shopping mall, and their trio is clearly meant to exemplify a 'new tricolor' of 'black, blanc, beur' [Black, White, Arab] one that was on display in France's victorious 1998 World Cup team - an ideal métissage which might be France's response to the multicultural challenge.

On the other hand, the film also shows that young people - or at least young people from this social background - are profoundly influenced by American culture, even in details such as how they cut their hair. The police gun Vinz acquires is compared to the gun in Donner's Lethal Weapon (1987) while the final Mexican stand-off parodies Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) which, itself, parodies shoot-outs in innumerable gangster films and westerns. In interviews about the film the director has stated that in Brian de Palma's Scarface, Al Pacino as the 'guy who comes from the ghetto, is stuffed full of drugs, and who dies a violent death but only after he has reached the top' serves as a powerful role model. Indeed, the billboard slogan 'the world is yours', altered by Saïd to 'ours', is a quotation from Scarface. According to Kassovitz, Scarface is one of the few films people like those in the Cité des Muguets will have seen, and they believe it depicts reality in the United States. Tales of American gangsters are as compelling, and have the same degree of reality, as other narratives, like Hubert's story about the man falling from a block of flats, or Saïd1s brother's tale about the candid camera.

More worryingly, perhaps, the specifically European shaggy dog story about deportation told by the elderly Jew encountered in the public lavatories in Paris, who Kassovitz said he modeled on his own grandfather, is seen as 'pointless'. But above all, La haine is influenced by Martin Scorsese. Vincent Cassel's febrile performance and obsession with guns inevitably recalls Robert de Niro as Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, while De Niro/Travis Bickle's solipsistic 'Are you talking to me?' routine enacted in front of a mirror in Taxi Driver is mimicked by Vinz. Scorsese's semi- indulgent, semi-critical attitude towards the Italian immigrant community and his invention of autobiographical personae for De Niro are echoed in Vinz's attitude towards his immigrant background and the way in which Vinz, actor and Jew, is cast as a representation of Kassovitz (who himself plays the skinhead). Indeed, Kassovitz has said that Mean Streets is the film he would most like to have made.

As influential as the detail of characters and settings, is Scorsese's aesthetic - the brilliance with which he combines the realistic and the poetic, the rational and the irrational, the everyday and the fantastic, not least in the soundtracks of his films which are extraordinary montages of music, dialogue and street noises. Like Scorsese, Kassovitz contrives to achieve a synthesis of traditions of urban film-making so as to combine the documentary/realist representations familiar from television with the poetic representations of the city in French films from the 1930s onwards. Thus the gag about turning off the lights on the Eiffel Tower is lifted, inter alia, from Eric Rochant's Un monde sans pitié (1989). But one of the most powerful intertexts, perhaps, is Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève (1939) with which La haine shares a 24-hour time frame, opened and closed by an explosion or gunshot, a setting in the outlying districts of the city, and a powerful tragic teleology. And just as its star, Jean Gabin, served as the symbol of the French working man in the 1930s, so Vinz, Hubert and Said collectively embody the dispossessed of the 1990s.

La haine rapidly became a media phenomenon in a way that might appear ironic for a film which criticizes the media's tendency to turn any spectacle, however gruesome or violent, into entertainment. Its success depended on extremely skilful marketing and its release was accompanied by various tie-ins.  For the bourgeois audience there was an exhibition of production photographs and an accompanying book by Gilles Favier and Mathieu Kassovitz entitled "Jusqu'ici tout va bien" (so far so good). For the younger audience there was a CD of the soundtrack which combined reggae performers like Marley with rap music from French bands like NTM. ['nique ta mère"].

For film buffs there was a video edition of the 'director's cut, about thirty minutes longer than the version released on screen. And when it was released in the United States, the subtitles deliberately drew comparisons with race violence in America, referring, for example, to 'Rodney King'. In this way, Kassovitz ensured that a film about the difficulty of crossing boundaries owed its success to its ability to cross such national and generational divisions. However, in France there was another dimension to its success. By forgoing the romantic plot and the attractive young actresses, like Emmanuelle Béart, Julie Delpy or Sophie Marceau, who are usually central to the international sales of French films, and by deliberately making its actors appear ugly - even Vincent Cassel, who plays the romantic lead in other films such as Mimouni's L'Appartement (1996) - the film gained credibility as a slice of life and as a warning shot, a 'pavé dans la mare' (hencethe image of the exploding Molotov cocktail).

Kassovitz's criticism of police brutality is serious, especially when it is set alongside the relative triviality of the friends' misdemeanors. It is true that they try to steal a car, but it turns out that none of them knows how to drive. It is true that they steal a credit card but they cannot find a taxi driver who will let them use it to take them back home. La haine takes a strongly opposing view to Bertrand Tavernier's contemporaneous L 627 (1992) which attempted to depict the police as heroes in the struggle against drug-related, immigrant perpetrated crime. By slightly modifying the opening parable from "it's the story of a man" to "it's the story of a society", the lines with which the film closes, and by ending the film with the sound of an explosion over a black screen as Saïd shuts his eyes in terrified anticipation, Kassovitz appears to wish his film to convey the message that a generation of essentially decent young people is being forced into violent and murderous action by a society that is unwilling or unable to acknowledge their predicament. In this way he seems to suggest that the role models offered by American cinema, in the characters played by actors such as Al Pacino, Robert de Niro or Spike Lee, are likely to move out of the realm of art and enter that of real life. By Jill Forbes © European Cinema (pp. 171-179).

Suggestions for Further Reading:
• Alexander, Karen 1995: 'La haine'. In Vertigo, Autumn/Winter, 45-46.
• Bourguignon, Thomas and Tobin, Yann 1995: 'Entretien avec Mathieu Kassovitz'. In Positif, 412, 8-13. Translated in Ciment, Michel and Herpe, Noël 1999: Projections 9: French Filmmakers on Film-making. London: Faber, 183-93.
• Darke, Chris 1995: 'La haine'. In Sight and Sound, November, 221.Favier, Gilles and Kassovitz, Mathieu 1995: Jusqu'ici tout va bien: Scénario et photographies autour du film 'La haine'. Arles: Actes Sud.
• Rémy, Vincent 1995:'Entretien avec Mathieu Kassovitz'. In Télérama, 31 May, 19-24.
• Trémois, Claude-Marie 1997: Les Enfants de la liberté. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Filmography Cauchemar blanc (1991) Assassins (1992) Métisse (Café au Lait/BIended, 1993) La haine (Hate, 1995) Assassin(s) (1997)

5. Bye-Bye (1995) - A Film by [Tunisian Filmmaker] Karim Didri

Bye-Bye by Karim Dridi [the child of an interracial marriage], is a compelling look at Arabs struggling to raise their French-born children in a country that shuns them. Sympathetic but tough-minded, and directed with great assurance, Bye-Bye, tells the story of two brothers, 25-year-old Ismaël and 14-year-old Mouloud, who leave Paris to stay with their uncle and his family in a Marseilles ghetto. On the surface a plea for racial tolerance, Bye-Bye also works as a family tragedy, a lament for fading cultures and a parable about the price of leaving one's homeland and relocating to a country that stigmatizes and isolates its newcomers.

Synopsis -  In Paris, Ismaël, a young Tunisian, cares for two brothers, Nouredine, a cripple, and streetwise Mouloud, 14. In haste, Ismaél and Mouloud go to Marseilles where an uncle lives. Nouredine has died in a fire, and Ismaél feels guilt on top of grief. Ismaël becomes friends with Jacky, a white man whose father and brother hate immigrants. Mouloud hangs out with cousin Rhida who breaks Islamic rules and deals hash. Ismaël decides Mouloud must return to Tunisia, but the boy runs off, becoming an acolyte to Rhida's supplier. Ismaël and Jacky's Arab girlfriend start an affair, friends betray friends, and the racism gets ugly. Can Ismaël rescue himself and Mouloud or will life in France crush them?

Three reviews

a) Just as African Americans are generating gritty films about their communities in the US (Boyz N the Hood), French Arabs are now issuing their own counterpart: hyper-realistic films about the industrial suburbs of France. These movies include Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (Hate) and now Karim Dridi's Bye Bye. Dridi, the child of an interracial marriage, wrote and directed this story of a Marseilles Arab family. Bye-Bye follows the lives of two young Tunisian brothers, Ismaël and Mouloud, who come to Marseilles to stay with their extended family. Mouloud, a precocious preteen, falls in with small-time drug dealers who introduce him to the world of "cruising babes." Meanwhile, Ismaël gets a job as a welder, and encounters racism as he tries to make friends. Ismaël and Mouloud's sprawling Arab family is full of vivid characters: A grandma who hears all but is mute; a mother who sneaks cigs on the sly but chastises her son for being stoned; and Ismaël himself, who is haunted by a childhood accident in which he maimed his brother. All of their lives are touched by an undercurrent of racial hostility, a timely reminder of the rise of ultraconservatism in France. But Dridi remains evenhanded, showing some humanity even in his most evil characters. Bye-Bye's plot is muddled at times; it's difficult to reconstruct the past that the brothers are attempting to flee. But the film's throbbing intensity (and its pulsing world music beat), coupled with slow-moving footage of the Riviera's gray port offer a stimulating, if imperfect, view of the struggles of tenants in teeming French tenements.

b) In France, where tensions are fierce between native French and a huge influx of Arab immigrants the port city of Marseilles, across the Mediterranean from North Africa, has the most troubled history of anti-Arab racism. There, Tunisian filmmaker Karim Dridi sets his second feature film, Bye-Bye, a compelling look at Arabs struggling to raise their French-born children in a country that shuns them. Sympathetic but tough-minded, and directed with great assurance by Dridi, Bye-Bye, tells the story of two brothers, 25-year-old Ismaël and 14- year-old Mouloud, who leave Paris to stay with their uncle and his family in a Marseilles ghetto. On the surface a plea for racial tolerance, Bye-Bye also works as a family tragedy, a lament for fading cultures and a parable about the price of leaving one's homeland and relocating to a country that stigmatizes and isolates its newcomers. Dridi traces those themes through the actions of the two brothers. For conscientious Ismaël, still tortured by the memory of his brother's death in a fire, Marseilles holds the promise of a new beginning. But after scoring a job as a dockworker and befriending Jacky, a French co-worker, his dreams splatter against the wall of racism --embodied by Jacky's Arab-hating brother. For Mouloud, a rap-loving punk with free-floating adolescent angst, Marseilles is just another place to raise hell -- this time free from his father's gaze. Ignoring his older brother's warnings, Mouloud takes up with his drug-running cousin Rhida, starts living on the streets and brings chaos to his tradition-bound uncle and aunt. Does he want to return to his homeland in Tunisia to be with his mother? Hell, no. France is his place of birth and his home, much as that fact plagues his father. Dridi's direction is sharp -- he stages one remarkable scene in a drug dealer's apartment, shot in one long, uninterrupted take, and he draws strong, passionate performances from his North African cast. Bye Bye is a strong, craftsmanlike and heart-rending film that serves as a window into a neglected, little-understood culture - © San Francisco Chronicle

c) Although Karim Dridi's second feature has all the elements of a slick gangsta flick -- crime, racism, disaffected black youths -- it shuns the clichés of overblown Hollywood violence for a more intimate but no less dramatic look at the relationship between two young brothers caught up in the cultural maelstrom of contemporary France. Two young beurs (the children of Arab immigrants to France) brothers arrive in the Mediterranean port of Marseille after a family crisis prompts them to leave Paris. Ismaël (Sami Bouajilla) and his younger brother Mouloud (Ouassini Embarek) take up with their uncle and his lively family. Ismaël finds work in a shipyard, makes friends with a white man. From the beginning, the two must fend against racist taunts and insinuations, but things get even more complicated when Ismael falls for his black girlfriend. Mouloud, meanwhile, has been ordered back to Tunisia, but instead runs away and gets entangled with a local drug dealer. In a slightly overwrought scene, Ismael bursts in on the drug dealer and rescues his younger brother. The two drive off into the sunset. Bye-Bye's strength is in its characters: like the banjee boy grandson who hides his stash under his silent, tattooed grandmother, or the Negrophobe's foaming white supremacist brother, or the based-out drug dealer and his pre-pubescent girlfriend. Dridi has created a narrative loose enough to accomodate his wily characters' rapid breathing. As in his feature début, Pigalle, Dridi shows his skill as a director lies in understanding a place that is not just about beautiful landscapes or heroic individuals, but about architecture peopled with life. Instead of gutless prosletyzing, Dridi gives us a screen that shimmers with characters that are as nuanced, provocative and distinctly urban as the mean streets they survive. - Lawrence Chua.

Main Reading: "Hybridity, space and the right to belong: Maghrebi-French identity at the crossroads in Karim Drid’s Bye-Bye[excerpted]

Bye-Bye focuses on the experiences of two brothers of North African origin, Ismaël and Mouloud who, in the face of opposition from both white French racism and pressure from their North African parents, attempt to establish their own sense of identity and rightful place within the Hexagone (France). The film begins with the brothers’arrival from Paris in Marseilles, where they are to stay with their uncle and extended family. It soon transpires that the brothers will depart Marseilles for the Maghreb: Ismaël has been instructed by his father to accompany Mouloud to the bled (family home) where he will remain with his parents indefinitely Mouloud is, unsurprisingly, strongly opposed to his enforced ‘return’ to a country and culture he hardly knows. His refusal to obey the father's instructions precipitates a slide into delinquency which leads to his involvement with a local North African drug dealer, Renard. Meanwhile, Ismaël, unable to enforce the law of the father, and haunted by the earlier death of his handicapped brother for which he feels partly responsible, drifts into a job at the local shipyard. Here he befriends a white work-mate, Jacky and his girlfriend, Yasmine, to whom IsmaëI becomes attracted. The culmination of  a series of events: IsmaëI's sexual encounter with Yasmine; Mouloud's delinquent activities; the father's demands that they return to the bled; and threats from a local gang of racist thugs, force the brothers to flee Marseilles at the end of the film, in search of a new future in an undetermined location.

Released in September 1995, Bye-Bye, Franco-Tunisian director Karim Dridi's second feature, appeared at a moment of both cinematic and sociopolitical significance in France. In cinematic terms, the year was marked by the emergence of what critics labelled the cinéma de banlieue: a number of independently released commercial features (of which Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine  (1995) was by far the most prominent) that tended to focus on social exclusion found within the disadvantaged periphery of larger French cities. Although French politics would be dominated by the same issues addressed in the majority of these banlieue film - unemployment, delinquency, fracture sociale - politically the mid-1990s was also a period in which the return of the Right to power was to be marked by an increasingly hostile and suspicious attitude towards the presence of non-European immigrants and their descendants in France.

Soon after the Right's election victory in March 1993, the new Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, introduced a series of reforms which toughened legislation concerning immigration, revoked the automatic right of citizenship for the descendants of immigrants born in France, and increased police powers to stop and detain any individual suspected of residing illegally within the Hexagone. The right-wing government's position was further consolidated in 1995 with the election of Jacques Chirac as President - a politician who in 1986 had unsuccessfully attempted to introduce more restrictive French nationality laws similar to those implemented by the loi Pasqua, and who remained unpopular among France's ethnic minorities for remarks from a (now infamous) speech made in 1991, in which he expressed sympathy with French people who disliked the ‘noise and smell’ associated with immigrant families.

Finally, the summer of 1995 saw massive police operations in Paris, Lille and Marseilles, aimed at eradicating groups of Islamic terrorists presumed to be active within the Hexagone.  In reality, the series of bomb attacks which instigated this crackdown was perpetrated by a small, isolated group of alienated youths of Algerian immigrant origin from the disadvantaged cités (housing estates) of the urban periphery, directed by Islamic extremists fighting against the Algerian government. Nevertheless, the combination of uncompromising political rhetoric and intense media attention which accompanied the police action fuelled an image of the banlieue as a common recruitment area for Islamic terrorist groups, whilst equating the Muslim community in France (and by extension North African immigrants and their descendants)  exclusively with Islamic fundamentalism.

In light of the political climate outlined above, the open and sympathetic portrayal of the Maghrebi community and their descendants beyond the confines of the disadvantaged cité  offered in Bye-Bye is highly significant. Dridi was praised for challenging the negative stereotypes commonly associated with the North African immigrant population, without eliding either the realities of discrimination and delinquency, or the complex issues of identity and difference, faced by Maghrebi-French youth during the 1990s. It is, therefore, rather ironic that a film which is at such pains to reject the essentialist cultural and socio-spatial identities imposed upon the French-born descendants of Maghrebi-immigrants, should, on occasion, find itself defined in these self same reductive terms.

Firstly, even though the majority of the narrative is located in the working class districts of Marseilles, the inclusion of a limited number of scenes in the disadvantaged cités of the urban periphery seem to be sufficient to include Bye-Bye as part of the cinéma de banlieue phenomenon which emerged at the time of the film’s release (Bye-Bye appeared on French screens barely three months after the intense media attention and box-office success of La Haine had brought the notion of the banlieue film to the attention of a wider public). Secondly, the fact that Bye-Bye is made by a Franco-Tunisian director and focuses on characters of predominantly North African origin has caused the film to be identified with the problematic (and increasingly redundant) notion of cinéma beur - a label which threatens to marginalise the Maghrebi-French film-maker as ‘other’ in relation to the dominant cultural norm. Through an analysis of the representation of space, cultural difference and hybridity in Bye-Bye, this [excerpted] chapter [of France on Film] will consider the extent to which Dridi is able to offer a portrayal of the North African immigrant community which transcends the potentially reductive paradigms of the banlieue film and beur cinema, thus leaving the film better equipped to explore the complex hybridity of the Maghrebi-French subject.

Let us first consider the representation of cinematic space in Bye-Bye. During, the 1990s, largely as a result of the representations offered by the mainstream media, the banlieue emerged as a new and highly stigmatized social space. The term is now used almost exclusively in reference to the most disadvantaged housing estates (cités) of the urban periphery, and qualifies the banlieue as a site of delinquency, violence and alterity, identified predominantly with male youth of North African origin. This notion of the banlieue as marginalised site of socio-economic exclusion is to be found in nearly all the so-called banlieue films of the 1990s, dehumanising and degraded citéscapes dominate the mise-en-scène of La Haine, Raï (Gilou, 1995) and Ma 6-T Va Crack-er (Richet, 1997). Although the majority of these films focus on an underclass of multi-ethnic youth, Maghrebi-French characters tend to occupy a central position within this social group. It is precisely this association with the stigmatised space of the banlieue from which Dridi is attempting to distance his protagonists of North African origin from in Bye-Bye.

Originally, the director had hoped to locate the film in Belleville, where he had lived as a child. Although a largely working class quartier with a significant non-European immigration population, Belleville is nonetheless situated within the arrondissements that form the central hegemonic space of  Paris. As such, the district's inhabitants are not stigmatised or excluded to the same extent as those minority social groups living in the disadvantaged cités on the extreme margins of the capital. However, the redevelopment of Belleville during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the fragmentation of the local community around which Dridi had hoped to base his film. Forced to search elsewhere for his location, Dridi went to Marseilles, where he again eschewed the run-down HLMs (habitations à loyer modéré - subsidised housing) of the periphery in favour of Le Panier, a district near to the city’s old port with a large and diverse immigrant population.

Unlike the uniform concrete towers of the alienating post-war cités which dominate the outskirts of larger French cities such as Marseilles, Paris and Lyon, the architecture of Le Panier - its courtyards and maze of narrow streets - forms an instantly recognisable part of the city itself. The fact that the district was constructed by the first wave of Italian immigrants to arrive in the port during the nineteenth century further highlights the long-established presence of an immigrant community in Marseilles. Le Panier is thus a space which identifies the immigrant population as part of the collective historical development of the city. Since the arrival of the first Italian immigrants, the district has housed waves of Armenian, Spanish, and Portuguese immigration, and is now home to a significant population of North African origin.

Dridi emphasises the plurality of cultural and ethnic origins to be found in Le Panier through the use of both image and sound in Bye-Bye. The camera contemplates multi-ethnic groups of children playing in the streets of the quartier, as well as the mixture of white, black and Maghrebi youths who flock to the raï concert on the beach.  Similarly, the films soundtrack associates an eclectic mix of music - including rap, raï and reggae - with Le Panier. Amidst the confusion caused by the eviction of a neighbouring black family which greets Ismaël and Mouloud upon their arrival at the family apartment in Le Panier, strains of Italian bel canto emanate from another part of the building, reminding the spectator of the cultural heritage of the district's original inhabitants.

Le Panier is characterised not only by its multicultural population but also the presence of an established working class community. Dridi is careful to identify the North African immigrants and their descendants as an integral part of this popular heritage. The brothers’ uncle, played by Benhalssa Ahouari, has a permanent job in one of the local shipyards, where Ismaël is also offered temporary work. The North African community of Le Panier is thus represented as economically integrated within the wider French working-class population. Moreover, by placing the Maghrebi-French subject in this environment Dridi distances him/her from the stigmatised space of the disadvantaged cité. Ismaël is not identified with the economic exclusion caused by unemployment which effects nearly all protagonists of North African origin in the banlieue films of the 1990s: Hexagone (Chibane, 1994), La Haine and Raï.

However, the representation of the banlieue as site of violence, delinquency and exclusion is not entirely absent from Bye-Bye. The disadvantaged cité is portrayed in a limited number of scenes involving Renard, a dealer of North African origin from a deprived estate situated on the outskirts of Marseilles with whom Mouloud becomes involved. On the one hand, the inclusion of these scenes is understandable. They serve to highlight the dangers of the precarious socio-economic position (poor housing, unemployment, exclusion) occupied by many young people of North African origin in the banlieue. Frequently, these individuals find themselves further marginalised by racism experience at both an institutional and personal level - the most obvious example being discrimination in the job market . These experiences compel a small number to reject the conventional path of education and a traditional work ethic in favour of illegal activity within the cité; mostly drug dealing and petty crime. Renard appears to be an example of on such individual who, excluded by society, has opted for involvement within this clandestine economy.

In spite of his well-intentioned efforts to highlight the potential danger faced by Maghrebi-French youth within the cité, the methods used by Dridi to introduce the spectator to these marginalised minorities within the disadvantaged urban periphery are somewhat disingenuous. The opening to the first sequence in the cité runs as follows: from an establishing shot of a rundown HLM estate, the camera cuts to a group of black and Maghrebi-French youths playing basketball, panning across to an individual tower block an, finally cutting to the interior of an apartment where Renard, knife in hand prepares to divide up a large block of hashish. The fairly clichéd images of the dehumanising HLMs indicate our arrival in the 'ghetto' of the disadvantaged cité. Furthermore, the initial sequence establishes a discursive chain which associates the banlieue to Maghrebi-French youth and drug dealing. Renard’s persona as the paranoid, gun-toting, cocaine-snorting dealer, is exaggeratel to similar effect. Given the fact that in the rest of the film Dridi is careful to avoid any stereotypical representations of the Maghrebi immigrant population and their descendants, the manner in which both the disadvantaged cité and the dealer of North African origin are portrayed in Bye-Bye is somewhat surprising.

It is clear, however, that Dridi did not intend for Renard (who only play a secondary role) to provide the dominant representation of Maghrebi-French youth in the film. Significantly, the dealer is portrayed as a solitary figure ? he never appears in Le Panier - and is thus isolated from both the North African community and wider French society. The larger than life performance offered by Moussa Maaskri as Renard and the rather clichéd representation of the banlieue further distances his character from the intimate realism employed b Dridi to portray the everyday lives of the extended immigrant family. Whether Dridi intended this division between Le Panier and the cité to be as pronounced as is suggested here is unclear. Nevertheless, away from the stigmatised and heavily stereotyped space of the cité in Bye-Bye, a more nuanced and comple portrayal of the extended North African family is allowed to develop.

Carrie Tarr suggests that this ‘new emphasis’ offered by Dridi on the extended immigrant family allows for ‘more fully individualised characters capable of challenging stereotypical expectations’ to emerge (1997: 77). This is particularly true of the female characters. The aunt is portrayed as a strong, compassionate and intelligent woman. In one scene she is shown giving English lessons to her daughters: a far cry from the stereotype of the North African immigrant mother as little more than a poorly educated housewife. In contrast to the rigid authoritarian approach adopted by Mouloud's father (endorsed by the uncle, with little success) the aunt is able to empathise with and accept her children’s position, defying the patriarchal authority of the bled to suggest that both Mouloud and her own children should remain in France. Cultural differences are present within the family home - the aunt converses with the grandmother in Arabic; the family watch an Arabic show on television - although not fore-grounded. Significantly Islam, generally perceived by the French as the greatest barrier to the successful ‘integration’ of the North African immigrant population is barely represented in the film. By challenging the stereotypes commonly applied to the North African immigrant population and their descendants, Dridi attempts to break down the perceived ‘difference’ which marks the North African community in France as ‘other’. In this respect, the representation of the Maghrebi immigrants and their children found in Bye-Bye is similar to the diverse range of protagonists of North African origin present in both Hexagone and Douce France (1995) by Maghrebi-French film-maker Malik Chibane.

Commenting on the wider significance of Marseilles as the location for Bye-Bye beyond the microcosm of Le Panier, the immigrant family home and the disadvantaged cité inhabited by Renard, Dridi (1995: 39) has stated: “Setting my film over there [in Marseilles] allowed me  to look at Africa from the other side. Just as I am half Arab and half French, so Marseilles is a city at an intersection, a very hybrid City.”

The multi-ethnic community of Le Panier quite obviously illustrates this notion of Marseilles, as miscegenated, multicultural space. However, the filmmaker refuses to reduce the espace métissé [half breed space] of Marseilles to an over-simplified vision of pluri-ethnic utopia. Interethnic relationships, founded on the tolerance of cultural difference, are formed within the diegesis, the most obvious example being that of Ismaël and Jacky. Yet these friendships are contrasted with the hostility displayed by Jacky;s brother, Ludo and the gang of racist thugs with whom he associates, towards the non-European immigrant inhabitants of Le Panier.

The scene towards the end of the film where local residents are shown celebrating a mixed-race marriage well illustrates this underlying tension within the hybrid space of Marseilles caused by such xenophobia. The camera contemplates the black groom and his white bride, in western wedding dress, dancing to North African music, surrounded by black, Maghrebi and white French guests (including Ismaël, his aunt and uncle, Jacky and Jasmine). The fact that neither the bride nor bridegroom appear anywhere else in the film emphasises the symbolic function of their union in relation to the narrative. Rather than foregrounding the individual subjectivities of these two characters, Dridi wishes us to focus on the mixed race marriage in Bye-Bye on two levels: as a symbol of Marseilles as miscegenated space, and, by extension, a reflection of Ismaël and Mouloud's hybridity.

Yet the wedding reception’s function as a site of multi-ethnic tolerance rapidly degenerates into one of racial conflict with the arrival of Ludo. Having insulted the newlyweds ? insinuating that the white bride has chosen to marry her black husband because she has already “had” every other man in the quartier (“you’re not the first or the last”), Ludo delights in generating further tension by revealing to Jacky that Ismaël has slept with Yasmine. His presence in this scene not only embodies the xenophobic tendencies of the far right in France ? Ludo’s fear of métissage is manifested through his aggressive opposition to mixed race unions - but also emphasises the way in which the success of such discourse comes as a result of exploiting the fears and insecurities of the white French population. Ismaël’s ‘betrayal’ of Jacky thus plays on the stereotype of ethnic ‘other’ as a sexual threat to the white male. The scene ends with Jacky, who has been portrayed throughout the film as a tolerant figure, entirely comfortable within the miscegenated space of a multicultural Marseilles, spitting in Ismaëls’ face. Jacky’s justifiable anger at both Ismaël and Jasmine is thus exacerbated by Ludo’s xenophobic discourse. The dispute is transformed (or even hijacked) by Ludo from the question of infidelity between friends to that of an apparently racially motivated act, which forms part of an ongoing conflict between the white majority and those of non-European origin who live in the Hexagone.

In addition to this notion of Marseilles as a site of métissage, the city's status as a port emphasises the transitory nature of this space for Mouloud and Ismaël, as they ‘return’ to the bled. Perhaps more important, though, is the geographical and historical significance of Marseilles in relation to North Africa. The visual motif of Ismaël  staring out to sea as boats leave the port bound for Africa, reflects the geographical proximity of France  to the Maghreb. However, it is also representative of the migratory flows and cross-cultural exchanges which have taken place between North Africa and the Hexagone during the past 150 years - of which Ismaël and Mouloud are the living embodiment. In this respect, the port offers a symbolic link with the cultural heritage of the Maghreb and also with France's colonial past. Marseilles would have served as a gateway for the post-war migration of North Africans to France; a point of return for French soldiers and colonial administrators following de-colonisation; and the entrance to a land of exile for the harkis and pieds noirs who arrived from Algeria in 1962 [Harkis were Algerians who fought for France during the Algerian War of Independence 91954-1962).  Pieds noirs are French colonial Algerians] Therefore, sealed within Marseilles’ history are reminders of the events that have led to the permanent settlement of North African immigrants within the Hexagone and thus shaped the dual cultural identity of their children. Given this symbolic importance of Marseilles, it is hardly surprising that Mouloud and Ismaël are forced to question the consequences of their own hybridity, when placed in this space ‘at the intersection’ between France and the Maghreb.

The child of a French mother and Tunisian father, by his own admission “the creation of two cultures”, Dridi is careful to articulate the complex questions of identity facing the descendants of North African immigrants in France today. Indeed, the cultural identification of each individual represents a unique response to their own hybrid subjectivity: one which is articulated in different ways, and expressed to varying degrees, as a result of personal experiences. These identifications can range from an almost total rejection of North African culture, to a sense of self defined solely in terms of Maghrebi/Muslim consciousness, motivated by a feeling of exclusion in both socio-economic and cultural terms from the dominant societal norm. Most, however, occupy an intermediary position: feeling an intuitive sense of belonging in France, yet still maintaining a strong attachment to their parents’North African culture.

The dilemma faced by Ismaël in Bye-Bye - whether to uphold the patriarchal law of the bled and return Mouloud to Tunisia, or allow him to remain in France and determine his own future ? is therefore representative of these issues surrounding identit s North y and belonging which continue to confront French people of North African origin. Mouloud, is vehemently opposed to returning to the bled, feeling a much stronger affinity with the French/western culture in which he has been raised and educated. The extent to which many French youths of Maghrebi immigrant origin share this sense of almost complete alienation from their parent’s religion and culture is well illustrated by the scene in which Mouloud and his cousin take shelter from racist thugs in an Arab household of Le Panier. The youths inadvertently enter in on the proceedings of a Muslim funeral. Mouloud looks on at events as a total outsider. As he attempts to make sense of the scene before him, the camera follows his gaze: panning across the women in traditional Arab dress into another room in which the men are seated and finally resting in an antechamber where the immams (holy men) who surround the shrouded corpse are reciting passages from the Koran.

In contrast, the stronger attachment felt by Ismaël to  his African origins is reiterated on a number of occasions - the repeated image of Ismaël staring out across the sea toward the Maghreb being the most obvious example. Elsewhere in the film he actively participates in the traditional dancing taking place at a local North African bar. Ismaël’s more open identification with the bled and the culture of his parents can, perhaps, be explained by the age difference between the two  brothers. Given the fact that he is in his twenties, it is possible that Ismaël was not born in France and thus arrived in the Hexagone having spent at least some of the formative years of childhood in Tunisia. Mouloud, on the other hand, is far more likely to have been born and raised in France.

However, the younger brother’s apparent ‘rejection’ of his parents cultural heritage is not only motivated by the fact of his socialisation within the Hexagone,  but also a desire to reject the patriarchal discourse of the bled. The father’s demand that Mouloud ‘return’ to Tunisia indefinitely, fails to acknowledge the powerful attachment to French society and culture which informs his son’s hybrid subjectivity. The Maghrebi-French subject’s desire to determine his/her own identity within the Hexagone is, therefore, shown to be opposed by forces within both French and North African society. Mouloud’s refusal that his own identity be determined by a third party ? be they the racist stereotypes of the French far-right or the patriarchal authority of the bled - is most emphatically articulated through the rap he has written entitled “Beur pourri” (rotten beur) with the refrain “ne m'appelle pas beur, car ce mot m'écoeure” (don’t call me beur, that word makes me sick). The fact that Mouloud focuses on the word beur is, of course, highly significant. Initially seen as an empowering self affirmation of their hybrid identity, the term beur has since been rejected by the majority of the Maghrebi-French population, who feel it has been appropriated by mainstream French culture - especially elements within the media - to signal their difference from the dominant social norm. [Beur is a deformation (back slang) of the word rebeu, meaning arab. It is used to designate a young person of Maghrebi origin born in France of immigrant parents].

The portrayal of the dealer of North African origin in Bye-Bye further highlights the extent to which these externally imposed (mis)representations offered by the dominant social norm marginalise Maghrebi-French youth. Renard sees a world of violence and drug dealing as the only means for him to acquire the material wealth and respect of his peers denied him by white French society. However, acquiescing to this stereotype of the North African male from the cité as the delinquent, marginalised other, means he must perform an identity, not be one. In the attempt to cultivate this image as the tough dealer, he appears to imitate the dress, lifestyle and mannerisms of a Hollywood gangster: the violence and drug-fuelled paranoia  that surrounds Renard in Bye-Bye is reminiscent of Al Pacino in Scarface (De Palma, 1983), whilst the white vest he wears conjures up images of Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets (Scorsese, 1973).

Clearly, it is Renard's disadvantaged socio-economic status and the association with the stigmatised space of the citg which effect his marginalisation, notany perceived cultural difference. However, when Mouloud visits  his apartment for the first time, Renard brings out his gun and, placing the young boy’s finger on the trigger, tells him: “you're a man with that [gun] ... look at how people’s reactions change ... you’re no longer a dirty Arab...” As his comments to Mouloud make clear, Renard sees his exclusion primarily in ethnicised, not economic, terms ? “T’es plus un bougnoule.” (You're no longer a dirty Arab) [...].

[...] In a television interview two months after the film's release, the director [Dridi] claimed that he had made Bye-Bye both to inform a mainstream white audience who had little contact with Maghrebi culture, and also to offer positive images of North African characters with whom spectators of Maghrebi immigrant origin could identify. In this respect, through the sympathetic portrayal of the extended immigrant family in the film, Dridi positively acknowledges his own North African origins, whilst simultaneously challenging the negative stereotypes which have previously dominated representations of the North African community in French cinema. For example, the director has suggested that Bye-Bye offers a counter-point to the polars of the 1980s such as La Balance (Swaim, 1981) in which nearly all the protagonists of North African origin are associated with criminal activity. As his comments  make clear, Dridi in no way intended Bye-Bye to be viewed or received as a product of a beur cinema, because of the way in which this externally imposed concept perpetuates the marginalisation of film-makers (and even spectators) of North African origin. Instead, he wanted to offer a positive representation of the North African community in France, determined by subjects of Maghreb immigrant origin - in this case, the actors and director himself - with which a wider French audience could also empathise.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dridi's highly sympathetic representation of the North African community and their descendants shares similarities with the work of other French film-makers of North African origin during the 1980s and 1990s: Le Thé au harem d'Archimède (Charef, 1984), Hexagone (Chibane, 1994), La Nuit du destin (Bahloul, 1997).  Nevertheless, the intimate, realist portrayal of the working class inhabitants of Le Panier in Bye-Bye is equally reminiscent of the work of British film-maker Ken Loach, of whom Dridi is a great admirer. Significantly, Phil Powrie identifies Loach as one of the British film-makers who has been seen to influence the new wave of young French directors whose work appears more engaged with contemporary social realities affecting France today (Powrie 1999). It could therefore be argued that, rather than existing in isolation as part of the beur cinema canon, Bye-Bye, in fact, belongs to this wider cinematic discourse surrounding the renewed emphasis on social realism and the political in French cinema in the 1990s (Bouquet 1995). This suggestion is further endorsed by the fact that Dridi was one of the 59 film-makers who, in 1997, signed a public call to civil disobedience against the repressive new immigration laws proposed by the right-wing government.

In the same vein, Bye-Bye is quite clearly engaged with the political realities of the period. The manner in which the film positively endorses the rightful place of Mouloud and Ismaël within French society, presents a clear challenge to the right-wing government of the mid-1990s, whose political discourse questioned the ‘Frenchness’ of those descendants of first generation immigrants born in France (the loi Pasqua of 1993 decreed that children born in France of foreign parents were no longer French by birth and would have to offer a manifestation of their ‘loyalty’ - through a formal request for citizenship between the ages of 16-18 - in order to acquire French nationality). The aesthetic sensibilities and political sympathies revealed in Bye-Bye appear, therefore, to be more readily identifiable with the return of the social realism in French cinema of the 1990s than any reductive definition of the film as an example of cinéma beur.

In the final scene of Bye-Bye, however, the specificities of Maghrebi-French identity are once again called into question. Having rescued Mouloud from Renard's apartment in the cité, Ismaël finally decides not to send him back to Tunisia. The brothers flee Marseilles, and in so doing defy the  external discourses that would oblige them either to return ‘home’ to the Maghreb, or else occupy a position of exclusion in marginalised spaces of the urban periphery. One reading of the ending proposed by Dridi, would be to suggest that  Maghrebi-French youth should reject the identities imposed upon them by third parties - embodied in the film by the patriarchal  law of the bled, on one hand, and Ludo's xenophobia, on the other - in order to determine their own subjectivity. This need for Mouloud and Ismaël to forge their own space and rightful place within society (one which demands their hybridity be accepted and valued, rather than feared and repressed) echoes Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of ‘third-space’ as the site of enunciation which allows for the positive recognition of hybridity within which cultural difference may operate (Bhabha 1994: 37).

Yet by the end of the film, far from occupying this empowering ‘third-space’, the brothers appear to have reached an impasse. Ismaël informs his father that he will not be returning his brother to the bled; the camera then contemplates Ismaël and Mouloud, standing opposite the phone box beside their brokendown car, on a deserted roadside overlooking the sea, discussing what their next move should be. By distancing the final scene from Marseilles and focusing solely on the two brothers, attention is diverted from the problems they have left behind. The consequences of Ismaëls betrayal of his friendship with Jacky, for example, are conveniently  side-stepped. In Le Panier, the xenophobic discourse propagated by Ludo, which aimed to divide the community along ethnic lines, has not been silenced. If anything, we might argue it is now even stronger, since Ludo has been able to break up the interethnic alliance between Jacky aand Ismaël (a  factor which contributes to the brothers’ decision to leave Marseilles).

The ending does not therefore explain how the brothers can overcome the legacy of the colonial past which informs their hybrid subjectivity and find a (third-)space within French society where they can be accepted on their own terms. Mouloud's final suggestion that the brothers forge a new life together.

The ending does not therefore explains how the brothers can overcome the legacy of the colonial past which informs their hybrid subjectivity and a and a final (third-)space within the French society where they can be accepted on their own terms. Mouloud’s final suggestion that the brothers forge a new life together in Spain could be seen as further evidence of the fact that there is not future for them in the Hexagone. However, the animated dialogue between Ismaël and Mouloud, which fades to credits accompanied by an upbeat hybrid mix of raï style vocals and flamenco guitar, largely dispels this sense  of underlying pessimism. Moreover, Isamël’s refusal to send his brother back to the bled effectively represents an empowering defiance of Maghrebi patriarchal law which had threatened to dictate Mouloud's own sense of self. It is therefore possible to interpret a degree of optimism and a determination on the part the brothers in the final scene of Bye-Bye. Mouloud and Ismaël may encount continued resistance from certain sections of both the French and Maghrebi population, but they will not be deterred in their attempts to establish their rightful place in a post-colonial, multi-ethnic society.

Bye-Bye is a film which, through the plurality of spaces offered to the Maghrebi-French protagonist and a nuanced portrayal of the North Afric community, refuses to be categorised as (or marginalised by) a simplist association with either cinéma beur or the banlieue film. Far from being extension of films such as La Haine beyond the bounds of the Parisian urb periphery, Bye-Bye, in many ways, offers a counter-point to the representation of the Maghrebi-French subject found in the cinéma de banlieue. Similarly, the film’s aesthetic and socio-political sensibilities are more productively analysed through their association with the  return of social realism to 1990s French cinema rather than in relation to a putative notion of beur cinema.

Through his film, Dridi reiterates that these questions of discrimination exclusion, cultural difference and national identity, although widely perceived as ‘problems’ concerning solely the Maghrebi-French population, do in fact need to be addressed by all members of France’s post-colonial society. Ludo’s inability, for example, to acknowledge Marseilles as a hybrid space, merely leads to xenophobic hostility and confrontation. However, this is not to de the central position given to Maghrebi-French youth in Bye-Bye. Against t background of the multi-ethnic, quartier populaire of Le Panier; the transitory space of the port of Marseilles and the marginalised, clandestine economy the citee, Dridi reveals the complex matrix of social, historical and cultural relations within which Maghrebi-French youth must negotiate their own set of identity. Yet as Bye-Bye makes clear, whether Mouloud and Ismaël will indeed find their own place within the Hexagone depends largely on the willingness of both French and North African parents to positively embrace the hybridity of Maghrebi-French youth.

By Will Higbee. From France on Film, edited by Lucy Mazdon, Wallflower, London 2001 (excerpted).

Questions:
1. Every Frenchman would notice the choice of automobiles chosen by Dridi, Ismaël's pififul (but as sober and resistant as a camel) 2 CV Citroën vs. Ludo's showy Citroën DS 19 (pronounced "déesse" = goddess). What's the obvious symbolism?
2. What's "a Beur" in French? What's the origin of this back slang word?
3. Mouloud tags a "Bye" on his brother's 2CV. Bye to what? Why does he want to go to Spain?

En 1995, au festival de Cannes, Bye-Bye a pu être considéré comme une alternative à La Haine de Matthieu Kassovitz. Il est certain que Karim Didri présente l’histoire d’Ismaël, français d’origine tunisienne de 25 ans, et celle de son frère Mouloud âgé de 12 ans dans un cadre qui refuse les clichés recherchés par Kassovitz : pas de cité HLM ghettoïsée dans Bye-Bye, mais un quartier central, populaire, de Marseille, le Panier, pas de crescendo de violence mathématiquement dosé, mais " une succession de rythmes joyeux et graves " que le cinéaste dit avoir calqué sur les pulsations de la métropole méridionale. Pourtant, la différence la plus marquante est ailleurs. La Haine plonge trois personnages archétypaux dans une situation qui évolue comme en vase clos, Bye-Bye en revanche prend le risque de brasser un grand nombre de personnages et de les mettre en relation les uns avec les autres. Didri a choisi de " montrer des Arabes dans un film français où ils n’auraient ni le rôle de la victime, ni celui du bourreau, ni celui de l’immigré de service, simplement le visage humain qu’ils ont tous les jours ".

Dans la société ainsi décrite, en regard des modes de fonctionnement d’une famille maghrébine sans cesse en train de réinventer ses équilibres, aucun espace de vie, aucune " institution " n’est coupée des autres grâce à ce que le cinéaste appelle " une construction en poupées russes qui montre à la fois Marseille, le Panier, et dans le Panier, la famille ". On ne s’étonnera pas alors que ce cinéma évoque celui de Jean Renoir pour le goût de la notation réaliste et la façon dont la caméra capte la multiplicité des trajectoires des acteurs. Soutiendra-t-on que Bye-Bye est un remake secret du Crime de Monsieur Lange par la porosité des groupes de voisinage et la conception du méchant débordant de vitalité ? On retrouve aussi dans les deux films la même circulation des femmes d’un groupe à l’autre, moyen suprême de miner de l’intérieur les identités apparemment les mieux assurées. Francis Desbarats

 6. The Town Is Quiet (2002) - A Film by Robert Guédiguian

a) The Town Is Quiet (La ville est tranquille) is about the impact of globalization on Marseilles, a once-bustling port now used primarily by fishing vessels. The focus is on the impact upon the people of a proud city that has become redundant. In search of new sources of employment, from research think tanks to tourism-politicians, the left and right have come together, while the working class is left out of their calculations.

The Town Is Quiet is Guédiguian’s most ambitious work to date. There’s Michèle, a fishmonger raising her granddaughter while her daughter struggles to rebuild a shattered life; Paul, who uses his severance pay as a dockworker to buy the car of his dreams; and Abderamane, transformed by his experience in jail and now looking for a way to make his mark on the world. Their stories combine with those of the other finely etched characters to create a rich, insightful, Altmanesque fresco of a particular contemporary urban reality, showing in the words of the director that "at a time when life is more and more meaningless, the town is not quiet."

Director's Notes
"At the beginning there was a title, this title.

When one looks at Marseille from Notre-Dame de la Garde, one gets the impression of an elongated city, stretched out as if to rest from the day's fatigue ... It's evening time ... The sun joins the sea and one can imagine lots of pretty things ... Sounds are toned down, people return to their homes, have dinner, tell each other stories, celebrate their anniversary ...

I always thought that this serenity was nothing but a façade, that bad things were swarming, dangerous, scary things that could at any time set fire to this town. I could say that the idea for the film comes from that.

The film works on these ideas and these behaviors that frighten me. I take note. I have nothing to propose and I obviously have no solution. I can do nothing but analyze these things with my life, hoping that this will refer people to their own lives, so they can talk, talk to each other, talk about it.

I wanted to talk of everything that scares me.  Robert Guédiguian.

Three Film Reviews:

a. Using the "shortcuts" cinematic method, director Robert Guédiguian, a former member of the Communist Party of France, lets us peer into the lives of several ordinary persons, nearly all of whom are so despondent concerning their fate that they seek scapegoats. The central character, Michèle, gets up at dawn to work in the fishmarket, while Claude, her husband, is on the dole. Their teenage daughter Fiona does tricks for the cash to buy heroin. All three express anger at each other, but only Michèle cares for Fiona's illegitimate baby. Michèle tries to get medical attention for Fiona, who needs to be institutionalized, but receives only pills that her daughter refuses to take. Ultimately, Michèle buys heroin from a former boyfriend Gérard, who has become a drug middleman and contract killer because his once-crowded bar is empty. For cash to pay for Fiona's craving for a hit, Michèle sells her body to Paul, a former dockworker who has become a taxidriver. When Paul gets too many traffic tickets, however, he loses his taxi license but continues his business illegally if less profitably. Yet he cannot keep up payments on the taxi to a loanshark, who fortunately refrains from inflicting physical violence upon him because he was a buddy in the French Resistance with Paul's father. Paul's father, meanwhile, has become a compulsive househusband, driving Paul's mother crazy. Even the middle class is adversely affected. Viviane Froment teaches music to the disadvantaged, including African Abderamane, who comes after her when he leaves prison for a short drug offense. Viviane's husband Yves, a rich developer, bores her by philosophizing about the fate of the city but doing nothing to help, so Abderamane is easily able to score.

However, tragedy inevitably strikes. Political organizers from the Far Right mobilize support on the premise that foreigners are the cause of their troubles, and soon Abderamane is shot dead. Michèle, frustrated that Fiona's habit is beyond her means, decides to deliberately give her daughter an overdose of heroin. Gérard assassinates Claude, and later commits suicide when a pedestrian shows anger at him. Music provides a sharp contrast with the darkness of most of the story. Viviane gets her pupils to sing with real spirit. Abderamane's pals are eloquent rap musicians. And the movie begins and ends with beautiful classical keyboard music played by a child prodigy from Georgia, who starts the film by playing in a park, asking for donations to buy a grandpiano.

The movie ends as his new piano is delivered to his home, an apartment building occupied by expatriates from the Caucasus who are ecstatic that one of their own is bringing Mozart to Marseilles. Indeed, the enterprise and joy of the Georgians, in sharp contrast with the lethargy and angst of the French, eloquently refutes the claims of the Far Right that immigrants are to blame for the economic downturn. Nevertheless, the most acerbic criticism in the movie is directed toward politicians, who are clearly not responding to the needs of the masses. As a film that clearly argues the need for greater democracy, the Political Film Society has nominated The Town Is Quiet for an award as best film of 2002 in promoting the need for greater democracy. MH

b. In his unsettling urban panorama, The Town Is Quiet,the director Robert Guédiguian invests the French port city of Marseille with the same epic sense of drama that infused Robert Altman's "Nashville." Raw, wrenching and more starkly tragic than Mr. Altman's satire, "The Town Is Quiet" evokes a similar vision of a city as a teeming organism in violent, spasmodic flux. Like "Nashville," the film is a sprawling mosaic of interlocking stories whose characters run the social gamut, from right-wing upper- class politicians to young North African immigrants to blue-collar dock workers. As much as the director grasps the anxieties of the city's well-heeled establishment, his sympathies lie with the sufferings of its underdogs, the struggles of its working class and the dreams of newcomers pouring into the city through its teeming harbor.

If his identification with the common people recalls Frank Capra, the go-for-broke passion with which he expresses that vision is closer to Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the opening scene a radiant young boy from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, dressed formally, is shown soliciting donations by playing classical music on an electric piano in a field overlooking the city. By the end of the movie, when he reappears (in one of its few hopeful moments), he has become a symbol of a future that ultimately cannot be denied to the immigrants, no matter what obstacles they may face. He isn't the only symbolic character in a film that combines an allegorical structure with an operatic style that pushes every dramatic situation to the extreme. (The movie's death toll includes three homicides and one suicide.)

The heart of the film is Michèle (Ariane Ascaride, the director's wife), a Mother Courage-like figure of indomitable fortitude. A fishmonger who works her fingers to the bone in an outdoor market, she supports an unemployed, alcoholic husband, Claude (Pierre Banderet); a daughter, Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier), who is a heroin addict and prostitute; and a grandchild (Fiona's baby by an unknown father). When we first meet Michèle, she is barely keeping the family afloat. Fiona's addiction has worsened to the point where she can neither care for her baby nor turn tricks to support her habit, and she lies around the apartment in a whimpering heap. Claude, who is on the dole, is fed up with his daughter's crying and is on the verge of fleeing the nest. After Fiona nearly dies from an overdose of a drug that was supposed to help wean her from heroin, Michèle gives up trying to cure her and makes the desperate decision to sell her own body on the streets to pay for her daughter's drugs. She contacts Gérard (Gérard Meylan), an old boyfriend who runs a bar, and persuades him to use his underworld connections to purchase a weekly supply. Although well past her physical prime, Fiona acquires a regular client in Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a kind-hearted former dock worker turned cabdriver who has gone deeply in debt to buy his taxi.

"The Town Is Quiet" includes one of the most harrowing portrayals ever filmed of someone in the throes of drug withdrawal. In the most searing scene, Michèle simultaneously prepares a fix of heroin for her daughter and heats her granddaughter's baby formula as their piercing screams mingle into indistinguishable cries for help. Other characters in the mosaic include Yves (Jacques Pieiller), a womanizing city planner and disillusioned liberal who prates pretentiously about there being "no more stories" left to tell, and his wife, Viviane (Christine Brücher), who (in a homage to Lily Tomlin's character in "Nashville") teaches music to mentally retarded children. In one of the movie's softer moments, Viviane reunites with Abderamane (Alexandre Ogou), a gentle North African fast-food worker and ex-convict she met while directing him in a prison choir.

At the same time that it flirts with melodrama, "The Town Is Quiet" maintains an intensely realistic urban ambience. The camera follows Michèle as she drives back and forth to work (and to Gérard's bar) on a motorbike. It visits parties, crowded bars and restaurants and observes a Muslim funeral rite. The editing isn't always fluid. Some of the transitions are abrupt, and the stories frustratingly foreshortened. (A longer version of the movie was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.) Yet you are left with an overall impression of a movie so full of life that it is almost bursting at the seams. The film's historical perspective is unabashedly romantic. The older characters wistfully remember a past that is more stable and rooted in the authentic heroism of the French Resistance and the solidarity of a labor movement that in recent times has turned reactionary and xenophobic. Gérard, the film's most enigmatic character, is a bitter, stony-faced dreamer whose youthful idealism has hardened into an anguished fury. The soundtrack underscores his suppressed rage to devastating effect by playing Janis Joplin's unstrung renditions of "Summertime" and "Cry Baby."

Were it not for Ms. Ascaride's shattering performance, the high drama might not have gelled. A wiry, wizened gamine whose brooding deep-set eyes flicker with lightning, her Michèle is a fortress of strength and devotion but devoid of sentimentality. Once Michèle makes a decision, she never looks back. And while those decisions may seem outrageous, her sacrifices are driven entirely by love and an urgent sense of duty. By the end of the film, she has become the director's ultimate incarnation of the salt of the urban earth, a towering icon of unsung, working-class nobility. By Stephen Holden, © The NYT. October 26, 2001

c. Robert Guédiguian's The Town Is Quiet (La ville est tranquille)  opens with a 360-degree shot of the French port city of Marseilles, and the rest of the movie aims to provide a similarly panoramic view. But it's safe to say that if you traveled to Marseilles on holiday, you wouldn't want the director/co-writer as your tour guide. Although Guédiguian has chosen this setting for previous movies (including the more upbeat romance "Marius and Jeannette"), what he sees here is a society in decline, where striking dock workers might as well take redundancy pay because their union has lost its bearings, where respectable professionals air their anti-immigration sentiments as if they were discussing aesthetics, and where people of various backgrounds seek desperately - and often futilely - to find solace in others.

The lyrical opening may suggest a city at peace with itself, humming to the rhythms of day-to-day life, but Guédiguian proceeds to expose the ample turmoil beneath the "quiet" surface. He does so with a mixture of subtlety and heavy-handedness. The filmmaker has a naturalistic style: He applies background music sparingly and strategically (Janis Joplin's recordings of "Summertime" and "Cry Baby" are used to particularly strong effect), and he lets scenes play out seemingly in real time, reinforcing the sense that you're not so much watching performances as eavesdropping on life. Guédiguian also gives the impression that he's not judging his characters as they act in morally questionable ways; these are just people inhabiting inescapably gray areas. Yet there's something relentless and jerry-rigged about the stories he chooses to tell.

The movie doesn't compel you to get to know and sympathize with numerous characters so much as it prompts you to shake your head at the parade of human folly and misery. At the front of the crowd is Michèle (Ariane Ascaride, the director's wife and frequent star), whose back-straining work in a fish market supports her on-the-dole, drunken husband, Claude (Pierre Banderet); her heroin-addicted daughter, Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier); and her infant granddaughter, Améline. Fiona, who looks about 20, has been turning tricks for drug money, so Michèle takes drastic actions to keep her daughter off the streets - actions that may prompt some baffled viewers to wonder: Have the French not have discovered the concepts of intervention and rehab? Meanwhile, the dyed-blonde, mop-haired Michèle has attracted the attention of Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a former dock worker who has used his severance pay to buy a taxi. An upbeat sad sack with a kind face, he embellishes tales of professional and personal success to his newly retired (and, of course, miserable) parents. His wooing of Michèle is several notches below textbook romantic. Michèle and Paul, both well-portrayed, are the only characters we get much of a feel for, even as their behavior at times provokes head-scratching. Others seem to exist mostly as representations: the pretentious, liberal womanizer Yves (Jacques Pieiller); his fed-up, good-hearted wife, Viviane (Christine Brucher), who teaches music to disabled persons; Abderamane (Alexandre Ogou), an African immigrant who, upon his release from prison, makes nice to Viviane, his former prison choir director; Gérard (Gérard Meylan), who knows how to procure heroin and perform other shadowy deeds; and a young beauty who frolics with a man who follows her.

Some scenes are devastating, such as when Michèle tries simultaneously to fill the appetites of her desperately drug-craving daughter and wailing granddaughter. Others have an understated power, such as movie-bookending scenes of an Eastern European immigrant boy playing classical piano pieces outdoors. But too much of the drama feels engineered to drive home the filmmaker's points. The movie includes several violent deaths, including one in which the supposedly random victim might as well have had a bulls-eye affixed to his forehead given the symbolic points scored by his killing. The structure, meanwhile, is ramshackle. It may be a given that the pacing of a two-hour-plus French drama would be uneven, but some characters and episodes are so sketchy that they might as well not be there. In the American indie cinema world, sprawling multi-character narratives are currently in vogue, with several awaiting release. Some of these films take their cues from elliptical European films (such as Jill Sprecher's upcoming "Thirteen Conversations about One Thing"); the lesser ones too often resemble soap operas where everything is tied together neatly.

"The Town Is Quiet," with its vivid sense of place, could teach most of these films lessons in craftsmanship, yet for all of the apparent naturalness on screen, Guédiguian's grim vision comes off as far too calculated. The movie may not be as toxic and ultimately hopeless as Todd Solondz's "Happiness," but it also fails to find humor, dark or light, in anything. When a filmmaker rotates his camera 360 degrees, he ought to be able to see more than a puppet show of woe. © By Mark Caro.

7. La cérémonie (1995) - A Film by Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol has spent much of his nearly forty-year career as a filmmaker examining the upper strata of the French bourgeoisie, with all of its attendant trappings: splendid, often isolated houses with impeccable furnishings; landscaping just this side of Versailles; clothing and grooming that make the women look like models and the men like the high-level execs that they are; and, of course, the little disruptions--a mother fixation (A double tour, Ophelia), an extramarital affair (La Femme infidèle, Juste avant la nuit, les Noces rouges), incessant bickering (Chabrol's vicious episode in Paris vu par...)--that end up destroying, often violently, small pieces of the leisure class's infrastructure from within.

On very rare occasions, however, the attack comes from without in the form of a kind of unorganized class warfare. In the 1970 la Rupture (The Breakup), a former topless dancer wins a struggle against her extremely wealthy in-laws for custody of her child, who has been seriously injured by his drug-crazed father. But it is in la Ceremonie, released in France in 1995 and premiered in the United States this past December, that the director has made what seems to be his most conscious statement on the subject. "You can't draw the conclusion," Chabrol has noted in a recent interview, "that the fall of Communism put an end to what Marx called the class struggle. 'I think what I want to say in this film is Be careful, it's not over.'"

Indeed, those who have been drawn to la Cérémonie because of its billing as a `thriller' from a director dubbed as the `French Hitchcock,' an appellation Chabrol has never worn very comfortably, have no doubt found themselves sorely disappointed. In the sober and somber la Cérémonie, unlike the flamboyant la Rupture, almost nothing that could be designated as thriller-type action takes place until the film's violent conclusion, at which point one suddenly realizes that Chabrol has set up everything with the precision and irony of a Greek tragedian. Based, like many of Chabrol's films, on an English-language novel (Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone), la Cérémonie deals with the arrival of a new maid, Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire), at the splendid country house of an extremely rich family with a classically bourgeois name, Lelièvre (literally "the hare").

As the action progresses, Sophie turns out to be the perfect maid. She is a great cook, and she keeps the small chateau inhabited by the Lelièvres spotless. But she totally refuses to warm up to any of the family members. When she reveals that she doesn't know how to drive, they offer to give her driving lessons. When she then uses the excuse that she needs new glasses, they take her into town to get new glasses (she uses the occasion to buy a chocolate bar and a pair of lightly tinted sunglasses). To much of what is said to her, she simply answers, expressionless, "J'ai compris" (I understood).

As we soon discover, Sophie is illiterate, and she goes to great lengths to hide her handicap from everybody. It begins to seem that la Ceremonie's principal drama will revolve around when and how Sophie's secret will be discovered. The plot takes a turn to the left when Sophie finally lets herself relax into a friendship with a postal employee named Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert, in her fourth Chabrol film) who, like Sophie, has been exonerated for a death that may or may not have been accidental (a potential infanticide for Jeanne, a possible patricide for Sophie-speaking of Greek tragedy...). Their combined energy turns intowhat Chabrol has called a folie à deux  (madness for two), which ultimately gathers the kind of force that can only resolve itself in the violence of the film's finale, in which Jeanne and Sophie blow away the entire Lelièvre family with shotguns portentously introduced into the filmic narrative around its midpoint (in this sense, la Cérémonie has echoes of Jean Genet's play The Maids, and of a little known gem of French cinema, Nico Papatakis's 1963 Les Abysses).

And that's it. La Cérémonie has no obvious good guys, no obvious bad guys, and Chabrol takes only mild potshots at targets probably more obvious in France than elsewhere. The father (Jean-Pierre Cassel, who plays a particularly disagreeable character in la Rupture), loves classical music, to the point that he even dons evening wear to sit and watch, with his family, a televised Don Giovanni. At one moment the mother, Catherine, played by none other than Jacqueline Bisset (whose slightly less than perfectly accented French is never explained away), forbids her barely adolescent son (Valentin Merlet) to smoke, while the next moment she shares a cigarette with him as the two watch a "good movie" on television (Chabrol's own les Noces rouges from 1972). Further, Catherine's fatal terror of finding herself without domestic help becomes one of the film's ironic focal points, since it keeps her husband from firing Sophie while there is still time. Sophie is guilty of little more than being relentlessly sullen, while Jeanne's worst flaws are a slight craziness from time to time, and a disturbing habit of opening Monsieur Lelièvre's mail.

Thus does Chabrol draw a battleground that seems fairly ambiguous, at least by Hollywood standards. None of the characters, with one exception, is particularly likable. And the two characters whose enmity leads to the final tragedy are the least sympathetic of all. On the right there is Monsieur Lelièvre, with his little bursts of righteous indignation. On the left, there is Jeanne, whose matter-of-fact hostility turns her character towards the repellent. But Chabrol is no Costa-Gavras, setting up characters on the right whose obnoxiousness leads us to cheer on sympathetic characters from the left. The sides in La Cérémonie are created by the class situation itself, not by the melodramatic establishing of good versus evil. And if we tend to root a bit more, in la Cérémonie, for the Lelièvre family, it is because theirs is the lifestyle that the class society in which we have grown up has taught us to strive for (although might draw the line at watching televised Mozart in a tux).

Chabrol even sets up his viewers with one character who seems to rise above the various annoying habits of class, and that is Catherine's stepdaughter, Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen). It is Melinda who accuses her parents of deliberately numbing out the new maid with the television set in her room. It is Melinda who knows how to fix Jeanne's broken-down car (and who then wipes her dirty hands on a handkerchief borrowed from Jeanne). It is Melinda who has the almost impossibly sweet, gentle, and cooperative boyfriend. And it is Melinda who discovers Sophie's illiteracy and offers to teach her to read. But it is that apparently innocent gesture of upper-class liberalism that sets the final wheels of the tragedy in motion.

One shudders to imagine what Hollywood would do with these two characters: Melinda would ultimately conquer Sophie's inhibitions, leading to a scene, backed by impossibly slurpy music, where Sophie, with tears streaming down her face, would pronounce her first words while reading a book. But Chabrol will have none of that. In la Cérémonie, Sophie brutally repulses Melinda's offer and threatens to tell her father Melinda is pregnant if the secret of her analphabetism is revealed. This is one of the cinema's great reality checks. Throughout, la Cérémonie has suckered us, with its almost plodding unfurling of everyday events, into a kind of feel-good attitude towards the Lelièvre family, and our main concerns have to do with why Sophie remains cold to their kindness, and why she has to pal around with the annoying Jeanne. It is only in retrospect that we realize that the Lelievres are only slightly more enlightened than the American southerners who used to tell us that they were `good to their niggers.'

Chabrol's film allows for almost no catharsis, instead imposing a kind of Brechtian esthetics that force us to reflect on what we have just seen and, ultimately, to see upper-class liberalism as a form of fascism that helps maintain the class system by keeping its slaves happy...but disposable. Melinda, when asked by her father whether she finds the idea of giving Sophie driving lessons too paternalistic, answers, "Paternalistic, no. Demagogic, yes." But Melinda remains blind to her own demagoguery when, while letting Sophie serve tea and get the sugar, she proposes to help her learn to read. In la Cérémonie, Sophie's illiteracy becomes not something that can be fixed from country estates by the bleeding hearts of bourgeois aristocrats, if you'll pardon the oxymoron, but rather the emblem of a situation that only the elimination of class structure can resolve.

For the role of Sophie, Sandrine Bonnaire creates a character who, appropriately, remains difficult to read. Her sullenness may hide still waters running deeply, or it may be the mask worn by an entire political philosophy. Or both. Such is the result of the interactions between a great actress and a gifted director working with a probing screenplay. Isabelle Huppert fits perfectly into the manic and flighty self-righteousness called for by the role of Jeanne, while, in the role of Catherine, Jacqueline Bisset becomes the most elegant of Chabrol's bourgeois aristocratic women since Stéphane Audran, the director's second wife, who frequently appeared in his films through the early Seventies and who recently resurfaced in the 1992 Betty. As Georges Lelièvre, lean-Pierre Cassel becomes the very embodiment of the way Chabrol envisages the entire family. And, as subtly portrayed by Virginie Ledoyen, the character of Melinda wears a sweet face and a pleasant manner over a basic emptiness.

Chabrol's son, Matthieu, provided the music for La Cérémonie. Scored for string quartet and piano and featuring mildly unsettling dissonances, it is the kind of music that Monsieur Lelièvre might listen to in an adventurous moment. And, somewhat in the manner of the brilliant scores provided by Pierre Jansen, who once formed with Chabrol one of the most significant composer/director teams in film history, Matthieu Chabrol's lugubrious score also appears just often enough, usually during transitions, to keep the viewer's nerves on edge.

But the real hero here is director/ cowriter Chabrol. Without using the jump cuts, the insert shots, the fractured narratives, and the numerous other distancing devices of his New Wave colleague Jean-Luc Godard, Chabrol has nonetheless managed to make not a political film but rather to make a film politically. That he has somehow slipped la Cérémonie into the United States and elsewhere as a thriller may be his biggest accomplishment of all.  By: Brown, Royal S. Copyright of Cineaste - Source: Cineaste, Mar 97, Vol. 22 Issue 4, p50-52/

Main Reading: "Chabrol and the Execution of the Deed"  by  Annette Michelson

With La Cérémonie, Claude Chabrol completes a construction in minute detail, fusing satire of a newly rich petty bourgeoisie with the triumphal analysis of the drive to murder. A film about class, as claimed by the filmmaker himself, this work differs from the sarcastic naturalism of the "human comedy" of the "beaufs" or the "B.O.F.s," the "butter, eggs, and cheese men" of postwar France.(n1) Until now, it looked as though the family, the married couple, the village, the class of shopkeepers, and small businessmen would be done in by the internal combustion of their own greed, lust, and lewdness. Chabrol's ambiguous fascination with this reactionary breeding ground has generated the creation of cynical, detestable characters, their archetypal protagonist usually played by the actor Jean Yanne. Two years before Chabrol's La Ceremonie,L'Oeil de Vichy, a montage of archival documents and of newsreels made under the Occupation, presented a description of Petainist France, as it had wished to be seen.

Now, however, comes a change of tone. The Lelièvre family, modern, freethinking, and republican, have all the features of the '68-era culture. The reference to tradition is now produced with the essential distance and aristocratic irony that indicate the disavowal of conservative ideology.

Chabrol describes a milieu that has known Marxism. The younger generation expresses it naively, the parents display it in a more calculated fashion. The swiftly brushed portrait of this relative and recent wealth--far less "poujadiste" or "lepeniste" than those to which Chabrol had accustomed us over the last thirty years--could invalidate in advance the revolt of employees not subject to enslavement.(n2) The apparent balance of the recomposed family (a divorced mother with her darling son, a father and his beloved daughter) offers no sign of pernicious clashes nor of conjugal pathology. The misfortune that will strike the Lelievres comes, then, from outside, through the paradoxical logic of an apparently gratuitous crime. Two young "proletarian" women will allegorically mete out justice to their excellent employers, whose only guilt lies in their excessively invasive concern with their servants' comfort. The reasons that drive them to kill will therefore necessarily be of a subtler nature than those of a merely individual psychopathology. Neither clinical nor critical, it is between or beyond these dimensions that the explanation of the fury of this deed's execution lies.

Chabrol does indeed speak of his heroines as born murderesses. The sequence of their reciprocal narrations of unpunished crimes (infanticide for Jeanne, patricide for Sophie--the symmetry is perfect) places the two amoral women--exterminating angels or witches--at the limits of the human. In addition, the film emphasizes the special situation of an illiterate woman anxiously hiding a humiliating handicap. This does not, however, suffice to explain the fait divers. To the structural framework of the crime the filmmaker, to his credit, adds the dimension of the event. For if murder is slowly hatching within both the evident madness of its perpetrators and the universal development of the master-slave relation, it requires nonetheless a favorable setting, a condensation of places and objects and words such that the inhabitual can surge up against the background of daily routine.

Chabrol's adaptation of Ruth Rendell's book A Judgement in Stone, translated into French under the title of L'analphabète (The Illiterate), clearly reveals his intentions.(n3)  He displaces its thematic stresses and ethico-aesthetic assumptions.

In the English novel, the crime and its meaning are presented in the book's very first sentence: "Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write." The film constructs, in reverse, the circumstances of a murder that comes only at the story's end. The written text evokes the victims' fate, their imprudence, bad choices, and credulousness; the film describes a series of ambiguous or fortuitous actions and places little emphasis on the murderers' biographies. Existential paths converge disastrously in a bloody crossroad.

The Coverdale family resembles the Lelièvres. These people share the same egotism; it lies less in "ignoring others" than in "believing them to be the same as themselves." The novelist, in a pithy statement, says that they wanted Eunice to be satisfied so that she would stay with them. But they didn't at all consider her as a human being. Rendell thus prematurely pronounces her accusation, and the capital punishment of the end is thereby, within the symmetry of rejection of human feeling, wholly explicable, if not justified.

Chabrol, on the contrary, is intent on setting judgment aside, without making any commentary. No narrative voice is heard, no thought exterior to the drama. The dialogue is replaced by purely visual means of representing the local micropolitics, the master's contempt, the servant's humiliation, power and resistance. These are strategies of subtlety and ambiguity. Each situation is open to chance; a basic indeterminacy allows for the relativizing of identities, biographies, social structures, while words, actions, objects, and gestures are all raised to the level of verbal slips or failed actions, that is, to chance signs of a latent subjectivity.

In both works Eunice/Sophie's illiteracy is the central mechanism in the execution of the deed, as though the privation of writing reduced one to the animal or infantile level, to the weakness of the primitive or subhuman. The handicap intensifies the situation of domestic workers by withholding the minimum of identification or mimesis through which they can assimilate their employers' ideals and modes of thought. Workers and serfs are not sacred; their act remains forever inexcusable. Sly, clandestine, and "sick," they bear, on the page as on the screen, the stigmata of guilt. However, Chabrol, like a true French anarchist (such as Georges Darien in Le Voleur [1897]) ironically modulates the murderesses' feelings of error; they never introject the judgments of common sense, they laugh at legal proof and quibbling.(n4)  Anomic rather than guilty, the witches' perversity (particularly visible in Jeanne, played by Isabelle Huppert) reactivates an obviously exhausted sense of rebellion. The speech of the two furies rediscovers a new, joyous, and purifying energy: "Ah, ça ira!"

Unlike the aging, bitter, and homely killers of the book, Chabrol's heroines are young, pretty, lively, and high-spirited. Rendell portrays a hysterical, mystical Joan, member of a puritanical, vengeful sect, while the film focuses on an anticlerical, subversive, and libertarian administrator of justice. The novel's crime seems to emerge from a distant stream of biblical curses against the propertied class, from issues of salvation and last judgment: a modern resurgence of paranoiac bigotry. The film's two rebels arrive at the edge of a world in which oppression and seduction are closely intertwined. They approach as if tempted and in a sudden start they destroy it. Jeanne--like Joan--is immediately punished; she dies in a car accident. Sophie's fate--unlike Eunice's--remains in suspense, which gives her the larger dimension of an Angel of Vengeance, a wandering missionary. The film, like the novel, appears to be haunted by the case of the Papin sisters, whose incomprehensible monstrosity has never, since 1933, ceased to challenge jurists, psychiatrists, intellectuals, and poets. The criminal sisters have, in fact, become mythic characters, brandished in provocations of violence by anarchists and Surrealists alike.

The facts are well known. Two sisters, domestics, placed by their mother and the nuns who have been supervising them, in an excellent house in Le Mans, suddenly and with especial cruelty murder their mistress and her daughter following a mild reprimand. Striking with a pewter pot, hammer, and knives, with their fists and fingernails, they pile horror upon destruction, then observe their carnage--"What a mess!"--before going to bed in tender embrace to await discovery, arrest, and trial. A widely followed trial arouses comment from notables, editorialists, and articulate consciences of the time. Anyone with a claim to influence on morals and ideals feels obliged to express an opinion and, eventually, an interpretation, or at least the melodramatic revelation of society's impotence when faced with senseless deeds of madness.

The essential question is consequently that of the criminals' mental health at the time of the deed and of their responsibility. The prosecution's position, supported by experts, will finally prevail in court; the Papin sisters have only acted in exaggeration of their "anger" andare not "mad." Like other intellectuals of the day (Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, Jean and Jerome Tharaud), Jacques Lacan becomes involved in the debate.(n5) Basing his analysis on Kraepelin's nosography, he focuses on the framework of paranoia, evokes paraphrenia, and arrives at a diagnosis of a "folie à deux." In so doing he sketches out his speculative hypothesis of the rising aggression. He also stresses the symmetry of the criminals' imaginary with that of their victims, and points out the narcissistic homosexuality that a remark made by Christine, the elder sister, as she lay dying, will reveal in a delirious avowal: "I do believe that in another life I should have been my sister's husband."

In an article published thirty years later, Louis Le Guillant follows a wholly different path.(n6) The Communist psychiatrist runs through the facts and observations, through contemporary commentaries and expressions of public feeling. Psychopathology and the oedipal approach must, for him, give way to the strong existential determinations of social factors. Unconscious and instinctual elements are but incidental figures on the ground of power relations within which the Jew, the black, the worker, the slave, the servant, and the colonized share the common fate of oppression and forbidden rebellion. "Repression" is certainly a factor, but only a collective imposition of order can produce the particular violence of "the return of the repressed," the truly uncontrollable volcanic eruptions.(n7)

French society of the 1930s appears to bear him out.

The judges of the Papin sisters appear so disquieted by the crime's allegorical value that they try in every possible way to find causes that are individual, sexual, or emotional: the trace of bad behavior on the part of the employers, sexual ambiguities of the master's behavior, rival nastiness on the part of the mistresses, the frustration or homosexuality of the murderesses. Official justice here unknowingly coincides with the Freudian descriptions of the sexual life of the turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie, with its constant surveillance of the characters of maids or governesses, the omnipresence of related phantasms. Le Guillant expresses surprise that no one ever invokes what is plain to see: the cruelty of a condition in which, point by point, social alienation becomes one with mental alienation in subjects who are truly dehumanized, for whom offense and humiliation border on the psychotic loss of identity.

With his celebrated work on "the incidence of psychopathology in the condition of the maid-of-all-work,"(n8) he had tried, drawing support from Swift, from Alphonse de Lamartine(!), André Mirbeau, Emile Zola, Jean Genet, and many others --Bécassine, the Countess of Segur - to show that the madness of servants appears to arise naturally in a favorable social climate. For the condition in such cases is one of major mistreatment, even and especially when innocent or well-intentioned. Research on the migration of Breton women to Paris also eliminated a certain number of received ideas. The young women who leave for town "to go into service" are often the most resourceful and the best educated. The verifiable correlation between the profession of housemaid and mental disturbance could thus not be read in the sense of a morbid predisposition, but rather as a real work-related pathology, with its traumas and interrelational complexities.

Nevertheless, the housemaid's work involves a central element that psychoanalysts note more attentively than sociologists; it is that particular intimacy of bodies and of desires, that inextricable erotic economy in which servants and masters are both caught, for better and worse.(n9) During the trial in Le Mans, the prosecution's indictment declared with all the clarity of its blindness:

On one side the victims, two highly virtuous women, members of Le Mans's elite, and on the other, two young girls of very modest origin, but also of irreproachable behavior. For seven years, these four women lived side by side in quiet monotony--a life, on one side, of the kindly authority of she who pays and is to be served, and on the other, the deferent and respectful submission of her whose services are for hire.

Except for a few words ("monotonous," "quiet," "kindly, .... deferent"), the contract appeared settled and desire, on principle, seemed excluded.

Fifty years later, in another text, Francis Dupré revisited Lacan's article, to complete or criticize the master's approach, his clinical hypotheses, his remarks on delirium and schizophrenia.(n10) The procedure remains faithful, nonetheless, to that approach; the division within "figures of madness" between discourse and execution of the deed is a fictitious distinction, for the deeds are also "a matter of transmission," of speech and utterance. The categories called into play within the psychoanalytic framework are extrapolated from moments of life within society. Conflicts, negotiations, or acts of violence are thus placed under the primacy of discourse.

In this position the Subject is diffused. If you attend equally to the criminals' statements and to the discourse of all the commentators on their actions (journalists, judges, lawyers, experts, physicians, literary figures, etc.), you expand what is said to the dimensions of a culture and a history. The social facts, the economic situations, the play of political forces, derive from a common language in which the statements and gestures of the heroines ("criminal" or "wretched," depending on the temper of the remarks) merely persist in excess, redundancy, or crudeness. The introduction to the "case," citing page one of the evening edition of La Sarthe on Friday, February 3, 1933, which carried both the fait divers of the maids (in a brief notice) and the headline of the lead article, "The majority of the German people support Adolf Hitler" brought out the surprise of a coincidence. "A remarkable juxtaposition. Political and social persecution was put into action; we did not yet know (even though it would soon seem likely) that another would break out."

This intuition is not followed up. And yet it is a fertile one! The historical moment and the cruel sisters' clinical case might in some way be connected, halfway between the great massacres of the past (1914-18) and to come (the Holocaust).(n11) The analytic work bogs down, however, in a sort of linguistic reductionism. The maids' statements, made under the special circumstances of the interrogations, are examined with the same grammatical curiosity as authentic "free association." The criminal acts are considered the continuation of a message and they form, "by other means," its definitive utterance. The modes of communication between the two murderers and their victims, with permissions or interdictions, are proposed as syntactical keys of a future transgression. Always, it is the "signifier" that circulates, stagnates, kills, or takes shape. The crime is only its effect or change of state. Words and family, sense and infantile sexuality form a redundant system whose least crack might one day explain the explosion. The economy of signification is inseparable from the familial structure of masters and domestics, the parental intrusion of the former, the progressive oedipal perversion of the latter.

Chabrol refers to these employers who intrude into other persons' affairs; Monsieur kindly offers to buy Sophie the pair of glasses that she seems to need .... But the filmmaker does not dwell on adoptive mechanisms or on the economy of sexual desire within the familial microcosm. The Lelièvre family is positioned aside and apart from their maid; although close, they are detached. The circulation of speech, the stunning conversational rituals are of no interest to the domestic, who, until the moment when she feels hemmed in, will make no effort to listen or overhear them. Her room, far removed from the family, contains the essential element of her autistic setup. Here the eye's role is preponderant. Sophie has only her gaze to guide her, the eye as compass in the exotic world of text. Images, faces, and landscapes are her only practical geography, and her means of survival.

With Les Bonnes (The Maids), Genet reintroduced unconscious desire within social relations. Far from restricting the libido's vicissitudes to the private sphere of family life, he embedded the servants' eroticism in the contractual bonds of their servitude. The tale unfolds like a myth. Rivalries and identifications are directed not only to the Mother, but to "Madame," to a certain status, power, wealth, and cruelty. And the "maids'" imaginary is the cause of their own undoing, the proletarian consent to alienation, social masochism. The play reinforces an insistent hypothesis; as in The Balcony [1956], the classes seek their pleasure in the perversion of their status. The dominators direct the insignia of their power against themselves, and sometimes, with a giddy excess, the dominated humiliate themselves to the point of suicide. The "maids" can only kill their masters in effigy; they are merely actresses and it is only in dying that they cease to be such.

The play's frenetic homophilia has certainly no equivalent in the film, even though the director is constantly attentive to shared pleasures, fleeting caresses, and bodily proximity. Chabrol's style, more impressionist than Genet's, dispenses with allegory, staying closer to special details. The tone of Chabrol's film isn't exemplary; if the narrative upholds morality, it does so accidentally, or additionally. The film takes its distance from mass structures, from the stratification of social roles; it approaches the multitude of piecemeal montages that escape statistical averaging and shape desire in everyday life. Genet's maids are characters on whom a director must confer life through his casting. Jeanne and Sophie on-screen fuse with their interpreters. Two other actresses would create another world, while the play "holds up" when merely read, through the strength of its didactic intent. The autistic dryness of Sandrine Bonnaire is joined to Isabelle Huppert's sensual spitefulness. Through their very contrast, this alliance of temperaments is more effective than a mediocre psychological realism. These cruel women have the faces and bodies, the smiles or grimaces of their protagonists. Like the Papin sisters, despite the comprehensible sufferings of servitude or the usual forms of social rebellion, they will remain enigmatic until death.

The difficult question, then, is that of the event, the crisis, the transition from the enduring of a social condition to the furious alienation of an "individual madness." Social psychiatry placed the blame on aspects of the maids' sexual life (flirtations, sexual encounters, keeping bad company, unwanted pregnancies, clandestine abortions).(n12) Unhappy love relations could provide an opening to psychosis, generally depressive and sometimes suicidal. Chabrol, however, alludes only faintly to the role of sexuality, in a ludic and polymorphous mode. As a couple, Jeanne and Sophie derive more pleasure from eating sauteed mushrooms, from taunting charitable parishioners, from moments spent with television than they do from the very rare gestures of a brief sensual contact. Laughter and tickling are the only forms of orgiastic allusion.

For Chabrol, the dialectic of Eros and the social is too Manichaean; he traces the catastrophe through the ins and outs of his mise-en-scène, its time and spaces; the world of exploitation always involves one's hold on space, objects, time--a mastery of signs. Sophie sticks to "I don't know!" Jeanne knows a lot and believes she knows more; the post office is the base for her spying, while Sophie, with no letters--in two senses of the term, those of characters and of missive--maintains a self-protective distance. Of the two, she is the only real "stranger." Jeanne is a persecutor, Sophie is persecuted. The film's shots underline this explosive encounter; they don't explain the logic of a violent act. Rather, they enumerate, in disparate fashion, the moments of chance and of breaks that lead these women out of the banality of their relations, that create, extemporaneously, small shifts of power, crystals of passion. Chabrol surpasses Rendell in rendering the physical and moral pain of Sophie's exile within the world of the written word. The clinical description of the effort of reading, the split between assimilation and rejection testify to her inner conflict, the bodies so near and the thoughts too distant.

The democratic ideal involves rich and poor in the illusion of a community. Elementary education is its natural instrument. Sophie's handicap compromises this adoption and frees her somewhat from this subjection. Chabrol constantly suggests that she sees the world differently from her masters and from the film's spectators. Sensations or perceptions are nolonger commanded by writing and enjoy a relative autonomy. The feelings that attach her to her visible environment don't have the weight of meaning as commonly understood. Her knowledge (more immediate) and her memory (less stratified) always depend on a mediator or interpreter. This is clear in the sequence during which the supermarket's delivery man makes a subtle pass at her; it's not that she rejects it, but she doesn't even notice, cannot decode the intention.

Together the couple naturally organize themselves to observe the world. The reading problem seems to be accompanied by an intensified sharpening of the senses, a considerable hyperesthesia. Sophie is certainly closer to her phantasms, more active, while the post-mistress projects, imagines her violence, works out its program. It is Sophie who sees the master of the house cleaning his gun, which gives the scene an emotional stress of a very Hitchcock-like sort. But it is Jeanne who takes the weapon down from the wall to simulate a "western."  Two ways of questioning the object; is the gun "broken," as Jeanne suggests, or merely "hinged" to receive the bullets, as Sophie, who has witnessed this, knows? This couple actually functions in a way similar to that of this weapon, that is, in two segments: Jeanne/butt plus Sophie/barrel, both necessary for setting up and killing the target. One urges on, and the other acts. And Jeanne finally concludes,   "On a bien fait!" = "We did right! "

The execution of the deed is preceded by a classic mounting of excitement. The carnivalesque preamble combines imitations and costumes with violence, laughter, and destruction. The girls tear up dresses so that they can't be worn again. They soil the masters' double bed with the pitcher of chocolate. Their gestures simulate those of masculine masturbation or the sexual act. But the scatological wins out over the genital, since what the maids care about is shit, body fluids, and trash. The final fury strangely resembles those murders committed by "possessed" untouchables, when the caste system and strict separation of tasks confining them to unclean matter give way to an excessive individual rage.

Jean-Michel Frodon, writing in Le Monde, notes Chabrol's stress on the terms of Sophie's first meeting with her employer. Gestures and things are objects of strategy, of an unconscious micropolitics of bodily habits. Who will prevail over the other? Who will dictate taste, customs, protocol? This involves not only verbal codes of politeness or of submission, but the way in which one positions one's self --opposite or to one side --forcing the other to confront or avoid one's gaze. Sophie, who had arrived at the station somewhat earlier than she has said, has the pleasure of seeing her mistress waiting, worrying, or thinking thatshe was not keeping the appointment. In this essential sequence--which contains, curiously enough, effects of the Lumière brothers' film The Train Entering La Ciotat Station [1895] and of The Sprinkler Sprinkled [1899], the domestic gains a first brief victory over all the orders that would, step by step, threaten her clandestinity.

The spectator is challenged to decide on his rightful position, as if by a test of character, and the word applies not only to a place, but also to a role, to a relation of power. The filmmaker places one's gaze at a crossroads, stripping one of the subject position, that permanent and universal object of desire. The sequence already points to the final scene's murder by its stress on the importance of the frame, the visual field, point of view and perspective. The cinema, more than any other mode of thought, can suggest what is at stake, for she who takes possession of space, as in war, holds the other in her power and has no further need of victory.(n13)

The film traces a path of "semi-causes," of minor events, of the "turns" or catastrophes that thwart fate. These are not masters and servants lined on opposite sides, but rather characters in indistinct positions, attempting, throughout their confrontation, to modify them tactically. One sees how each narrative mode offers its mechanism to the interpretation of the "execution of the deed." The writer deliberately stresses thebook-object, coupling an impassioned Bible reader with an illiterate. The playwright installs a stage within the stage (as in Hamlet), and the maids "rehearse" a murder that they can never carry out. Chabrol settles his accounts with the cinema and, further still, with television, its younger enemy. Book, theater, and film all seem to want to simultaneously seize the substance or content (the story) and the various forms of expression (its representation--written, spoken, or projected on-screen). Consequently, their arguments differ. The book stresses the semantic lines of separation and the crucial role of the written text. The theater unfolds, in a sumptuous doubling, the play of identifications, mimetic temptations, the series of recommencings and resemblances, that must necessarily fail. The film, in line with its own insights, easily tends toward the moment, the present, privileging the spatial and temporal facts, neglecting the characters' psychology or the determinants of social analysis. The cinema takes advantage of its multiplicity and modulations of viewpoint, of an endless slippage of utterances, of gaps between word and gesture, between facts and places. Difference is created not so much by stress on the visible or the presence of the gaze, but by the natural establishment of a free, indirect discourse, a rhizome of affects, of substance, forms, and signs within which, given unforeseeable but precise and singular circumstances, the event will be produced. One then observes that the spectator is himself taken hostage, and that the constant shift of positions of mastery problematizes, in turn, his media-driven fascination and passivity.

Sophie lives in proximity to a world of which she knows nothing. Her masters want to take her in hand, educate her, assimilate her to the customs of their class. This "domestication" is done through objects, limits, the media, as if the entire house were the scene of an opera of manners, with a mute servant present and watching, against her will.

The mapping of domestic life is purposely centered on the television sets. Chabrol gives them special attention. They are points of refuge and of pleasure, frequently shared. In this zone of semiotic indeterminacy, reading is not required, neither is consistency nor continuity; from a polymorphous region of images and sounds each extracts her share, according to taste and the given moment. Sophie passes through this attic window into presence, nonetheless, in the hostile world surrounding her, whereas the masters convert their television set to the futile instrument of their membership in the cultural elite of "great" music, opera, Europe. For the maid, it is a position of withdrawal, a line of defense; for the bourgeois, a continual expansion. However, everyone in the house has her/his particular mode of attachment to the apparatus that seems endowed with a power of regulation or of generalized subjective replenishment.(n14)

The term "ceremony" will now take on its full meaning. Chabrol probably borrows it from Genet, for the maids of the play rehearse in "Madame's" absence a scenario of love and death that they thus name.

In the text's accompanying notes of advice to the director, Genet evokes a score of movement, intention, and duration that would allow for the characters' exposition, for the dialogue does not suffice to identify them:

The directors must try to define a way of moving that is not left to chance; the maids and Madame move from one point of the stage to another while describing a meaningful geometry. I can't say which one, but it should not be simply the effect of coming and going. It should be inscribed as the flight of birds is said to inscribe predictions, the bees' flight a vital activity, or in the gait of certain poets, a movement of death.(n15)

An ambitious program for the theater, but more natural to the cinema and suitable to its scenic organization. The theater's spectator--and this holds true for the modern overthrow of scenographic tradition--is responsible for a single, egocentric viewpoint on the event. The cinema, in contrast, forces us into this diffraction of gazes in which the collective structuring always prevails over the subject's definition. The characters are drawn into the action's polycentrism, placing each in turn either at the center or on the fringe of the action.

The wholly "geometric" issue of the gaze obviously gains in importance as we approach the plot's resolution. The structural placing of the final execution makes manifest, in catastrophic fashion, the hypothesis that lay hidden throughout the tale; the division between the visible and invisible, between the real and the virtual is nothing less than a question of life or death. In the sequence leading up to the slaughter, the two young women are on a mezzanine overlooking the salon. They look down--in a high-angle counter-shot--at the family of spectators, wholly absorbed in the production of Don Giovanni televised from Salzburg. The spectator is necessarily included in the setup of a broken line that has its origin, somehow, in him. At the other end, the Mozartian object is a kind of collective source of mythic identification. The film shows only a few very brief moments--fleeting allusions to love, defiance, and death, which will, in a tragicomic coincidence, be linked to the event of the murder. In this decisive sequence, with the fate of the characters at stake, the spectator wonders if the Leli`evres--TV spectators--will notice the two women as he sees them on the screen, as spectators of spectators. Thus, within the whole scene one adopts by turn the three vectors of the gaze ("spectator-killers," "family-killers," "TV-family"), and one hopes for--or fears (or both at the same time?)--the family's gaze in low-angle shot toward its enemies and the danger.

The deadly result is surely due to the impossibility of this return of the gaze as the result of consideration or--to remain closer to the Latin etymology--of respect. The ethical and aesthetic are now fused, for one can't "hold at a respectful distance" someone whom one does not respect, from whom we withhold our regard.(n16) The Lelièvres cannot "consider" a situation, with its elements at the center and its margins, its leading roles, and its unforeseen actors. Outside the cone that shackles them to their own society, their culture, images, and signs, no lateral or marginal vision exists. At the limit of this beam of privilege, they are isolated and rendered vulnerable by blinders.

Even if the Lelièvres have organized the evening well in advance as a spectacle to be summoned to their home, they remain manipulated by this particular televised production of property, of modes of communication, of the homogenization of the landscape that increasingly separates them, if not from an indefinable real, at least from any form of otherness. As objects of the gaze that they have now become for an aggressive third or "fourth world," they engage in a strange pantomime that, in the eyes of their murderers, only renders them more insubstantial. And since they are mere images, they can be effaced.

(n1.) These terms refer to the model set by the profiteers in scarce and/or rationed products who were enriched during the wartime Occupation and a black-market economy. (Translator's note.)
(n2.) The attributes of "poujadism" and "lepenism" refer to political movements, respectively in the 1950s and 1990s, of the extreme right and of a distinctive protofascist aspect. (Translator's note.)
(n3.) Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone (New York: Vintage, 2000).
(n4.) Georges Darien (1862-1921) published Le Voleur in 1897, the novel by which he is best known today. Largely ignored upon publication, this chronicle of an anarchist career and sensibility was nonethless read and praised by Alfred Jarry, and upon its rediscovery in 1955, by André Breton, who greeted its republication with great enthusiasm in an article republished as preface to a paperback edition. See Georges Darien, Le Voleur (Paris: Juilliard, 1964), 470 p.
(n5.) Jacques Lacan, "Le crime des soeurs Papin, motif du crime paranoïaque," Le Minotaure 3-4, December 1933. This paper and his thesis on the paranoid personality are his only clinical writings on psychosis.
(n6.) Louis Le Guillant, "L'affaire des soeurs Papin," Les Temps modernes, 1963.
(n7.) The terms in quotation marks are those of the author, for Le Guillant's philosophy, closer to that of Georges Politzer than to that of Freud, is not concerned with a dialectic of drives or the play of familial phantasms.
(n8.) Louis Le Guillant, "Psychiatric Evolution," lecture delivered at Saint Anne's Hospital, December 19, 1961.
(n9.) This intimacy is treated in Jean Renoir's film La Règle du jeu (1936) and Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963).
(n10.) J. Allouch, Erik Porge, and Mayette Viltard, La Solution du passage à l'acte: Le double crime des soeurs Papin (Paris: Editions Eres, 1984). The book is heteronymously signed by Francis Dupré.
(n11.) In his study Docteur Petiot, Christian de Challonge produces a brilliant reading of these correspondences or anamorphoses. Petiot's crime (perverse and paranoid) retraces and prefigures other killings, programmed collectively as a perfect epidemic against the background of a production of "delirious" subjectivity.
(n12.) Le Guillant's research was done in the 1950s.
(n13.) This is certainly the structural motif in all of Miklos Jansco's cinema: battles are rarely engaged or enemies destroyed.
(n14.) Felix Guattari, L'inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1979): "The ideal of capitalistic subjectivity implies a systematic deterritorialization of expressive relations, even though they may be reterritorialized in varieties of a functional ersatz such as the nuclear family, the ideal of social standing, etc. The polyform designs of deterritorialization converge no longer on a race, a chosen people, nor even God's own son upon the cross, nor yet upon the surface of an empty consciousness. They converge rather on that dull third eye that haunts the white man's gaze in countries well provided for; it is there that all the powerful creative powers of desireend in extinction and the investments of power are established."
(n15.) Jean Genet, "Les Bonnes," in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1968), p. 147. Translation, A.M.
(n16). The word "regard" is in italics to indicate the fusion of the meanings in French (gaze) and in English (respect).
By Jean-Claude Polack - Translated by Annette Michelson
Copyright of October is the property of MIT Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.  Source: October, Fall 2001 Issue 98, p76, 17p.
 
8 . The Dreamlife of Angels (La vie rêvée des anges) - A Film by Erick Zonca

In Lille, two penniless young women with few prospects become friends. Isa moves in with Marie, who's flat-sitting for a mother and child in hospital in comas following a car crash. Isa is out-going, unskilled, with hopes of moving south to warmer climes. Marie usually is either angry or detached. Then, while Isa begins to visit the child in whose flat they live, going to hospital to read to her, Marie slowly falls for a rich youth. At first Marie keeps him at bay, then she not only pursues him, she begins to dream he is her life's love. When Isa tries to warn Marie, their friendship flounders. How will Marie handle the inevitable? And once they lose the flat, where will they go?

This low budget French movie, devoid of glamour and set in a grim northern industrial town in the depths of winter, charts intimately and sympathetically the friendship of two young women, who are alienated from their dysfunctional families and struggling for economic survival and emotional fulfillment. The performances of Natacha Regnier as Marie and Elodie Bouchez as Isa are utterly convincing. Marie is an emotionally withdrawn person who has to be coaxed into friendship by Isa, the cheeky sparrow. Together they pick up men and try to find work. Marie, who both needs and dislikes men, becomes involved with Chris, a handsome, wealthy but fickle young restauranteur, while Isa visits the comatose young former occupant of her room, who is in hospital after a car accident and whose diary Isa discovers and reads to her. Somehow, the bleak landscape, the grotty workplaces and mean bosses are pushed into the background by Isa's warm spirit. At the end you are sobered rather than depressed - there is still some hope for Isa and the many like her.

Much of the film sees to have been shot with hand-held cameras in a small flat, an ideal method for filming the relationship of two people with quite different personalities living on top of each other. Yet it's not claustrophobic as there's plenty of inner space to explore. There is also the development of the relationship between Isa and the comatose girl. Pretty hopeless looking but there's always a chance that things might turn for the better. The minor male characters, Charly and Fredo the biker bouncers, turn out to be decent sorts, more than be said for Marie's boyfriend. All these parts are beautifully realised in a gem of a movie.

Three Film Reviews

a) On a note of uncommon grace, "The Dreamlife of Angels" begins simply and becomes a glimpse into an unexpected world. Though its two main characters, young Frenchwomen adrift and living hand to mouth, are rough-edged and scrappy, they wind up forming a bond of enormous delicacy. As that bond frays, this impassioned first feature by Erick Zonca reveals a soulful, moving vision of our shared responsibility for one another's lives.

In a film whose two stars jointly won best actress honors at Cannes, the most immediately unforgettable figure is Elodie Bouchez's Isa. At 21, she's a scruffy opportunist toting her backpack through Lille, raising pocket money by hustling religious pictures to passers-by. She takes a factory job as a seamstress, failing dismally but winding up with a fellow worker, Marie (Natacha Regnier), as her new best friend.

Marie couldn't care less about being a seamstress either. In a film that easily incorporates class struggle into its story and cares more about working-class experience than many a more openly political drama, she too lives strictly in the moment.

Both women are at an adventurous age, looking for opportunity wherever they find it and working only because they must. Then, with the lovelorn blindness of a Dreiser heroine, Marie hitches her hopes to a wealthy man.

Zonca depicts Marie's love affair with furious intimacy. It begins in a most unexpected way. Isa and Marie have been happily taunting bouncers at a club, mostly just for sport; Marie even has an affair with one of them (a hefty biker, played with incongruous tenderness by Patrick Mercado).

The women have also harassed smug-looking Chriss (Gregoire Colin) without realizing that he is the club's owner. One day Chriss spots slim, pretty Marie while she is shoplifting a jacket and saves her from arrest. Rebellious but also secretly impressed, Marie lets Chriss buy the jacket and buy her, too.

With her big, toothy grin and rough features, Ms. Bouchez's Isa looks like the plainer of the two women at first. But as she rises to the occasion of befriending the badly confused Marie, she takes on an astonishing radiance, a glow of stirring compassion. "She gave out an impression of serenity, grace and absolute confidence in life," Zonca has said of the young woman who inspired this story, and the luminous Ms. Bouchez summons that same spirit magnificently here.

"The Dreamlife of Angels" escalates with frightening urgency as Marie loses her bearings. Wise in the ways of stubbornly wrongheaded love affairs, Zonca shows how sexually responsive she is to Chriss' cruelty, and how easily sexual desperation drives a wedge between the friends when Isa counsels caution.

In scenes of tumultuous intimacy, he watches the two feisty heroines fight out their differences. The two actresses perform with overwhelming naturalness, as if utterly locked into this conflict. Zonca had them live together while making the film, and it shows.

In the end, this beautifully acted drama, as raw and immediate as it is heartfelt, describes much more than the fallout from friendship or a headstrong love affair. It leaves behind what Isa has discovered: the profound ties among the lives that are seen here, and the way those ties make sense of our world. By Janet Maslin, © The NYT, Oct, 8, 1998

b) […] I can't imagine anyone not responding to Elodie Bouchez in Erick Zonca's "The Dreamlife of Angels." Her huge-eyed face topped by a shock of close-cropped black hair, her toothy smile and overbite making her lips seem even larger than they are, Bouchez's Isa is -- from our first glimpse of her trudging along the streets shouldering a rucksack almost as big as she is -- heartbreakingly open. A young drifter who works when she can and tries to get by selling homemade cards the rest of the time, Isa depends on the kindness of friends as well as strangers. She willingly puts her faith in people, and it's a measure of how uncynical Zonca's film is that Isa isn't a fool or a victim. The scar she carries on her right eyebrow suggests that she's known what people can be at their worst. Yet she doesn't expect the worst from the people she meets. In Lille, Isa meets Marie (Natacha Régnier), a girl her age whom she encounters in the clothing factory where she picks up a few days' work. Marie invites Isa to move in with her to the apartment she's minding. This home is as temporary as everything else about the girls' lives; the inhabitants, a mother and daughter, have been hospitalized after a car crash. But the night's shelter Marie offers Isa stretches to weeks, and the two settle into both their shared living space and a camaraderie.

"The Dreamlife of Angels" is, at its heart, a mystery story about the forces that draw people together and, bit by bit, pry them apart. Marie appears as closed off as Isa is open. Régnier (who bears a resemblance to model Stella Tennant) offers Zonca's camera a face that seems hard, suspicious and yet almost trembling with fragile defensiveness. Marie harbors vague dreams of the good life, though nothing much seems capable of bringing her pleasure. When she gets involved with a local hotshot a few years older than she is, a coldhearted bastard of a club owner (Gregoire Colin, whose blankness worked against him as the lead in "Nenette et Boni" but who is perfectly cast here), the attraction is only partly what his money can offer her. Marie is just as turned on by the way his unfeeling use of her confirms her own feelings of worthlessness. (Zonca made cuts in the bedroom scenes after the European version earned the film an NC-17 from the subcretins of the MPAA ratings board.) For all the resentments she harbors and all she does to keep people on the outside, Marie is completely unprotected. When she and Isa audition for a job at a café where the waitresses are supposed to dress as stars, her hostile embarrassment exposes her to humiliation while Isa's game, laughing imitation of Madonna brings out the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise.

Zonca has made a film that's much like his heroine. It's not that Isa gratefully takes whatever life hands out. She's just better able to accept what life is (which is not the same thing as being complacent) without assuming that her circumstances preclude either pleasure or beauty. Zonca's approach is similarly clear-eyed, yet without rancor. "The Dreamlife of Angels" is set in the gray northern industrial town of Lille, one of those places where the ephemera of consumer culture appears to be more lasting than the centuries of tradition you can still glimpse in the architecture of the town center. The streets are dotted with discount shopping stores and fast-food outlets, as well as the occasional upscale club or restaurant for those who can afford them. Nearly everything -- the odd jobs Isa and Marie pick up, their shelter -- feels transitory. It's a rootless world Zonca is showing us, where the protective forces of home and family are shadows in the lives of people who are fending for themselves.

Zonca doesn't spell out the reasons why two women so young are living without a net. His movie isn't a socioeconomic tract. Accepting this state of things as a given, he's more interested in how people do or don't hold onto their humanity in these circumstances. Like Isa, he has the grace to know that people can surprise you. Trying to bull their way into a concert, the girls meet two burly bouncers, one of whom, Fredo (Jo Prestia), is interested in Isa (who's not interested in him) and the other of whom, Charlie (Patrick Mercado), eventually sleeps with Marie. One look at these two in their biker leathers and earrings and you think, "Trouble." But they turn out to be good guys; in their own way, gents -- particularly Charlie, a man completely at ease with himself. There's a wonderful gentleness to the scene where he lolls in bed with Marie after their lovemaking, delightfully unembarrassed about his folds of flesh as she (not entirely kindly) teases him. He's even better when she breaks up with him and the generosity of his response sends a little ache to your heart. Mercado's performance is warm and utterly lived in. His Charlie is one of the most believable characters in all recent movies. Zonca believes in the importance of connections between people, even fleeting ones. That might be summed up by the throwaway moment when Isa greets Charlie with the traditional French kiss on two cheeks and the pair laugh with pleasure at discovering that their friendship has progressed to this point.

The meaning of the title remains elusive. I think Zonca intends it as a poetic phrase for the atmosphere we create around others, even those we don't know, by what we do, by how we choose to carry ourselves through life. Partly as a way of thanks for the shelter she's been given, partly for reasons she can't articulate (and Zonca doesn't try), Isa visits the comatose young girl, Sandrine, whose apartment she's staying in. At first she just sits by Sandrine's side. Then she reads to her from Sandrine's own journal, which she has discovered in the apartment. Zonca doesn't point up how the adolescent moments Sandrine has recorded seem anything but trivial in this context, and he doesn't allow the movie to descend into false spirituality or allow Isa to become a saint. He's simply suggesting that we carry with us traces of the people we encounter.

Certainly we carry more than traces of Bouchez and Régnier with us after seeing "The Dreamlife of Angels." The two shared the best actress prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and their performances are flawless. Régnier, perhaps, has the more difficult role, having to draw us into a character who works to keep people shut out, but the whorling fear and desperation underneath the studied stoniness of her surface is palpable -- and pitiable. Bouchez is simply a marvel, delivering one of those performances that justifies talking about purity, both of the actresses' approach and of the emotional effects she delivers. Bouchez expresses everything through her eyes -- effortless happiness, concern and the pain of trying to understand, and quell, the unhappiness she sees in others.

This is Zonca's first feature after three short films and years of working in documentaries. Perhaps his making his feature debut at 43 offers some explanation as to how he's made a film that expresses both the eagerness to work in the medium that characterizes first films and the sureness and compassion that is the mark of a mature sensibility. "The Dreamlife of Angels" has stayed with me more than any film I've seen in months. Shot in 16 mm by cinematographer Agnès Godard and blown up, the look of the movie is extraordinarily intimate. Its seemingly episodic structure builds to a muffled wallop. It's devastating, but not depressing. And the final shot achieves the sort of unqualified compassion that can only come out of sorrow. Zonca is working in the tradition of filmmakers who attempt to melt the barriers that keep their characters from seeing one another's common humanity. And he's trying to do it in a time of diminished expectations, for both life and art. Now, when high-toned blubber-fests have been extolled as heralding the return of "humane" movies, Zonca has achieved something unexpected. "The Dreamlife of Angels" heralds a humanist cinema that neither shortchanges our minds nor cheapens what's in our hearts. © salon.com, April 5, 1999

c) The Dreamlife Of Angels, simply put, is exquisite. From its inception, with the unconventionally beautiful Elodie Bouchez backpacking across an unspecified french town, to its denouement, in which she seemingly ends where she began, the bittersweet soul of the film feels more real than almost any other in cinema. The film meditates upon women's need of love and their search for truth in relationships, and my favorite particular meditations are upon the dynamic between men and women, how that dynamic affects the relationships between female friends, and how quietly tragic the consequences of a relationship can be for a woman- specifically a woman. I find it interesting that a film from France- a nation I understand that still ambivalently treats women as the lesser sex- would so poignantly capture the real pain and hurt that men cause women while the United States- which prides itself on feminizing everything- continues to be ambivalent about making a film exploring the dynamic between men and women at all (post-60's). If you intend to really understand women, and how their intrinsic vulnerability towards men affects everything about them, then this film is your beacon. I have never felt the pain of a woman- a pain I could never really feel myself and otherwise never really understand- like I did with this film.

The performances are, of course, a notch above just about everything else. I feel Grégoire Colin is the most natural actor I have ever seen, and potentially one of the greatest actors to have ever lived, even at his age (remember Marlon Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire"?). If you haven't seen him in "Olivier, Olivier," you have been missing perhaps the most infectiously charming performance in cinema (as I know it). The writing only occasionally slips into the French tendency for nonsensical pretentiousness (forgive my diction, people) and even though it does, I felt at the end as though I empathically understood those things which could never really be explained on an intellectual level. The only Americans who wouldn't enjoy this film own shotguns (12 gauge or lower). Yet, it was the tenderness of the story, and of its characters, which lingers beyond everything else; it will touch you and comfort you.

The final scene implants a song into the heart of the film. The confluence of the song and the film are as powerful as "Born Slippy" at the end of "Trainspotting", in that the song is a cathartic echo of the dreamlife the film bestows you. © Andrew King, NYU Film Student

From an Interview with Erick Zonca

"The origin of The Dreamlife of Angels was my meeting with a girl who was the inspiration for the character of Isa. I was casting my second short film, Eternelles, one of the candidates was a young girl with a rudsack and she showed me a strange sort of book she put together, which was in fact her diary. She gave out an impression of serenity, grace and absolute confidence in life. She told me how, like Isa in the film, she wandered from place to place, living from day to day, at the hazard of happenings and encounters. Like Isa she had sometimes worked in factories, just going her own way. I kept in contact with her and followed her journeys. In fact she came on to the set and when she saw the film she told me that she recognized herself in the character of Isa.

As for Marie, I was also inspired by a woman I know who is very dear to me. At the time we met, she was in total rebellion against society and she felt the same powerless fury as Marie does in the film.

I constructed the story around these two encounters with two different women. It took me two years to write and to reduce an initial project of four hours to what the film has become today. My approach to writing is primarily visual. My scripts always start at an imaginary point. Any didactic approach is totally foreign to me. I never start with a theme or a theoretical point of view but let myself follow my imagination. The introduction of sense and coherency come after an initially unstructured approach to the work.

As was the case for Rives, Eternelles and Seule my three short films, the main thing I wanted to make felt was emotion. I have absolutely no interest in formulating truths about the world or society. My vision is not in the documentary tradition. What matters to me is encounters with human beings.

My experience as an actor has helped me understand the mirror effect between a director and an actor. Directing actors is an agonizing experience for me yet at the same time it's what I like best. If I believe what my actresses say then they don't feel that they received any direction from me. I certainly feel that they seized their characters and captured them perfectly. It was obvious while I was writing the script that Elodie Bouchez was Isa. She has the innocence and the grace of her character.

The others convinced me during the screen tests. To start with I had a completely different idea about the character of Marie. For example, in my mind she was a brunette. Then following a number of tests I found that Natacha Régnier, with her blond hair and her posture and way of moving, opened up other perspectives on this violent and extreme character personified by Marie.

Grégoire Colin was evidently Chriss, a sort of wild animal, instinctive and dangerous, exactly what I was looking for in this role. I greatly appreciated that he never tried to draw any sympathy to his character.

I was especially touched by the genuine tenderness that emanates from Patrick Mercado, who plays the part of Charly. Also he writes thrillers and that was a definite additional advantage."

9. Tatie Danielle - A [mean] film by Etienne Chatiliez

Auntie Danielle is an elderly widow living in the provincial town of Auxerre. She is mean and tyrannical towards her aged maid Odile, and she heartily dislikes her relatives (great-nephew Jean-Pierre Billard, his wife Catherine and their two sons, Jean-Christophe and Jean-Marie, as well as Jean-Pierre's sister Jeanne). She confides her thoughts aloud to a portrait of her deceased husband Edouard. When Odile dies from a fall for which Danielle is partly responsible, the latter goes to live with her family in Paris.

The Billards' patience is sorely tried by life with Danielle, who hates the food they give her, is bored by the outings they organize, scoffs at gifts and wilfully loses their younger son in a park. The war of attrition escalates: Danielle makes herself sick on purpose and wets her nightgown in the presence of the Billards' dinner party guests. When the Billard family goes on holiday to Greece, a home help, Sandrine, is hired to look after the old woman. Danielle tries to bully Sandrine into submission, but soon discovers that her tactics do not work.

Sandrine and Danielle strike up a friendship of sorts, though Danielle refuses Sandrine's request for a night off Sandrine goes out all the same and, out of spite, Danielle wrecks the apartment, smears herself with filth, eats dog food and sets the place on fire. Rescued, she becomes an overnight celebrity, while her relatives (still in Greece) are branded on TV and by the neighbours as uncaring monsters. After the scandal dies down, Danielle is sent to an old people’s home, where she tyrannizes other female inmates. One Sunday, however, she vanishes; she and Sandrine are discovered having a great time at a skiing resort.

In the late 60s, Simone de Beauvoir wrote: "Old age is a problem on which all the failures of society converge. And this is why it is so carefully hidden." Times are changing, it seems, when a 1990 mainstream French comedy can tackle old age head-on via a cantankerous eighty-two-year-old heroine who behaves spectacularly badly.  Tatie Danielle is the second feature by Etienne Chatiliez, the director of the hugely successful "La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille" (Life Is a Long Quiet River).  This is not the quaint and romantic France so beloved of the British: people eat frozen convenience-foods, watch American soaps dubbed into French, read Barbara Cartland, and go on holiday in a Club-Med-type village in Greece complete with "reconstructed Cretan chapel".

Yet for French audiences, Tatie Danielle hits many familiar sore spots, such as the legendary meanness of he French provincial bourgeoisie and their obsession with inheritance, explored in literature since Balzac. The hypochondria of a medicine-obsessed, doctor-worshipping nation ("You know the doctor says no sugar") is touched on, as are racist habits like training dogs to attack black postmen. Most sensitive of all, the film tackles the issue of how an increasingly aging population is to be dealt with, given the vicissitudes of hectic urban life: in other words, what is to be done with inconvenient grannies (and dogs). The dog is disposed of in classic Parisian fashion by being left by the roadside. As for the granny, her destiny appears to be the old people's home with its horror stories of emotional deprivation and out of control bodily functions.

This bleak and unflattering picture is unusual in French comedies, which have by and large invoked the nostalgic and the cute rather than the grotesque (as in the work of Jacques Tati, for example, or recent  films like "Trois hommes et un couffin" (Three Men and a Cradle) and "Romuald et Juliette". Etienne Chatiliez, however, touches on aspects of social reality most of us would rather not see on the screen, while still being extremely funny. This comedy - for instance, in the moment when Sandrine slaps Danielle, and in the scenes in the old people's home - has affinities with the post-68 vitriolic humour of cartoonists like Reiser, who drew memorably mean OAPs [Old-Age Pensioner] and alcoholic wrecks. And yet, in the end, cuteness resurfaces, in the fantasy ending, for instance, or in the occasional transformation of Danielle from vile 'bitch' to the naughty girl who eats too many cream cakes and makes faces behindpeople's backs.

More fundamentally, Chatiliez's decision to extend the film's derision to all the characters, leaving no positive point of identification - except possibly the working-class Sandrine - defuses the impact of his satire. It is also unfortunate that the mockery, often very precise and sociological, as with the Billards' petty bourgeois tastes (their clothes, their passion for trendy cuisine, their language), has its reactionary side in, for instance, the treatment of the older son's homosexuality.

Ultimately, the film cannot decide whether Danielle is an ungrateful virago, the bane of a well-meaning (if silly) family, or a subversive vieille dame indigne, an unruly older woman who flies in the face of convention. The ending, in which Danielle is rescued from the old people's home by Sandrine. seems to favour the latter interpretation, but the rest of the film does not really support this. There is little explanation offered as to why an old woman should behave in such a manner, even though this is a film scripted by a woman and almost entirely played out between women, in which men are either dead (Danielle's husband) or absent from the screen. Catherine is seen at work in her beauty parlour (where she specializes in hair removal), for example, but her husband is not. It is the women who discuss, and ackle, the problem of caring for the elderly.

There are hints that sexual frustration, alluded to in the words of the song heard over the titles, the "Ballad of an Old Bitch"  and echoed in her passion for Barbara Cartland novels and TV soaps, may be one cause for Danielle's behaviour. In the old people's home near the end, the image of Danielle gazing out of he window for hours chimes with earlier shots of her peering from behind her curtains at the outside world, evoking a wasted life of appalling emotional isolation. Despite its upbeat ending, this dark quality casts enough of a shadow to make Tatie Danielle bitter rather than sweet. Ginette Vincendeau

Some Questions:
1. Tatie Danielle,  “a mean and intelligent film.”  This is probably why some people hate it and others find it quite entertaining.  Where does your preference go?   Explain.
2. Chatiliez's satire extends to all the characters, except one. Which one?  For what reason perhaps?
3. The best part of the film, undoutedly is Chatiliez’s astute observations on French society and the average French family.  What are some of the observations that you can contrast with what you experience in our American society?

10. The Girl From Paris (Une hirondelle a fait le printemps) 2001 - A Film by Christian Carion

Sandrine, a woman in her thirties gets tired of life in Paris and decides to leave her work in computers and become a farmer. She takes the required practice for two years, and after that she buys an isolated farm from Adrien, an old farmer who decides it's time to retire. However, Adrien wants to stay a few more months before moving away from the farm, and the rough winter finds them together...

Three reviews

 a) by A. O. SCOTT  "Fleeing the City for a Life on the Farm"

Literature is full of stories of ambitious young people who flee the countryside to seek their fortunes in the city. "The Girl From Paris," which opens today in Manhattan, tells such a story in reverse. Its heroine, Sandrine Dumez (Mathilde Seigner), a disaffected urbanite drifting toward 30, abruptly decides to embrace the rural life and become a farmer.

This being France, she must first clear some bureaucratic hurdles, in particular a rigorous training program (telescoped here into the bloody slaughter of a pig and a daunting encounter with a giant combine). This is no place for dreamers who want to make goat cheese and play the guitar, the instructor says. But Sandrine is practical and serious. After she buys a dairy farm in the Rhône-Alpes region from a grouchy old peasant, she sells her goat cheese over the Internet, and converts an unused cow barn into a rustic bed and breakfast.

That grouchy old peasant, Adrien, is played by Michel Serrault, whom American audiences may remember — though not necessarily recognize — as the high-strung drag queen in "La Cage aux Folles." Adrien's arrangement with Sandrine allows him to remain on the farm for 18 months, ostensibly to show her the ropes. But she is too self-confident to require much help, and he is more interested in waiting around sulkily for her to fail than in offering any. Once the lonely indolence of winter sets in, he resorts to some passive-aggressive ways of making her dependent on him, like cutting off the electricity in her barn. But gradually and inevitably, they become friends, as they discover that their proud obstinacy, initially an obstacle between them, is really a virtue that they share.

"The Girl From Paris," which was directed by Christian Carion, is a quiet, slow-moving tale, very much in tune with the gradual rhythms of traditional agricultural life. It could easily have been dull and anecdotal, but Mr. Carion relates his simple story with relaxed precision. He regards the staggering beauty of the landscape, with its golden hay and craggy escarpments, with the matter-of-fact appreciation of a native.

Ms. Seigner and Mr. Serrault bring fresh, unforced naturalism to their characters, each of whom grows deeper and more complicated as the months pass. (Jean-Paul Roussillon, as Adrien's roly-poly best friend, adds a grace note of gentle buffoonery.)

As Adrien reveals the tragedies and setbacks he has suffered in his struggle to remain on the land, a wider social background comes into view, and you, along with Sandrine, come to a profound and remarkably unsentimental appreciation of country life. (The NYT Film Review )

b) by Keith Phipps

Cascading through idealized scenes of nature to the accompaniment of stirring music, The Girl From Paris begins almost like a parody of an IMAX film. Passed at a gallop, the French countryside looks lovely and toothless, a bit like a dream. Cued by honking horns to pull back from the idyll, director Christian Carion reveals that it is a dream, as the rush of Paris forces protagonist Mathilde Seigner to stop staring at the lovely scenery advertised on the back of a bus and keep moving. For Seigner, however, that's enough to get her out of Paris for good. On the cusp of turning 30, she decides to chuck her job as a computer instructor and become a farmer, and she enrolls in a government-sponsored two-year training program. The film spends little time on her schooling, barely enough to subject her (and the audience) to a horrifically graphic scene of pig slaughter before sending her off to purchase a lovely, remote goat farm. The point seems clear enough: All the training in the world can't prepare her for the realities of farm life. Selling the place to her on the condition that he be allowed to live there for another 18 months, the farm's former owner, gruff widower Michel Serrault, would be the first to agree. He watches with a mixture of surprise, resentment, and admiration as she makes her new purchase succeed both as a farm and as a humble tourist attraction, since the small country farm has become something of an oddity in the 21st century. Though it would be simple to play this relationship for easy laughs and pat gags about Serrault's old-fashioned ways and Seigner's lack of experience, Carion and his gifted leads never take the easy way out. Instead, they let the characters get acquainted against the slow change of the seasons, taking their relationship along unexpected turns. The story eventually gets around to melting Serrault's heart, but it doesn't end there, and it doesn't cut Seigner any slack from the demanding, occasionally crushing routines of farm life. Instead, it finds that the beauty of nature asks for as much as it gives, and sometimes more. Settling into the quiet, life-or-death dramas of Carion's chosen corner of the world, the film pauses to explore the full complexity of a land usually glimpsed through postcards—and, of course, bus ads. (August 19th, 2003).

c) by Susan Granger

Nominated for two Cesar awards, including Best First Feature Film, Christian Carion's whimsical tale revolves around Sandrine (Mathilde Seigner), an almost-30 Internet instructor who yearns to escape from Paris to the fresh air of the Rhone-Alps. To make her dream a reality, she goes to Agricultural School and buys a picturesque but remote goat farm from Adrien (Michel Serrault), a grumpy, elderly widower who - while he has plans to retire to Grenoble - refuses to leave for 18 months. Secretly, Adrien doubts that this "kid from Paris" can make it by herself, although her clever renovations soon turn a desolate, old barn into "Balcony in the Sky," a small hotel to which eager, ecology-minded tourists flock. To Adrien's chagrin, Sandrine even begins to sell her goat cheese to Germans on the Internet. However, the harsh cruelty and utter isolation of winter is another matter, particularly when Adrien sabotages Sandrine's electricity and she's forced to seek refuge with him. During that time, she learns how "mad cow disease" devastated his herd and a bond between the two "loners" grows. Perhaps she could be the daughter he never had, or he could be the father she never knew. Problem is: the script by Christian Carion and co-writer Eric Assous glosses over too many crucial points. Like how does Sandrine manage to have so much free time to frolic in the sun if she's really running a farm single-handedly and making cheese? Why doesn't her estranged mother visit her? And who is the mysterious hang-glider who haunts her dreams? Instead, it dwells on repugnant shots of animals being slaughtered and goats born dead. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "The Girl From Paris" is a scenic but unsatisfying 6. It's a charming trifle.
 

11. The Closet (Le placard, 2001. A film by Francis Veber

Director/writer Francis Veber, who scripted "The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe" (1972), "The Toy" (1976), "Le cage aux folles" (1978), and "The Goat" (La chèvre, 1981), plus wrote and directed last year's hilarious "The Dinner Game," (the American remake's planned title is "Dinner for Shmucks") has returned with what might turn out to be the funniest film of the year.  The hero of "The Closet" is an excessively humdrum accountant, François Pignon (Daniel Auteuil), who has worked many years for a company producing condoms, going largely unnoticed. But one day, he is noticed and not favorably. While seated in a bathroom stall, he overhears he's to be fired. Oh, no! Distraught, he sluggishly returns home to dwell upon his uniformly faltering existence. His ex-wife doesn't return his calls. His son ignores him. And now his only remaining purpose in life, his job, is about to ditch him, too. What's left? Suicide!  But before he can achieve eternal peacefulness by jumping off his terrace, his new neighbor, a Monsieur Belone (Michel Aumont), barges into his life with a plan. Make believe you're gay. No one can fire gay people any more without seeming politically incorrect. And a condom company? They wouldn't dare. An unbelieving Pignon agrees hesitantly to the ruse, and before he knows it or can stop it, the ruse takes on a life of its own. The result is a politically astute, first-class farce that brilliantly displays how society's perception of a man or woman can change drastically once the adjective "gay" is added to their résumé.
(indieWIRE/ 06.27.01)

Witty as it is, "The Closet" has serious points to make at the expense of political correctness, hypocrisy, and the lengths we go not to appear prejudiced. Witness Depardieu, who drives himself mad - literally - trying to mask his true feelings. The actor, who had a heart attack just before shooting started, has seldom been better. But then everyone is on top form in a comedy of manners which proves, yet again, that France has the finest farceurs in the world. - Neil Smith

Three Reviews

a) By Nahtan Gelgud

Sexually Confused  A comedy of manners treats our conflicted feelings about homosexuality .

"Playing gay is not an easy role," a secondary character in The Closet tells the film's protagonist, Francois. "Most actors who try are way-off, vulgar."  This assertion from François' neighbor is one example of the subtle commentary that takes place in Francis Veber's The Closet. While a film about someone pretending to be gay immediately sets itself up for political exegesis, Veber manages to pull off a film that lets homosexuality exist as a given.

Daniel Auteuil is happy and gay in The Closet.

The Closet is foremost a brilliant comedy of manners about interoffice politics and masculinity. Veber paints up Francois as a somewhat likable but rather dull workaday type. When François discovers that he is losing his job, his neighbor Balone suggests that he pretend to be gay so that his company will be afraid to fire him. Veber's tasteful sense of humor guides the comedy of the film, while the mistakenly outed Francois is played with great reserve by Daniel Auteuil.

What makes this film one of the best so far this year is not only its cleverness, but the elusive way that it treats the alleged progress of homosexuals in the past two decades. It happens that 20 years ago, Francois' neighbor Belone was fired for his homosexuality. "Things are evolving," says Belone. As a device to set up Balone's motivation in helping François, it is heavy-handed, but it simultaneously serves as a basis for an inquiry into social progress. While things have clearly changed--François uses homosexuality to keep his job--Veber hints that the political correctness that often courts such changes is also a barrier to true understanding. Veber implies throughout the film--to great effect--that much "progress" is not the result of honest change but a P.C. keeping-up-of-appearances. Francois does not keep his job because his superiors are supportive of upwardly mobile gays, but because they are terrified of seeming homophobic. When François gets back in touch with his estranged son, Frank, it has more to do with a straight/bourgeois fascination with the other than any genuine desire for Frank to reconnect with his dad.

In an impressive subplot, two coworkers conspire to convince an oafish homophobe, Santini (Gérard Depardieu), that he must befriend the recently outed François or lose his job. When they come up with the ploy, a black friend tells them that they are being "too harsh." But when they tell him that Santini called him a spade, he says, "OK, give it all you've got." While Veber acknowledges the Santini character as a repugnant racist homophobe, he questions the positioning of racial or sexual orientation-based social games. The plot against Santini supports a great comic strain in The Closet, but Santini eventually emerges as a somewhat sympathetic simpleton.

In this way, Veber plays to his straight audience almost apologetically: The Santini character could be seen as a sympathetic portrait of straight male rage about the increasing acceptability of homosexuality. But the seeming contradictions here are actually a dialectical stance on gay progress. It's not that Veber's approach is ambiguous, but that progress itself is a gray area. Near the end of the film, a newly confident François tells his wife, "By pretending not to love women, I became a man." This is a statement that lends itself to multiple interpretations; it could potentially offend or exhilarate anyone with visceral feelings about homosexuality or sexism.

By refusing to clear things up, Veber points to the speciousness of the progress that Belone's character believes in at the beginning of the film. As a whole, The Closet can be read in a number of ways, at least one of them pointing to its unintentional homophobia. But as a comedy of manners that plays off of our confused thinking about homosexuality, this seems to be entirely the point.

b) By Edwin Jahiel

The basic story, clear and simple is that of François Pignon (the same name as the protagonist's in "The Dinner Game,") played by Daniel Auteuil. For 20 years he has worked as an accountant in a super-modern firm of rubber items, especially condoms. François has been a good employee but his personality is, to say the least, unremarkable. He blends in with the wallpaper, so to speak. And he is something of a sad sack these days because his wife had left him and their teen-age boy studiously avoids him. He finds that Dad is "chiant," a strong French word for "supremely dull." Unexpectedly, the firm decides to retrench -minimally that is--which means that just one employee will be let go. François find out that he is that person. What with his gloom about his ex-wife and his son, François goes to his apartment and contemplates suicide. A new, older neighbor comes to the rescue. This wise man thinks up a way to save François's job: make the firm believe that François is gay. Firing him would be politically incorrect, perhaps bring on a lawsuit, certainly create much bad publicity to the firm. How this is done is an utter delight, but I will not spoil it for my readers. Suffice it to state that there are laughs galore, that the acting is first-class, that François never adopts any gay characteristics, that the technical aspects are excellent, the music first-rate and appropriate, and that there is, in the cast, the loveliest Scottish kitten you'll ever see. All the details are perfect and planned with energy as well as superior clarity throughout the delicious twists of characters and plot. The tempo is perfect. Everything moves fast, but not in a speeded-up way. The camera and the editing know when to mini-linger, when to cut away. Daniel Auteuil is a great performer. So is Gérard Depardieu. In a most un-Hollywoodian way, those superstars are not exactly pretty fellows-- to put it mildly. But then there is the unspoken, humanizing French tradition of often using leading as well as supporting actors who are not beauty kings -- call it the Michel Simon syndrome. Depardieu's role here is a supporting one, and that's the sign of real trouper. He plays the factory's most openly homophobic employee, a man hoisted on his own pétard who ends up as a simpatico character. More I cannot disclose. See for yourself. 

c) By Todd R. Ramlow, PopMatters Film Critic.

What happens when you find yourself watching an ostensibly "gay movie" in which only one gay character appears, and in a secondary role? Does it still qualify? And what, exactly, constitutes a lesbian or gay film anyway? The answers to these questions are, of course, complicated and related to each other. These questions are further complicated by Francis Veber's new French bedroom farce, The Closet. The film demonstrates just how a movie may be directly concerned with questions of sexual minority rights and social enfranchisement, without being overtly "gay," in terms of featuring stereotypical characters, visual homoerotics, outraged/morose AIDS sentiment, a camp sensibility, or all the above. The Closet attests to the cultural and political advances made by sexual minorities in the recent past in being a gay movie almost entirely evacuated of gay characters. In fact, Veber is no stranger to "gay films" that are a bellwether of the changing place of sexual minorities in and in relation to "mainstream"/heterosexual communities. He wrote the original screen version of La Cage Aux Folles, as well as its U.S. version, directed by Mike Nichols, The Birdcage. Both of these films (despite embracing I would call some pretty terminal clichés about gay folk) can be read as reflective and productive of both heterosexual perceptions of gayness as "lifestyle" and as community. And the same can be said for The Closet.

You see, The Closet isn't so much (or at all, really) about queer people living queer lives in queer communities, but rather about some of the ways in which gayness functions as a social category. More to the point, the film is about how gayness is experienced, interpreted, and "made sense of" by non-gay individuals and communities. At the same time that gay individuals and cultures are disappeared from most of The Closet, the film recognizes that even if sexual minorities have become politically and legally enfranchised in most Western nations, overt homophobia, social intolerance, and physical violence against gays and lesbians continues to be a fact of daily life in these same countries. The pervasive threat of homophobia and violence experienced by many gay men and women every day suffuses The Closet and the new "gay" life of its hero. François Pignon (Daniel Auteuil) is a staff accountant at a prophylactic factory. Sounds like the start of some sexy romp, no? Well, Pignon (as he is called by everyone in the film) is actually something of a bore. His wife left him two years prior, claiming he was a "drag" and taking their teenage son with her. He's been working the same job for twenty years, but times being what they are, the company is in the process of downsizing, and Pignon finds himself about to be jobless in addition to wife-less and family-less.

As he considers throwing himself off his high-rise balcony, he's interrupted by his new neighbor, an older gent named Belone (Michel Aumont). After hearing of Pignon's woes, Belone devises a plan for him to at least keep his job: he's to start a rumor that he is gay and don't do anything to deny it, that way the company won't fire him for fear of a sexual discrimination lawsuit. To help him, Belone offers to digitize Pignon's face onto some photos of leather-boys in compromising positions he has handy, and to mail them to Pignon's boss anonymously. When Pignon protests that he isn't gay, Belone assures him that the fact is immaterial; all that matters is that other people believe he is gay.

Pignon's enactment of "being gay" proceeds not as some flamboyant "flamer," which would be, according to Belone, "vulgar in the extreme," but rather by behaving in the same manner as he always has, and letting his co-workers and family read him how they will in light of this new information. Belone is exactly right, and this is The Closet's most pointed insight. While identity is personal, it is also intersubjective; while it is a function of who/what we claim to be, it is also produced by external interpretation. This is not necessarily news. Anyone who is non-traditionally gendered -- whether gay, straight or otherwise sexually inclined -- can tell of the harassment, bullying, and violence they suffer at the hands of peers who perceive them to be "gay." Still, it's a revelation to Pignon, who experiences all this firsthand, perhaps most acutely when two macho co-workers, threatened by the presence of a presumably gay man in their midst, follow him home one evening and bash him in the parking garage of his apartment building. Belone's insight into how our own identities are experienced through other people's reactions and interpretations is exactly right. He is, after all, the film's single gay character and thus, I suppose more familiar with identity politics. And as an older man (in his early 60s would be my guess), he has presumably endured the social and political changes affecting sexual minorities over the latter half of the twentieth century. Indeed, when asked why he is being so helpful to Pignon, he replies that it is because, "twenty years ago, I was fired for the same thing that is going to save your job." Belone understands that today, being gay is no longer necessarily anathema to hetero-normative cultures.

Of course, one of the film's blind spots is that this inclusiveness is really only for some gay men. It is questionable whether the "vulgar" flamer Belone speaks of, or an m-t-f trans individual might find the same congeniality among the managerial business culture of which Pignon is a part. Nonetheless, the effects of Pignon's "coming out" on this rather small and tight-knit business community are The Closet's primary concern, and provide its humor. Somewhat refreshingly, the film does not use gay characters acting like "flamers" for comic relief, but rather finds its humor in the spectacle of perplexed straight folk and how they relate personally to Pignon's "gayness." So, his Accounts Department co-worker Ariane (Armelle Deutsch) declares that she "always knew" he was gay, and that he is much more sexy and interesting now that he is out. His departmental boss, Mlle. Bertrand (Michèle Laroque), while startled by the announcement, refuses to believe it and eventually becomes Pignon's love interest (hey, it's a romantic comedy, it's gotta have a love interest for our non-gay "gay" hero). The company CEO, Mr. Kopel (Jean Rochefort), initially flummoxed and homophobic, comes around to see that this turn of events can be an excellent marketing tool for a condom manufacturer, and commissions a float for the Paris Gay Pride Parade, atop of which he places Pignon. On seeing the parade on the news, Pignon's son Franck experiences a renewed interest in his dad, whom he previously considered a dullard, to be avoided at all costs.

The most complicated response to Pignon's "coming out" comes from his co-worker, Félix Santini (Gérard Depardieu). Santini is the captain of the company rugby team and an all-around homophobe with no time for "sissy" men. When he is advised by some practical jokester co-workers that if his phobic rants against Pignon continue, he will get himself fired, Santini sets out to befriend Pignon and ends up courting him (he takes Pignon to a fancy restaurant and buys him a pretty pink cashmere sweater). Santini's relationship to Pignon becomes increasingly complex and it seems that through Pignon, he will be able to come to grips with his own homosexuality; at least until Pignon rejects his suggestion that they move in together. Following this rejection, Felix breaks down and ends up institutionalized. Though he recovers and returns to work, Santini's "crisis of identity" is never resolved. But this is a good thing. Santini's homophobia (and homophobia in general) cannot be so simplistically resolved as repressed homosexuality, just as homosexuality (or sexual identity in general) cannot be so simplistically defined as the gender to whom we are attracted.

Ambiguously "gay" from beginning to end, The Closet challenges easy definitions of what constitutes gay and lesbian film, and yet nevertheless comes off (at least for me) as a decidedly "gay" film. More importantly, The Closet makes no claims to show what gayness "is," but rather how it functions socially and politically, how it is interpreted and understood by non-gay people, and how that function is not producedby a singular or individual act but through the subjective interactions of all of "our"communities.  PopMatters Film Critic.

12. Amélie - A Film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Guillaume Laurent and Mr. Jeunet. Photography, Bruno Delbonnel. Editing, Hervé Schneid. Sets, Aline Bonetto. Music, Yann Tiersen. Producer, Claudie Ossard. Cast: Audrey Tautou (Amélie), Mathieu Kassovitz (Nino Quincampoix), Rufus (Raphael Poulain), Yolande Moreau (Madeleine Wallace), Arthus de Penguern (Hipolito), Urbain Cancellier (Collignon, the grocer), Dominique Pinon (Joseph), Isabelle Nantty (Georgette), Claire Maurier (Suzanne), Serge Merlin (Dufayel), Flora Guiet (young Amélie), et al. 120 minutes. R (mild sex).

Plot Outline: Amélie, an innocent and naïve girl in Paris, with her own sense of justice, decides to help those around her and along the way, discovers love.

Two Film Reviews

a)  "Amélie," the record-breaker best-seller in France, is warm, fairy-taleish and sweet but low on glucose. It opens with a long, most amusing and creative biography of the child Amélie, then segues with the 23-year old protagonist waitressing in a colorful Parisian café in colorful -- near the Abbesses subway station-in which almost everyone, from personnel to clientèle, is colorful and eccentric. So is the population of the neighborhood.

Now, the lines above could belong to a negative review of a movie, but in this case, their meaning has to be taken very positively. The film packs such a large amount of facts, feelings, portraits, thoughts, information and events that a mere summary would run for pages. Amelie is the epicenter all right, but what and who is around her are of major importance and inseparable from the main "plot." The young woman with intense, observant saucer eyes, gets things going when, behind a wall in her apartment, she discovers a decades-old tin box of items collected by a previous tenant. That's the start of the road to Damascus for the girl. To find the owner and deliver to him this slice of his past she sleuths, successfully. And, having made (anonymously) an older man happy, she embarks on a series of doing good. Her tactics remind me of the very popular early 40s song by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer: "You've got to accentuate the positive/Eliminate the negative/ And latch on to the affirmative/ Don't mess with Mister In-Between/ You've got to spread joy up to the maximum/ Bring gloom down to the minimum/ etc."

Mr. Jeunet has surrounded Amélie with oddballs or eccentrics who range from one-of-a-kind characters to familiar but not-clicheed types. They are all superbly cast. Almost all live in Paris, a Paris of which dozens of locations are shown with immense affection. The film is not a travelogue. It does not separate the City of Light from its denizens. It is simultaneously a love song to the capital and to its people. And it is both the Paris that was, and the Paris of the mind. Using with masterful brio digital techniques and beautifications, the movie idealizes the city to fit the positiveness of Amélie. In this cleaned up Paris one does not step on dog-do, get caught in traffic jams, inhale automobile exhausts, or run into disagreeable characters. Nor does one meet tourists, exhausted commuters or sad proletarians. For that matter, we see no minorities, whether African, Asian or whatever. (The movie had some naysayers about this.) Still, the picture, while getting dangerously close to postcard-ism as well as to a Brigadoon-minus-sing and dance, manages to avoid it. There is much poetic realism In a sense, and mostly because of Amelie's neighborhood, it follows that loving saying of many that "Paris is really a collection of big villages."

Interestingly, Jeunet's filmic preferences do not include the New Wave and its downbeat movies, yet he shares with it its Paris-centrism. That's the same attitude that one finds in the 1930s French cinema of populism and "poetic realism" by filmmakers such as Marcel Carné. Mr. Jeunet has symbolically interwoven "his" events with actual happenings. He sets the time in 1997, the year when both Mother Teresa and Princess Di died. The latter is mentioned more than once, the former is recalled by the doing-good persona of an Amélie who might almost be canonized. She is, in her way, a sort of Robin Hood, witness how she sets things right for the symbolically one-armed, put upon employee of a nasty grocer. Witness Amélie made up as Zorro. Or Amélie as a matchmaker. Or as a faker of a "just found" 40-year old letter which finally tells a widow that her cheating husband really loved her. Amélie's mini-Odyssey runs at times like a scavenger hunt, but one elevated to poetry through magic realism, odd sights and sounds, and surreal images--such as the Tour de France cyclists pedaling behind a loose, galloping horse.

Is the name Amélie a witty reference to the play "Take Care of Amélie" by Georges Feydeau, the Belle Epoque master of comedy and bedroom farce? There comes a moment when Amélie, who takes care of others, will take care of herself. That's when she is sees a young man collecting discards in Photomatons, the booths where you can take fast pictures of yourself. Thereby hangs a very odd romance which adds a new dimention to our story. But I will not elaborate. The strange obsession of the man Nino (played by actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz) was in fact the preoccupation of writer Michel Folco, who did publish his findings and did inspire Jeunet. The Amélie-Nino romance coulld have used a bit of tightening, but this is a minor consideration in a film that is splendidly original, beautifully crafted, entertaining and almost flawless in its ingenuity. Copyright © Edwin Jahiel

b) In one scene in the movie, Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tatou), filled with passion to improve the lives of people around her, helps a blind man cross the street. When they reach the sidewalk, she decides to give him a visual description of the events on the street. She stimulated his imagination by describing the foods on sale on the street, the people walking along with them, and the weather. After she left him, the blind man stands still on the street with a tender smile on his face. That is one of the numerous moments that show that "Amelie" is a special film. It is filled with sterling moments of tenderness and energetic scenes of delight.

The film tells the story of how Amélie Poulain turned her life around by suddenly deciding to improve the lives of others. While performing these deeds, she also finds something that she has eluded or has eluded her for years, love and companionship. It all started in the day of Princess Diana's death, in shock of the news, Amélie drops a glass ball. It rolls, hits the wall, and reveals a compartment that contains a box full of treasured memorabilia hidden by a child from the 50s. She hunts down the owner, and when she saw the delight on the owner's face, she decided to dedicate her time into making others happy.

As a child, Amélie was isolated from the world, and it left her retreating to her imagination. Her mother died when a suicidal who jumped off Notre-Dame falls on her. Her father rarely pays attention to her, so when he gives her a heart checkup, her heart beats so fast that he thinks she has a heart condition and decides to not let her go outdoors often. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amélie," a sugar-rush of a movie, has what could be called meticulous clutter, a placement of imagery that covers every square centimeter of the screen. Mr. Jeunet's sense of humor gives the movie heart; his real affection for the medium can be seen in all the funny little curlicues and jottings around the action. "Amélie" offers Mr. Jeunet a chance to show some flair without the brittle chill of his previous films like "Delicatessen" and "The City of Lost Children," in which his imagination and heartlessness combined for the film version of felonious assault. "Amélie" has a hypnotic sense of romance; it's a fable filled with longing, with a heroine who constantly flirts with failure.

Just because the movie has the reflexes of a predatory animal doesn't mean it lacks a heart. [...] Mr. Jeunet has made his own Paris through sets and computer-generated art for "Amélie." He and Guillaume Laurant, with whom he wrote the script, tell the story of Amélie (Audrey Tautou) from her conception through her adult life, which is filled with the kind of offhand cruelty normally found in the novels of John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut. Her parents are described as "a neurotic and an iceberg," and part of Amélie's charm is that she is preternaturally levelheaded and survives her youth with her dark, glowing eyes wide open. She has the innocent vitality of a silent-film star; with her helmet of gorgeous brunet hair, she is posed to suggest Louise Brooks from some angles.

Mr. Jeunet directs his protagonist so that even when she is a child (played by Flora Guiet), each thought and impulse shines though her skin. (Ms. Tautou addresses the camera as if she were looking each viewer right in the eye; she has the cross-hairs focus of a movie star.) As a grown-up, Amélie, who works as a waitress, tinkers in the lives of her friends. She scampers around like a woodland sprite, laying out elaborate stunts and practical jokes as payback for those who get on the wrong side of her buddies. When she falls in love with Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), she can't be direct and let him know how she feels. Instead, she pulls him into an elaborate courtship dance that turns life in Paris into a game of Twister with a treasure hunt added to the mix. Nino, mouth agape, trails after Amélie, still the mystery woman to him, as she leaves clues about herself everywhere.

Mr. Jeunet soaks each frame with sepia and greens. The sepia indicates that "Amélie" takes place in a dreamscape Paris, and the wide-open streets come out of the French films of the 1930's, which already idealized France. The green gives the picture a trippy atmosphere, as if it had been dunked in absinthe. As a conception, the movie feels so scrubbed that it is on the sterile side. And Mr. Kassovitz's presence underscores a pivotal deficit in "Amélie." There are no people of color in this snow-globe version of Paris, and since Mr. Kassovitz is one of the few French directors to deal with racial tensions in his own work (the social drama "Hate"), the lack becomes impossible to ignore. Given that Mr. Jeunet used a black hero in "Alien: Resurrection," he can't be blind to race. (Michael Haneke's "Code Inconnu," due this month, is a hard- edged examination of racism in France, and a must.)

In "Amélie," the fastidious complex of flesh and fantasy is a dazzling achievement. It has the impact of Wired magazine in its earliest days, when every single page looked like a ransom note put together by a kidnapper who had just downed a six- pack of Mountain Dew. Mr. Jeunet is not the first French director to deal in pop-abstract terms; Louis Malle's "Zazie Dans le Métro" (1959) was the first influential example of eye-catching zest and was the story of a strong-willed princess-type, a plot point "Amélie" shares. Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Diva" (1981) was also a stylized tour, a walk through a punk Paris that is now as quaint as Mr. Jeunet's only-in-the-movies France. He painstakingly creates his urban vision with the same meticulousness that Amélie's neighbor, the painter Dufayel (Serge Merlin), does stroke- for-stroke recreations of Renoir paintings. (Dominique Pinon, a Jeunet regular who plays the jealous-guy Joseph in "Amélie," is the shaved-head punk on the "Diva" poster.) Perhaps after living under a studio's demands for a fourth-in-the- series "Alien" sequel, Mr. Jeunet decided to build his own universe from the ground up. Maybe, too, after the violence -  spiritual and physical -  of his earlier films, he wanted his latest tale to glisten with optimism. This balletic mix of whimsy and fairy tale could potentially err on the side of self-infatuation, but Mr. Jeunet moves so fast that the movie never stops to ogle its beautiful reflection.

Mr. Jeunet loves video stimulation. In a single scene, a television shows a man doing back flips while a friendly doggy runs in place on his stomach, an image replaced by the gospel whirlwind Sister Rosetta Tharpe, twanging her way through "Up Above My Head." The film's pacing is athletic, though the pulse of the narrative is gradually slowed. By the climax, the movie segues into a rumination on loss and the perils of being too playful. When Dufayel straightens Amélie out, we see it in a monologue on videotape. Here Mr. Jeunet uses video as a device to demonstrate how Amélie has kept the world at arm's length, but the scene evokes "Krapp's Last Tape"; in close-up, Dufayel resembles Samuel Beckett. By this point, the director brakes the action so that thought, and possibly regret, can filter through. The film's original French title was "Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain," and Mr. Jeunet deflates the self-mocking pomposity of the title by the last third of the movie. Yet there is no denying that "Amélie" is, to paraphrase its title, fabulous.

13. L'auberge espagnole - A Film by Cédric Klapish

Going abroad to find yourself

Xavier is a Parisian who, in order to get a job at the Finance Ministry, must learn Spanish. He promptly signs up for a yearlong study abroad program in Barcelona, leaving behind his hippie mother and his girlfriend Martine (Audrey Tatou of "Amélie" 's fame.) He meets Jean-Michel and Anne-Sophie, a newly-wed couple, on his plane there. Turns out they are newcomers to Barcelona as well, and though Xavier initially dislikes them, he accepts temporary housing with them when his own housing plans fall through. Within days, he lands a room at an apartment with an eclectic mix of students who hail from all over Europe. In all these different people, he finds what he has been looking for all his life, and becomes a ready part of the mix.

Two Film Reviews

a)  L'auberge espagnolepresents an appealing and persuasive picture of European integration, in which national differences, which once sparked military and political conflict, are preserved because they make life sexier and more interesting. The ending, though, feels like a bit of a cop-out, as Mr. Klapisch decides that Xavier's pleasant year abroad must yield a lesson. The ending suggests that the bureaucratic routines of Xavier's job with the European Union are antithetical to the freedom and chaos he savored in Barcelona. They are, but only superficially, since they are aspects of the same phenomenon: the transformation of Europe from a battleground to a consumerist, hedonist playground. Americans, on the other hand, are not so fortunate as to be completely overlooked. The token Yankee is a guitar-slinging cowboy boy toy from Santa Fe, who is (justifiably) referred to as 'stupid American' at least once and whose few lines consist primarily of howling like a dog. His appearance is brief, though, not long enough to really bother me very much. However, it wouldn't have bothered me at all had the film not gone out of its way to dismantle this sorts of stereotype as it is applied to Europeans. This occurs when a younger brother visits the crew and quickly alienates himself from everyone with his insensitive caricatures of various European nationalities (the anal German, the messy Italian, the mumbling Frenchman).

The filmmakers clearly want the audience to be irritated because in the backlash against these ridiculous stereotypes, they will be better able to recognize their own European-ness. American stereotypes, however, are apparently still fair game, and it just feels like a cheap shot. Because of this, and contrary to some claims, I would argue that this film is not about promoting cross-border understanding generally; rather, it's exclusively about forging a European identity (and a Western European one, at that). The other thing which annoyed me was the stereotyping - Anne-Sophie is portrayed as a stuck-up French bitch and Wendy as a typically sex-mad unfaithful English girl. The German is portrayed as "typically" having no humor when the English Girl's brother makes jokes to him about the Germans.

This sort of stereotyping is all well and good but it could be done more intelligently. Also, certain others of the characters we learn little about - the Italian, the Dane. I thought the Belgian lesbian had her character developed a little more. The central character the Frenchman had, I thought a very weak and diluted character and seemed just unable to take it all in ( too much pot, I suppose ). Audrey Tautou's tantrums were unnecessary and she was nowhere near as interesting as in "Amélie Poulain". All in all, a bit of a washout.

Although there are quite a few familiar situations, they are irritatingly clichés and do not go beyond the trivial events. This made the movie uninteresting to watch, and gave me a strong "been-there-done-that-don't-you-have-anything-to-add?" feeling. Apart from that, the movie lacks a firm story. It sometimes looks more like a documentary or 'real-life' show than a seriously made movie. Indeed the most interesting part is the everyday life in the Auberge Espagnole (Potluck Party Year could be an informal translation). Not the life of Xavier at large. Xavier is like Tintin or Amélie: you follow him without questions but you never identify with him. But Klapisch is not Hergé or Jeunet as his vision get mixed up in a short-sighted reality.

What eventually makes it a nice little movie is: 1/ the pace (no time to get bored as in more self-concerned movies) 2/ the focus of various issues catering for young Europeans, 20 to 28 year-old (sex and love and life at large in a Friends-like happy-go-lucky atmosphere) What makes it only a little movie is the lack of strength in Xavier's characterization out of L'auberge Espagnole. Prolog and epilogue, before and after Barcelona sequences are wooden; like some long-time student work. As for me the whole movie should have taken place in Barcelona.

The movie is filled with colourful people, all of them stereotypes (the British twat and her racist brother, the sexually liberated Dane, the ultra-organised German,...). In this case though, the stereotypes are brilliantly done. You feel like you know people like that (I for one know an arrogant doctor and his trophy wife, and they're just like the characters in the film!), they feel like REAL PEOPLE! For an American audience, the only disheartening aspect is that in this lovefest the odd man out may very well be . . . us. "L'Auberge Espagnole" has only one American character, and he's a complete imbecile, going around with an acoustic guitar. Needless to say, only the English girl will have anything to do with him, and even she knows he's an idiot. . This film contains strong language. By Cynthia Fuchs ©  PopMatters Film and TV Editor

b) A joyous mosaic of life in the European Union "L'auberge espagnole" was playing at the time I lived in Spain (fall 2002), but somehow I never got around to seeing it. Now, more than a year later after returning home, this charming film made me realize how much I enjoyed my experiences studying in Spain, cherished my friendships with other Erasmus students, and relived the embarrassing "fish out of water" moments that made my stay so memorable.

Directed by Cédric Klapisch, "L'auberge espagnole" tells the tale of Xavier (Romain Duris), a twentysomething Parisian studying economics. Xavier decides to spend a year at the Universitat de Barcelona as an Erasmus student (a university exchange program between EU member countries), and along the way he meets an assortment of other European students, locals, and transplanted French (a local at a bar offers to teach him "puta madre" Spanish, which made me laugh out loud.) Xavier arrives in Barcelona disoriented and brokenhearted at having to leave his girlfriend and the comfort of familiarity behind. Weighted down by a myriad of bags (which brought back plenty of memories of my arriving in Spain similarly loaded down), he wanders the unfamiliar streets, alone and friendless, not speaking either language fluently (Castillano, the official language of Spain, and Catalán, the official language of Catalunya and Barcelona). After ditching the morose boarding accommodations provided by a friend of his hippie mother's, Xavier begins the grueling and expensive task of finding a flat. His search lands him in a flat with six other Erasmus students: Londoner Wendy (a noted clean freak), Tarragonese Soledad, the gorgeous Italian Alessandro, Tobias from Germany, the Dane Lars, and latecomer Isabelle from Belgium.

Slowly, Xavier adjusts to his new life: an utter lack of privacy, homesickness for his girlfriend Martine (Audrey Tautou from Amélie), studying, balanced with the occasional joint and night out clubbing. The seven flatmates generally get along, speaking with each other in English and Spanish. A wrench is thrown into the mix when Wendy's obnoxious brother William (Kevin Bishop) comes to spend two weeks with them and ends up offending everyone. Xavier also becomes infatuated with the wife of a French doctor working in Barcelona and the two begin an affair. Although he believes himself to be an adequate lover, Xavier is coached by the lesbian Isabelle on how to truly please a woman, and the result, as Xavier says, is "like something from the movies." The film is beautiful to look at, showcasing the architecture of Gaudí (Sagrada Familia, Parc Guell), the swaying palm trees, blue water and sandy beaches of Barcelona, and Paris at intervals as well.

The film's humor is reflected in the editing, "you are here" labels, and special effects. The music is an upbeat mix of new and old that perfectly reflects modern Europe, including contributions by Radiohead, Ali Farka Touré, Vicente Amigo, Kouz-1, Daft Punk and the late Arthur Rubinstein. Overall, a gem of a film that brought back many happy memories of living in Spain (Burgos, in my case) and made me homesick for the many wonderful people and experiences I had while living there. ¡Viva España!

Cédric Klapisch's 'L'Auberge Espagnole'('Euro pudding') now tips the scales to Barcelona for me as I watch a group of 20 somethings negotiate life in a communal apartment. They represent the emerging melting pot of Europe, learning each other's language and purging themselves of racism and sexism. The film is alive with change. Protagonist Xavier (Romain Duris) is moving from Paris (a city against its type here-repressive and decidedly unromantic) to Barcelona for a year in order to qualify for a business job that demands immediate experience in Spain. Leaving his girlfriend and his hippie mother behind, he witnesses love in forms his shy French persona would have never encountered, including adultery and lesbianism. That he will be different, more urbane and wise, is preordained by the decision to move; that the director wishes us to see the allegory of a polyglot Europe is all too obvious. But the photography through the narrow streets, even in the barrios, is muscular and lyrical, especially when it takes us all to the top of the Gaudi Cathedral to survey the messy world below (Xavier eventually comments the world is 'badly made'). Beyond my affection for Spain, this film reaffirms for me the salutary effect travel has on the uncertain heart. After one year on his own, Xavier is ready to make a serious decision, but not about Paris vs. Barcelona - it's whether the corporate world that started this string of events is the one he wants or the artful one in his heart. Tennyson's Ulysses says, `I cannot rest from travel.' Xavier, on the other hand, found his rest in travel.

c) Some Additional Comments about Stereotypes and Other Things

I’ll begin with a little story - a true story - that tells you how a German feels about an Italian, or more exactly how a young German driving a German car felt about an Italian automobile. That was in the summer of 1961. I was hitchhiking toward Munich on my way to Innsbruck (Austria) to join a group of French, German and Austrian friends I had met at the university of Leuven in Belgium where I was a student at the time (the famous Leuven where Erasmus had taught and, in my days, was still a bilingual [Flemish-French] university) and go hiking with them in the Austrian Alps.  A young German salesperson in a light blue Volkswagen, not the “ladybug” or coccinelle but the 1500  squareback of old, kindly picked me up. There was no speed limit on the autobahn in those days, and I still can see the speedometer needle on the 150 km mark ... and that was fun ... Suddenly a red Alfa-Romeo sped by, leaving us behind.  We both looked silently at the vanishing beauty.  Then, my German Good Samaritan said to me:  "You see ? He was talking about the fast and flashy Alfa-Romeo, THAT is the girl to love, but  - adding a gentle tap to the steering wheel of his reliable VW (pronounced “FaVé”) - THIS is the girl to marry!”

This example shows how Germans see Italians : nothing in their view replaces Teutonic reliability. Italian women may be beautiful, fancy Italian cars are perhaps very fast, but we Germans prefer German engineering!

Human nature may be the same everywhere but we do not think or act alike. There is, for example, an expression in Dutch  ‘een zuideneuropees leventje’, which says it well. It can be translated as something like “a little life from the south of Europe” that is to say an easy life without problems.

We must never forget the weight of European history : centuries of wars between the British and the French, the French and the Germans, the British and the Irish, the British and the Dutch. Why do you think we still say in English “to talk like a Dutch uncle” or “to go Dutch”?  This is just a reminder of the time when the rivalry in international commerce between these two sea powers was very high. Dutch courage, for the British, is the courage of the drunkards, a Dutch wife is (pardon my French!)  a bitch of a wife.

In the late Middle Ages, when the lingua franca was Latin, there were already a series of more or less proverbial formulae, stereotypes that already were a form of linguistic racism. The most often quoted of these examples is the one about the multilingual Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500-1558) and what language he would use.  If he wanted to talk to men, the Emperor said, he would speak French; if he wanted to speak to ladies, he would speak Italian; to speak to his horse, he would speak German and, if he wanted to talk to God, he would speak Spanish.  This is, of course, the Franco-Spanish version of the anecdote ; for the Italians, Italian, of course, is the language of men and French the effeminate language! German is also ill-treated in another proverb that goes back to the XVIIth century: “German howls, English cries, French sings, Italian plays the comedy, and Spanish talks.”

Let’s begin with the French and see how other languages treat them.  English first. Surely we find ‘French cuisine’, ‘French dressing’, ‘French fries’,  but immediately after, in alphabetical order: ‘French kiss’, ‘French lover’, ‘to take the French leave’, and other pejorative expressions such as the ‘pardon my French’ just mentioned...

Spanish treats the French a bit more generously. They say ‘desperdirse a la francesa’,  (which means without saying good bye), the same as the Germans say ‘sich auf französich empfehlen’ (to escape the French way), which, in both cases seems to have been borrowed from English.

The Germans may comment on the French and their cuisine by saying: ‘leben wie Gott in Frankreich",  (live like God in France), but the Dutch say also nasty things about them: ‘Fransecomplimentem maken’, (to compliment the French way) , that is say to flatter,  ‘Met de Franseslag’ , (in the French manner), that is to say sloppy ; and here is another one: ‘Parÿse opvattingen’, (Parisian ideas), which means allowing all kinds of debauchery.

The Danes are nor far behind: ‘frankske artikler’ (French articles) -  I don’t mean le, la, les ? are... condoms.  In L’auberge espagnole you will hear Juan, the barman, ask Xavier if he knows what it is a “francès” - The French, on the other hand, for the now all too-common préservatifs say  ‘capotes anglaises’ ‘English raincoats’. For the Danes, ‘franske postkort’ (French postcards) mean erotic postcards.  Here is another one: ‘franske ydelser’, (French benefits), which mean not taxable.

From the above we gather a rather negative image of the French: flatterers, lazy and debauched in the view of the Dutch, for example; with a reputation for “taking the French leave”,  not very trustworthy in a word.  Or again, take the English dictionary and what it says in a Shakespeare’s concordance at the word French: “the lusty French”, “the false French, “the fearful French”.

Truly the French have had bad press.  As individuals they are much like anyone else, some good, some bad. But everyone has the same gripe about them as a nation : they’re arrogant. Even the English and the Germans think so, and they should know. They complain that the French act if they had invented culture, as if no one else could cook with élan, write poetry with panache, or behead aristocrats with finesse.  For proof of French arrogance, people say, one needs look no further than their generous contribution to the lexicon of snobbery, to which they have donated nouveau riche, parvenu, arriviste, petit bourgeois, faux pas and chauvinist, among others.

Now, what about the English?  The French say, as I just mentioned, ‘capotes anglaises’, and the English reciprocate for the same thing with ‘French letter’. In slang, you may hear the expression ‘les Anglais ont débarqué’ or ‘avoir ses Anglais’  (in reference to the red uniform of the British army in the XVIIIth century).  For the French, the English are also “des rostbifs”, whereas the Dutch prefer to say ‘Engels gaar’, cooked the English way, that is to say badly prepared. But it is mostly their supposed coolness that seems to dominate, with stereotyped expressions such as : ‘Engels flegma’ in Dutch, le flegme britannique, or as they say in Danish “stive englændere’’, the ‘stiff English’.

More seriously, what does this mean? Let’s try to make sense out of this. When you look at all these stereotyped expressions, what do we see?

1. First, the profusion of popular ways to name people living on the other side of the border, based on their food habits: froggies or frogs, rosbifs, Krauts or sausage eaters, or macaroni or pizza eaters, with a geography based on four poles: overcooked roastbeef in England, sausage and cabbage in Germany, frogs and escargots in France, and pasta and more pasta in Italy.

2. The second picture that we get is the way the English used to talk about their neighbors, the French, the Dutch, and the Irish.  You know some of these expressions about the Irish: ‘Irish bull’, ‘to get one’s Irish up’. In other words, these pejorative expressions are like fossils, traces of times past, reflecting the ideological look that the British cast on their former enemies and that have been kept in the language without, many times, any thought of offending anyone anymore.

3. There is a third form of racism prevalent in Europe today, which is the racism against foreigners.  Just think of the word we use in French, Italian, Spanish for a foreigner: étranger, straniere, extraño, a word that means both foreign and strange.  In the Romance languages, the word for ‘stranger’ also means foreigner, outsider.  It has a clear ‘them and us’ distinction, a distinction we find as well in German in the word Ausländer, to say alien or foreigner.

Since the1950s, many new “strangers” have come to Europe ?  Turks, Indians, Africans and Arabs - ‘guest’ workers are they’re called in German - or former colonial subjects, many of whom are now in Belgium, France or England second generation Europeans.  But there is a widespread reluctance to accept them as fellow Europeans. The Italian press has found a novel way of calling these people. They call them extracommunitarios, meaning from outside the European community, which disregards the large number who are European citizens. The expression has caught on, but in shortened form: they’re called the extras.  To me this outwardly innocuous little word (“extras”)  is more dangerous than froggies or Krauts or rosbifs.

Names can hurt you. Sometimes they stick, sometimes people become what you call them. It’s been 1500 years since the Vandals devastated Gaul but ? where do you think the word ‘vandalism’ come from? ? they still get the blame for graffiti and broken public toilets. The Vandals gave also their name to the southern part of Spain where they have settled: Andalusia.

There is indeed a paradox: Frogeaters, Rosbifs, Krauts, Macaronieters and others, in short the very people who call themselves names, are, as Isabelle comments about the Catalan professor in L’auberge espagnole, working toward a European Union and, at the same time, as seen in the movie, they don’t seem to stop making fun of each other.

If there is some hope, it has to be with the younger generation of Europeans, required, for example, to study two foreign languages in high school and are having constant student exchanges, such as the Erasmus program at the university level. To study another language is to mold yourself into another view of the world and go farther in your perception of the ‘other’, deeper than the fact that they eat frog legs, sausage and cabbage, spaghetti or roast beef.

And to return to "French Cinema and Society," I hope that the movies that we have screened all through the semester  illustrate the true meaning of the word “liberal” in  “Liberal Arts” or in “Liberal Education”, which is to liberate the mind from the chains that keep us tied to our old habits and prejudices.  © Joseph Garreau
 


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Additional Relevant Films

1. Ridicule (1996) -A Film by Patrice Leconte

In the periwigged and opulent France of Louis XVI, an unwitting nobleman soon discovers that survival at court demands both a razor wit and an acid tongue.

A note on King Louis XVI (1774-1792)

Louis XVI, though far superior in personal habits than his grandfather [Louis XV] and possessed with a genuine desire to govern, was pious and virtuous, but he was fat, rather clumsy and lacked sustained willpower. He also ate in excess so that he would often fall asleep during meetings or other functions in Versailles. Contrary to Louis XIV, Louis XVI had a very common appearance and, even when dressed in the best garments, never looked elegant. His big love was hunting and aside from this sport, Louis XVI had little taste for the arts and music, and he was too clumsy to dance. In spite of these drawbacks, Louis XVI was liked by the French people. He appeared to have a good heart and to be worthy of trust. His wife, Marie-Antoinette, was beautiful, charming and at ease in society, in contrast with Louis XVI, who was clumsy and very ill at ease with people. Louis XVI adored his wife to a fault, while Marie-Antoinette had only contempt for him, seeking frivolous pleasures away from him. She was also a spendthrift, so much so that she was soon nicknamed "Madame deficit." The fact that she was the daughter of the Austrian empress alienated her from the affection of the French, who remembered that for three hundred years Austria had been France's enemy. In fact, Marie-Antoinette never became French. She looked at the French from an Austrian point of view, and so the French were very unhappy, not only because they hated the queen, but because France faced crisis after crisis, mostly due to the national debt, which was huge and which tripled after 1774. Between 1775 and 1778 there were many violent riots because of food shortages and heavy taxes. Louis XVI was faced with an emergency situation, but he could not cope with it. The finances of the state were further drained by France's involvement in the American War of Independence, a way for France to get back at England. Of course there was a more positive aspect to France's assistance to young America. A number of young noblemen, the famous Marquis de Lafayette among them, went to the help of the American patriots. Soon Benjamin Franklin came to France and dazzled the Court, its women and Parisian salons. But when the war ended in America, France did not gain much. First of all the Americans signed a unilateral treaty with England, and France only managed to recover later a few minor territories, the islands of St.-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland, that it had lost through the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The consequences of the American war were serious for France, particularly because it showed the French people a model of government founded on democratic principles. In addition it drastically emptied the coffers of France to the point that it required a meeting of the Estates-General to examine what measures could be taken. Ironically, this meeting did not do much for France's finances, but more importantly, it precipitated the fall of the Old Regime. © Guy Mermier Historical Background of the French Revolution, p. 59-60.

Three film reviews

a) "Twilight of the Witty But Supremely Shallow"

By Janet Maslin Teetering on the brink of revolution the French, aristocrats in Patrice Leconte's discreetly scathing "Ridicule" indulge in a decadence that is peculiarly their own. They place the utmost value on cruel, wounding wit, which is used for the entertainment value of humiliating others as well as to define each speaker's precise caste among fellow courtiers. Artfully. and with an elegant malevolence that suits this ornate and quietly sardonic costume drama. Mr. Leconte makes it clear that this is no laughing matter, While the characters in "Ridicule" imagine that they live or even die by, the bon mot, the year is 1783, six years before the real ax falls. The film fully appreciates the ridiculousness of drawing-room repartee In the face of this. Mr. Leconte, known here for "Monsieur Hire" and "The Hairdresser's Husband." makes it immediately clear that 'this is a vicious game. His film begins with the shocking spectacle of the ancient Count de Blayac being visited by one of his enemies, who urinates on the helpless old man to settle some unknown score, When the Count dies soon afterward, the talk at his funeral shows the some genteel savagery. "I'd rather bury him alive, but God is our master," whispers one guest. Into this sly, decorous atmosphere, which is rich with the kind of boudoir chicanery that shaped "Dangerous Liaisons," comes the incongruously decent Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy. He arrives from the provinces with the hope of persuading Louis XVI to finance a swamp drainage project so that the peasants on his land will not die of mosquito-carried diseases. But the court to which Ponceludon brings his case is a place where a cleric may say about sick peasants. "They're not only dying, they're boring." Quickly and nimbly, Ponceludon discovers that he must try to beat the courtiers at their own parlor games. If he is to win the King's interest. One woman who becomes crucial to his plans is the widow de Blayac, an impervious creature who has children blow dusting powder from silver trays after her bath. Played as a figure of supreme shallowness by the ever-glanourous Fanny Ardant, the countess is offset by the story's carnest.young heroine, Mathilde. who looks fetchingly fresh, takes her inspiration from Rousseau and is defiantly wit-free. The courtiers, by contrast, invoke the exalted memory of Voltaire in ways that finally prompt Ponceludon, to exclaim, "Voltaire would have wept!" Because a fair share of this film's value is decorative, Mathilde is played by beautiful Judith Godrèche as a ravishing country girl, half-scientist, half-milkmaid. Her father is.a doctor who helps Ponceludon, even though he himself is terribly worried aboutthe fine points of witty dueling. The doctor keeps a file of clever remarks, repeats some dubious ones (from a man shot in file head by a cannonball: "I fear I'm losing my mind") and is filled with remorse when he thinks up a good rejoinder two hours too late. While all this shallowness risks becoming self-defeating, Mr. Leconte keeps his own rapier reasonably sharp. As written by Rémi Waterhouse, who draws on real historical detail here, "Ridicule" satirizes this world of absurd protocol while it proves that skewering fatuousness and snobbery, however obviously, is never out of style. Among the film's more piquant historical touches are a scene in which deaf-mutes mocked by these aristocrats wind up having the last laugh, and another in which a visit is paid to the French court by an American Sioux warrior, whose regalia is duly criticized. "And yet, he almost makes us look ridiculous," one of the film's foppish characters observes. No one really listens. © The New York Times, Nov. 27, 1996.

b) THE FRENCH COMEDY Ridicule stylizes the extravagant, brocaded life of the ancien régime [before the 1789 French Revolution] in an entertaining new way: As screenwriter Rémi Waterhouse and director Patrice Leconte tell it, wit rules the court of Louis XVI - rules it so thoroughly that a man who says something brilliant at a dinner party or recover quickly from another man's insult finds himself rewarded with the king's favor. On the other hand, if the same man falls down on the dance floor, or begins an insult that peters out, he receives derision so acute and persistent that he might be required to absent himself from France altogether. What makes the situation even more frightening is that the king himself does not possess wit and sometimes has trouble recognizing it. "It's not a pun, is it?" he asks anxiously after hearing something that pleases him. (Puns are considered unworthy.) "It's wordplay, Sire," replies the adroit adviser, very much to the king's satisfaction.

In this war of all against all, one of the vanquished, having spent some time out of the country in disgrace [in America more precisely], returns to the house of an old tormentor, now a withered and speechless man dying in a chair. The visitor [unsheathes his member,] as you will surely remember, opens his fly and urinates on his host. Wit and the male member go, so to speak, hand in hand. The witty get to sleep with such beautiful courtesans as [Fanny Ardant's] Madame de Blayac, who has the pleasant habit of promoting her current lover's interests with the king. Can we believe it? Is any of it true?  Did these people do nothing but sit around uttering pompous epigrams and playing tricks on one another? Perhaps not, but what's the difference? The French-style high concept makes for a brilliant, rather outrageously suspenseful movie. Leconte produces some intimate moments, but most of the movie is set at social occasions-parties and gatherings of all sort in which the malice rattles like musket fire. [...]  The powder and rouge and the wigs that go swirling heavenward like whipped cream are a visual analogue to the patter, which never touches on anything that matters. Style is what counts: People live or die by it.

There is, perhaps, a certain fatuity and theatricalism in the French character that makes movies like this one irresistible. The words are not so much spoken as recited. The actors can get away with anything as long as their diction is crisp, their poise and address unimpeachable. Bernard Giraudeau is particularly brilliant as the capering, fantastically dextrous Abbot de Vilecourt, a fornicating cleric who triumphs on every occasion but finally goes too far and outrages the king. Fanny Ardant [in the role of la comtesse de Blayac], as the most fetching of the prizes, stands naked while powder is blown at her by servants; she emerges from this cloud, a glittering pale Venus, vague yet relentless, self-dissatisfied but always ready for the next round of the game.

[...] These spoiled-rotten people, with a few exceptions, deserve to die. One of the exceptions is an old courtier, (the Marquis de Bellegarde) [played by the familiar Jean Rochefort], who sees through the mystique of the court but remains obsessed nonetheless.  Rochefort's Marquis de Bellegarde is losing his memory; he can no longer strike with speed. He adopts as his protégé a young man from the provinces, Grégoire Ponceludon de Malavoy (Charles Berling), a smart and serious engineer and landholder who wants to drain the mosquito-infested swamps of his region. Grégoire, learning to play the game, replaces the fallen Abbot de Vilecourt in the bed of Madame de Blayac; he advances toward the king's attention.

At the same time, he falls in love with his patron's beautiful daughter (Judith Godrèche), who is meant to be some kind of pure scientific spirit. Tall and imposing, Godrèche stalks about the fields rather incongruously in a long dress that leaves most of her breasts exposed. She is not meant to be a woman of fashion (physically, she's like a princess -in a fairy tale), so it's hard to know what to make of the décolletage, except that the movie's producers know how to sell tickets. Ridicule is set up as a morality play pitting the pure love of the young woman against the lust of an older woman, science and responsibility against fashion and selfishness. Grégoire and his lady play at science in the fields and lakes, experimenting with an early form of a pressurized diving suit, and they are both a little solemn. Some of us might even prefer the company of the nasty wits back at the palace. One of the peculiarities of the court badinage is that it's not actually funny. Wit, as here conceived, is artificial, formal, logical. It reveals nothing of character; its very point might be to conceal it. But the director finds these people out; he is more ruthless than the king. Ridicule is a rather preposterous movie, but, in grand style, it gives us the pleasures of malice. After the revolution, people couldn't have had half so much fun.
© New York, December 9, 1996

c) By Professor Edwin Jahiel

 See this delightful movie and you'll be miles ahead in understanding the French people. Before an American lady of my acquaintance left for Paris, a French friend in the USA gave her this advice: "In France you can say what you want, if you say it cleverly. "

This has not changed much in that land, although it has no longer the sometimes paroxystic levels found in the chic salons during the second half of the 17th century and all of the 18th. In 1783 Baron Ponceludon de Malavoy lives in a southern area of swamplands that breed mosquitoes that have been killing hordes of people. He is an engineer with a grand plan of draining the swamps. Lacking the wherewithal , he gets on his horse and rides up to Versailles where the court lives its dolce vita. The French Revolution is only six years away, but no aristocrat shown seems conscious of its coming or of anything except entertainment and being noticed by the King. The King is Louis XVI, who will be guillotined in a few years, as will his wife Marie-Antoinette and many of the courtiers. Ponceludon naively hopes to gain access to His Majesty and ask him for life-saving funds. He is rapidly taken in hand by a protector, the Marquis de Bellegarde, who is also a doctor (his talents are gently mocked by the movie) and a scientist. His experiments have impoverished him, but he is nonetheless in good standing at Versailles.

The Marquis opens the idealist visitor's eyes to the facts of life at the court. One needs not only sponsors but wit in a high society where people constantly play games and are deadly bored by anything approaching serious issues. They only take seriously unseriousness, "légèreté" (lightness) superficiality. They practice "esprit" (wit), "mots" (bons mots), puns, paradoxes, cutting remarks, rapier repartees, quotable quips or amusing verse. The Marquis himself is strong along those lines. Nothing upsets him more than when after a gathering he thinks of a witticism he could have made earlier. A clever quip and your fortune may be made. A bad one or one at your expense, and you are covered with ridicule and disgraced. Luckily, Ponceludon is not a titled bumpkin from the provinces, but is well read and has a great gift for words. The Marquis introduces him to the nobility, especially to a beautiful Countess, Madame de Blayac, one of many passing mistresses of the king. She sleeps with her household clergyman, the Abbé de Vilecourt.  Both the Countess and her Abbé have a fearful talent for "esprit. " This goes beyond games. Wit can be --and often is-- used cruelly, to put down people and insult them, to exact private vengeance, sometimes to reduce them to a form of dishonor through verbal dueling.

Words are like swords dipped in honey or perfume, but still lethal. It's all done with exquisite elegance that never includes the use of vulgar epithets or even ordinary insults. "Imbécile" and "idiot" are reserved for social inferiors. All this goes hand in hand with promiscuity, amorality and immorality --and with highly amusing situations, among them a blasé nobleman returning from England where he has discovered "humour. " A pity the film does not dig deeper in comparisons between wit and humour. Ponceludon is a hit at Versailles, but must conform to the rules. In just days he spends on clothes his income for a year. He starts using foppish powder and lipstick. His mentor advises him not to laugh at his own jokes and, whenever he laughs, not to do it with his mouth open. Yet if Ponceludon meets with success, the King is still hard to reach. Among other stumbling blocks is the necessity to prove to the court genealogist that his nobility does go back to the year 1199!

Meanwhile back at the Marquis's country home the Baron has met, argued with and predictably fallen in love with Mathilde, the daughter of the Marquis, a scientist herself (she works on diving suits), a pure young woman who is the opposite of the corrupt courtiers, a daughter whom her father brought up by the precepts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with naturalness and freedom. (She's really an anachronistic, late 20th Century young lady). Matters get complicated. Mathilde, needing funds for her experiments, has almost accepted to marry a rich old man who is looking forward to becoming a widower. The scene of a cynical prenuptial contract is a howl. Ponceludon is tempted by his new milieu, but he holds steady in his plans to rescue his people back home. Finally, he does get into the King's good grace. . .

There's a surprising amount of plot, but it is subservient to the minute-by-minute details. The developments include the main figures, a duel, a touching sequence around the Abbé de l'Epée (a real figure) and his school for deaf-mutes, in which the court's snobs get their comeuppance, and more. . . The movie was the opener at the 1996 Cannes Festival. It is beautifully photographed and scored, with a profusion of beautiful interiors, exteriors, costumes and artifacts. The casting is perfect, as are all the delicious performances. Remarkably, the film has three newcomers to the screen: Berling (Ponceludon), Godrèche (Mathilde) and scriptwriter Waterhouse. Director Leconte, known in France for comedies not exported to the USA, has a sense of humor that he sneaks even into such films as the thriller "Monsieur Hire, " and the very offbeat love story "The Hairdresser's Wife. " He has stated that he did not attempt to catch with total authenticity the looks, moods, sounds or lifestyles of the period. Or to draw parallels between that society and ours. No matter. His quirky recreation is convincing, his subject is original and the film drips with Frenchness as much as any I can think of. Copyright © Edwin Jahiel

Addendum to Ridicule:  The art of eloquence

Esprit  is the French word for the highest degree of conversational brilliance. Esprit [or as it is called in Leconte’s film le bel esprit] is never self-deprecating, the way English humor tends to be. To practice esprit, one usually needs a target.

The French certainly have a sense of humor; they laugh at the same jokes we do. But there is a side of them that prefers this combative form of humor, fueled by ridicule and mockery.[...]

The French also value precision in language use. The term for speaking well is une langue châtiée, which literally means a "punished tongue." And that's not far off the method used to make children express themselves in a refined and polished manner. Even before they go to school, children are drilled in grammar and rhetoric. After years of that treatment the grown-up French don't hesitate to correct each other, and especially foreigners

In 1992, the National Assembly wanted to modify the Constitution to include the phrase "French is the language of the Republic." Parliament  debated the issue for several days and finally concluded that the sentence should be, "The language of the Republic is French." (The term "Republic" had to be in the subject clause of the sentence, instead of the object, because everything in France must proceed from the République.). [...]

Given the French love of rhetoric, precise language, and esprit, it should come as no surprise that they expect their politicians to express themselves well, both in speech and writing. If a French president is caught reading poetry on his way to an international conference, no one accuses him of being pretentious, wasting his time, or squandering taxpayers' money. National politicians who have published a book are well regarded, and it's not uncommon to see ministers publish while they are in office. In 1976, while he was still in power, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing even took a fifteen-day hiatus from his duties to finish his book La Démocratie française.

The French's love of words and esprit creates a strange dynamic in political coverage. The words politicians choose are often the real news not what they actually say. Nothing fascinates the French more than what they call la petite phrase  (the little sentence), or murderous verbal jab, designed to cast ridicule on political opponents. After the president's highly ritualized New Year's Greetings, the press scrutinizes his words for two weeks. Endless editorials are written on what his real intentions may have been by using a certain word or expression. Was he making a dig at the prime minister? Was he trying to send a message about the budget?

Skillful politicians know how to use the fascination with the  spoken word to throw powder in opinion makers' eyes. President Jacques Chirac is a master of it. His first mandate has been marred by accusations of a dozen cases of corruption, embezzlement, and kickbacks that allegedly occurred during his mandate as mayor of Paris (1977-95). Most of his former collaborators have been named in more than a dozen cases under investigation, and some hav even been jailed.

In the fall of 2000, Chirac was named for the first time when it was revealed that a former fund-raiser had recorded a testimony on videotape just before his death. The fund-raiser claimed to have witnessed the exchange of a briefcase containing one million francs in Chirac's presence. The press went berserk, but a few days later, the president made a rare appearance on television and called the allegations abracadabrantesques. (The term, which can be translated loosely into "preposterifying," is borrowed from nineteenth-century poet Arthur Rimbaud). The ploy worked. The press dissected the expression for two days and then forgot about the allegations.

In a country where eloquence and rhetoric are prized, it should come as no surprise that authors and artists are highly regarded. [...] Intellectuals proliferate in such fertile grounds, and the French prize their intellectuals above all. Unlike in North America, the French intellectual is not just an expert or scholar. French intellectuals are, by definition, engagés [committed to a cause]. They are accomplished authors who push a cause either by getting involved in politics themselves or by throwing their weight behind a polemical issue, or even by creating an issue. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) was one of France's first high-profile intellectuals. He produced a fantastic body of poetry, but was also a politician who gained enough notoriety to become one of the five members of the executive council of the provisional government of the Second Republic. It was he who was chosen to proclaim the New Republic in 1848. Victor Hugo (1802-85), author of Les Misérables and Notre Dame de Paris, won a seat as député [people’s representative] in the same assembly. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), author of Democracy in America, was a député and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In the twentieth century, one of the  most prominent intellectuals was author André Malraux (1901-69), who became Minister of Culture under de Gaulle.

It was Émile Zola (1840-1902) who set the standard of the intellectuel engagé with his inflammatory pamphlet, J'accuse, written in 1898. Zola denounced an army conspiracy against a Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, who was found guilty twice of spying for the Germans, in fixed trials, and sent to the infamous Devil's Island in French Guiana. Zola accused almost every witness and general involved in the case of lying and covering up the affair. He demanded a third trial, but ended up on trial himself, accused of defamation. He was found guilty and voluntarily went into exile in London, but the issue polarized the Right and the Left in France and snowballed into one of the most severe political crises of the Third Republic. Dreyfus was tried twice more before being released and rehabilitated as an officer in 1906. Zola died a mysterious death by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1902.

And of course there was philosopher, author, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), who was never elected to any office, but whose political opinions held incredible sway in France throughout the twentieth century. In the wake of the May 1968 protests in France, Sartre founded France's first left-wing newspaper, Libération, which was openly Maoist.[...]

Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, p 64-70

A Note on Decolonisation

Unlike Britain, which decolonised its former white dominions by transferring power to local political leaders, France had no such tradition. As a result, when pressures for decolonisation grew after the Second World War, there was no precedent in French history to which France's governing élites could turn. Thus, at a conference organised in BRAZZAVILLE in 1944 to discuss the future of France's African empire, any possibility of self-government for the colonies was specifically ruled out, and the term 'decolonisation' itself only began to be used in French in the 1950s. The other key factor that framed the French approach to decolonisation after the war was the perception of France's post-war governing élites, of both right and left, of the key importance of the empire for France. Its preservation was seen as essential if France was to retain its great-power status in a new world order dominated by the two new superpowers, US and USSR. As a result, the French approach to decolonisation was framed by a mindset that saw decolonisation taking place through closer INTEGRATION with France rather than secession from it.

The French Union, the new name given to the empire, was established in 1946 to enable this to happen. However, under pressure from external events and an increasingly active nationalist movement, the French Union rapidly began to disintegrate. Indochina never fully joined and other parts of the empire, increasingly frustrated with the slowness of the reform process, rapidly began to demand greater autonomy and eventually independence. The mindset described above led France into two wars of decolonisation, first in Indochina, from which France was expelled following its defeat at DIEN BIEN PHU in 1954, and then in ALGERIA, which became independent following a war which lasted from 1954 to 1962. In other parts of the world, however, notably TUNISIA and MOROCCO (which became independent in 1956), and Black Africa (1960), the transition to independence took place largely without violence and bloodshed and France was able to transfer power to local élites that were friendly to France. (Tony Chafer) Francophone Studies, 2002.

2. Chocolat (1988) - A Film by Claire Denis

Synopsis of the film:  France, whose father was a commissaire in the French colonial administration, visits the remote region of the Cameroons where she spent much of her childhood. She hitches a lift to the airport to catch a plane into the bush from Mungo Park, a black American who has settled in the country. Her mind flashes back to scenes of her youth: she remembers her friendship with the black servant Protée; the Englishman, Boothby, arriving for dinner when her father was away and her mother hastily unpacking her evening dress from a trunk; the upheaval caused when a plane crashed nearby and the house was invaded by the crew and passengers, including a white coffee planter and his black mistress, a young couple on their first trip to Africa who refuse to accept treatment from the local doctor, and Luc, an ex-seminarian who has gone native. Luc detects an attraction between France’s  mother Aimée and Protée, and taunts the latter. When Aimée makes a half-hearted attempt to seduce Protée, he turns her down and is banished, at Aimée's request, from the house to the garage, where France visits him secretly. The plane is finally repaired and the guests depart. France's rêverie ends and she arrives at the airport. Mungo Park, assuming she is an ordinary tourist, asks if she is disappointed that he is not a real 'native'. (MFB, April 1989)

Three comments:

a) From Claire Denis herself

I come to this conference [on “Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema”] as someone raised in European culture but born outside Europe. I want to begin by referring to a line from Passion [a 1982 film by Jean-Luc Godard]: 'Il faut vivre les histoires avant de les inventer' -  You,have to live stories before you invent them. This for me is an important statement. I believe that when you make a documentary you concentrate on the 'other', but when you make fiction you talk about yourself. Cinema is therefore a very personal medium, and if European cinema is anything it is a reflection of subjective European experiences.

When I was making Chocolat  I think that I had a desire to express a certain guilt I felt as a child raised in a colonial world. When the film was completed I was asked to write a piece on it for the press booklet. Unsure of what to write, I found an introduction to an anthology of Black literature and poetry by Jean-Paul Sartre which suggested that for three thousand years the official view of the world had been a white view and he [Sartre] now welcomed an alternative - the view from those who had been watched, what they saw when they looked at us, the white Europeans. I put this in the booklet because I thought that there was very little else I could say knowing I was white. I tried to be honest in admitting that Chocolat  is essentially a white view of the 'other'.

Raising money for the film was difficult because of the subject matter, but significantly, I did not experience any problems in actually discussing colonialism - unlike the censorship experienced by filmmakers in France after the Algerian war. I was, however, strongly advised to construct an affair between Protée, the male black servant in the film, and the white woman. The producers saw this outcome as good box office. But this would have totally destroyed what the film was about for me, so I resisted the pressure to alter the script. When it came to doing the scene in which Protée resists the possibility of a sexual encounter with the woman, I shot it quickly in one take, before anyone could even attempt to suggest an alternative. I know this was a big disappointment for the production company, because they really wanted me to re-shoot the scene and to change it, but Protée’s refusal was the purpose of the film. Screening Europe, p 66-67

b)  From “Nostalgia and the Ideology of the Impossible in European Cinema”  By  Ien Ang. Screening Europe, p 25-26

Europe's impotence in productively dealing with its colonialist past can be highlighted through a reading of Claire Denis's film Chocolat. Chocolat  recalls the last years of French West African colonialism through the memory of a young white woman, whose name is, significantly enough, France, and who in the late 1950s grew up as the daughter of a French district officer in Cameroon. The film is about the subjective experience of colonialism from both the perspective of the colonised, personified by the family's black servant Protée, and that of the little girl who was too young to understand what colonial power was about and who treated Protée as both her friend and her subordinate. For reasons that need not be explicated here the uneasy bond between the two ended abruptly, and incomprehensibly to France, almost coinciding with the end of the colonial period. When France returns to Cameroon many years later, in the 1980s, she finds herself unable to recover her colonial childhood; she'd like to see the house her family lived in, but isn't sure whether she should. Protée does not reappear.

The film, then, problematises the difficulty, if not impossibility, on unproblematic post-colonial re-encounter (and reconciliation) beween coloniser and colonised, because those who were colonised have changed, no longer defining themselves in terms of dependency and marginalisation, no longer in silent, private and impotent wrath and suppressed desire as was the overtly loyal Protée, but busy transforming the colonial legacy into an emergent, self-determined identity, a society of their own. In fact, what France, or France, must realize is the ultimate irrelevance of her presence in this post-colonial African place: none of the locals pays any attention to her, she talks to no one, remains a bystander, an invisible onlooker. The only 'other' she teams up with is an African-American who came to Africa in the hope of rejoining his 'brothers' but finds that his identity is American, not African. “They've no use of my being here. Here I am nothing, a fantasy,” he says. His own fantasy, we might add, just as France finds her past to have disappeared, unrecuperable - meaning (so the film suggests by emphasizing France's detached silence) that she has no identity, reduced to nothingness. “No past, no future.”

c) “Fom European Cinema on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” by Stuart Hall. Screening Europe, p 49-54
When Europe attempts to encounter itself at its edge, so to speak, as it does in Claire Denis's Chocolat, is there any more controlled, less hysterical, less internally dislocated way of its confronting or coming to terms with the past? Paradoxically, Chocolat  is the only real attempt at a post-colonial text among these films. [...] Chocolat  is an attempt to say something about Europe from its margins. There are some simple sentimentalities at work here, and even a touch of the exotic. But the core of the film, what I would call the 'colonial family romance', is established with great insight and sensitivity. The 'colonial family romance' consists of the father (the European administrator), the madame, the child and the servant. This quadrilateral of power, sexual and other relations is the discursive field across which Chocolat  mainly operates. The intricate reversals - of love, authority, dependency - between the child and Protée, the African servant, are a beautifully judged commentary on the way power and desire, authority and intimacy are doubly inscribed in the colonial relationship. Only so long as the child, France, remains a child is the 'romance' between her and the servant (the two 'sibling' dependants) tenuously permissible, and it can't last. The effort of the grown-up France to rediscover this 'lost' colonial world is doomed to failure. [...]

Chocolat  also contains one sweet symbolic moment of colonial revenge (films like this often contain moments which incite a sort of surplus pleasure which eludes the control of the filmic discourse) [as, for example,] when Protée throws the white hippie, Luke, and his back-pack off the verandah. A film which is able to say to those European hippies who think it's fun to 'make out' in Africa for a white man, 'Why don't you go home?' has a lot going for it. This ambivalent European figure [Luke], who quotes from European high literature while seducing the madame, on the one hand, and insists on using the 'boy's' (that is, men servants’ shower, on the other, deserves what he got: his comeuppance.

I'm not sure the madame quite deserved what she got. Nevertheless, the moment when she waits for Protée in the dark on her knees behind the curtain, overcome by the sensuous beauty of his body, and he, silently refusing what she offers, instead makes her stand up, is a remarkable moment for the European cinema. But what is powerful about Chocolat  is not what happens but what doesn't. It is a film of refusals, of barred intimacies, of turning away, of meetings that don't come off, of relationships in the past that cannot be recovered, colonial world that is gone for ever. The aptly-named France, who has returned to reconnect with her past, discovers its impossibility. The black American cannot 'find himself' in Africa either. 'Here, I'm nothing. A fantasy.' 'Run away quick,' he advises France, 'before you get eaten up.' The faint possibility of something between them, the two outsiders, is unrealized. She tentatively proposes. He gently refuses. When she finally decides not to go on but to go back to France, Protée - a modern Protée, no longer the 'houseboy', but just another airport baggage-handler - can be seen in the distance, talking and laughing with his mates, oblivious of her and us. But she doesn't see him and he doesn't see her. They are both in the traveling business, but in different time frames. Their trajectories cross, but do not meet.

Chocolat  is about the dislocations produced by Claire Denis's disciplined refusals, the refusal of absolution. There may come a time when France and Africa can meet again, on different terms, but for now it is either too early or too late for such easy narrative conclusions. And the one thing which Africa should not, at this moment, be required to do is to forgive Europe anything.

Chocolat  is a post-colonial text, as it were, by default. Recently, there has been some criticism of the spate of films coming out of or about Africa made by white film-makers which have the European rather than the African experience at their centre. Chocolat suggests that this may be the only kind of film European film-makers should be making about Africa just now. It may be time for Europeans to confront what colonisation has done to them rather than instantly taking on the white man's burden, once again, of  speaking for the 'other'.

Chocolat and women's experience of the colonies

Whereas during the 1970s, films set in the French colonies tended to dwell on the military or the political, it was only in the 1980s that 'the personal experience or semi-autobiographical recollection of an ex-colonial' became a common theme. Many of these 'ex-colonial' films have been made by women, among them Claire Denis's Chocolat (1988) set in Cameroon, Marie-France Pisier's Le Bal du gouverneur (1990) set in Noumea, and Brigitte Roüan's Outremer (1990) set in Algeria. [...] What seems to characterise women's representations of colonialism is a critical perspective, but on a personal or domestic rather than a historical or epic scale. Frederic Strauss has rather schematically contrasted the 'soft' films by Denis, Pisier and Roüan with 'hard' military accounts of colonialism by male directors such as Pierre Schoendoerffer, Régis Wargnier and Jean-Claude Brisseau. Certainly the marginal position of women in the colonies symbolises their marginality in society as a whole. Claire Denis has said of colonial wives and daughters that they represented France, but lived an empty and futile existence while their husbands and fathers lived a romanticised adventure closer to the world of Tintin.

Claire Denis spent her early childhood in Cameroon, and on her return as an adult found herself accused of being a mere tourist. The question of identity raised by that experience is dramatised in the frame narrative of Chocolat, which presents a white adult narrator, rather predictably called France, whose Cameroon childhood forms, in one long flashback the main body of the film. As France drives (left to right) through the African landscape, the past is suddently evoked in a tracking shot which reverses her direction, and leads us (right to left) into the past. France's point of view is thus no longer that of a French tourist but of a young girl who is part of colonial West Africa.

The narrative now centres on France's parents, and in particular on her mother's unfulfilled desire for the black houseboy, Protée. The thematics of female desire, insufferable heat, and stifling convention are reminiscent of Duras's India Song, but Chocolat is far more conventional in form, and the constraints of the female colonial experience are tempered with an evident nostalgia for the period, the setting, and for childhood. Nevertheless this impression is qualified in the epilogue, in which the adult France is told by a black American soldier that he has both an Afrocentric past and a future, while she, as an ex-colonial, has neither. Denis has stated that she was determined not to restrict herself to the story of her childhood, but intended in this conclusion to give a glimpse of Africa after colonisation. Her two subsequent films, the quasi-documentary S'en fout la mort (1990) and the violent thriller J'ai pas sommeil (1994), continue this interest in contemporary societv. © Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema, pp. 94-95.

Four Reviews

a. Watching Claire Denis' Chocolat, you feel as if your senses have been quickened, reawakened. The movie is like sex for the eyes -- it's ravishing in a way that goes straight into your blood. Denis builds up her movie with such small moments and performances, as well as with moods you want to savor -- the lazy haze of afternoon, the romantic allure of evening. And though she may end with a cynical conclusion about cultural divisions, she also leaves you with enough images and (purposely) unexplained mysteries to last you long after you've left the theater. - Washington Post

b. Chocolat is a film of infinite delicacy. It is not one of those steamy melodramatic interracial romances where love conquers all. It is a movie about the rules and conventions of a racist society and how two intelligent adults, one black, one white, use their mutual sexual attraction as a battleground on which, very subtly, to taunt each other. The woman of course has the power; all of French colonial society stands behind her. But the man has the moral authority, as he demonstrates in the movie's most important scene, which is wordless, brief, and final. - Chicago Sun-Times

c. In Chocolat, a young woman is traveling alone in the Cameroon. As she looks at the countryside, her memories take her back to the 1950s, the last years of French rule in this African country. Her name is France and as a young girl she's isolated from her beautiful and bored mother Aimée and her father, a district officer who travels a lot. France's closest companion is Protée, the family's house servant. They share riddles and spend time together despite the racial and cultural barriers that separate them. Protée's sexual yearning for France's mother, and hers for him, is a source of tension in the household. This and other tensions that have been gathering are brought to the surface when a group of travelers from a downed plane arrive at the compound. Among them is a coffee grower who symbolizes the worst racist tendencies of colonial intruders. Also present is Luc, an ex-seminarian who is crossing Africa on foot. He eats with the servants, sleeps outside, and uses their shower. Singling out Protée, he says, "You're even worse than the priests who raised you." In the end Aimée decides to assign Protée to duties elsewhere. The humiliation and the anger he feels are directed at France. Now, still unreconciled to her past, this young woman listens to an American black who tells her that Africa holds no answers and that she has no future here. In her début as a director, Claire Denis has fashioned a subtle and very captivating portrait of colonial Africa, based on her own childhood experiences there. "I just tried to describe the visible part of the iceberg. In Africa, nothing is ever said. But the weight of things is always there." © By Frédéric and Mary Ann Brussat

d. Not to be confused with the Academy Award-winning film of the same name that came out in 2000, Chocolat is a slow, beautiful film about colonial French Africa in the 1950s. The film is framed by a present-day woman, France, who is revisiting North Cameroon, where she was the young daughter of Marc and Aimée Dalens, district officer in the remote outpost of Mindif. Most of the film centres on the tense relationships engendered by the family1s houseboy, Protée. Protée is beloved by the young France and respected by her father, Marc. But he is envied by their house guests, and runs afoul of the mother, when she makes a pass at him; his refusal to accept her advance forces him out of the house. Chocolat is about the racism inherent in the colonial situation, and the impossibility of equal relations between the colonizer and colonized even, or especially, between lovers. Various French visitors arrive and leave Mindif through the course of the film. All of them show that they have been corrupted by the colonial system in one way or another. There is the wealthy coffee plantation owner who keeps a black mistress in his room and brings her leftovers from the kitchen, and the wives of the French civil servants who openly discuss the attractiveness of Protée. Despite a simmering mutual attraction between Aimée and Protée, they manage to maintain their proper social positions until late in the film, when Aimée comes on to Protée. Protée's refusal of her advance reveals the nobility of his character, and the penalty for that nobility in a corrupt environment. The film is an indictment of colonialism on a very personal level. The acting is strong, the sets and setting are beautiful and the production values are very high.

The trouble with Chocolat is that it is so slow and subtle in building the tension surrounding Aimée and Protée that the effect of that tension verges on boredom. The slow place of the film is no doubt evocative of the slow pace of life in a remote town such as Mindif. But in mirroring that pace, the film no longer compels the viewer to want to watch it. In its subtlety, too, it lacks the punch of a more comprehensive critique of colonialism. There are worse economic and social inequalities than the aborted love affair of a civil servant1s wife and her houseboy. The framing device is likewise unnecessary. The present-day narrative that begins and ends the film is so brief that it carries no weight on its own; nor does it add anything to the extended flashback that makes up the rest of the film. In short, an otherwise beautiful and beautifully produced film is marred by a script so subtle and under-written that it verges on inconsequence. © By Graham Barron

3. Overseas (Outremer) 1990 - A film by Brigitte Roüan

In French Algeria, after World War II,  three daughters of wealthy settlers begin their adult lives. Zon marries an often absent sailor. Malène's husband, Gildas, refuses to work in the farm, so she has to take care of everything. Gritte, the youngest, does not want to marry and is a nurse for the natives. We will follow their three different destinies.

Historical context - Algeria: The Unacknowleged War

Outside of France, very little is known about the war in Algeria (1954-62). It was certainly one of the most traumatic events in recent French memory, at least as traumatic as World War II. It is no exaggeration to call it the Vietnam of the French - in many ways, this is even an understatement.

The conflicts resemble each other in striking ways. Both were colonial, or neo-colonial, wars. In both cases, two powerful countries were defeated by an enemy considerably inferior in means ? the French sent 1.3 million troops to fight against about 330,000 Algerian guerrillas, and lost. And at home the populations of both countries were split over the war, with huge segments opposed to their country's military campaigns abroad to begin with.

That's where the similarities end, though. Imagine if, at the time of the Vietnam War, there had been one million American settlers who had lived in Vietnam for four generations. Imagine if Vietnam had not been "foreign territory," but a part of the United States, a fifty-first state-and if North Vietnamese terrorists had killed twenty-five hundred American civilians in the United States. And just imagine the scenario of the U.S. Army becoming so displeased with its own government's conduct in Vietnam that it attempted to overthrow the American government y staging a coup in Washington. This is exactly what happened to France during the war in Algeria.

Few books and even fewer films tell the story of this war. The French government did not even call it a war until that term was accepted in a vote on June 10, 1999, thirty-seven years after the 1962 cease-fire. Until then, it had been known officially as an aspiration de maintien de l’ordre (a law-and-order operation) to contain Muslim nationalists in French territory. But a war it was. At the height of the operation, in 1959, five hundred thousand French troops were stationed in Algeria. During the conflict, twenty-five thousand French soldiers were killed, and probably ten times more Algerians.

Four decades later, the War of Algeria remains an open wound in France's national psyche. For the French, the physical hardship of World War II may have been greater, but the psychological consequences of Algeria were at least as terrible, partly because, unlike World War II, the war in Algeria was not a "noble" one by any stretch imagination. France's attempts to "pacify" Algeria were shockingly out of step with the times; in the rest of Africa the decolonization movement was in full swing. Unlike World War II, the War of Algeria offers no psychological refuge in a "Resistance," whether real or mythical. The millions of men who fought as conscripts or voluntary soldiers in Algeria were either obeying orders or willfully fighting for the cause of a French Algeria. Some of the French who opposed retaining French Algeria protested, but that was all. [...]

The story of French Algeria started in the 1830s, when France arrived in the North African country with the official pretext of cracking down on piracy in the Mediterranean. Like other countries at the time, France wanted to extend its influence and boost its prestige by acquiring foreign territory. France also wanted to get a hand of Algeria's rich agricultural shores and resume colonial expansion, which had stopped when France forfeited New France to the British in 1763.

However, France would not only settle in its new colony: it would make Algeria part of France.

By 1954, Algeria was the home of one million "Europeans"-referred to this way because half of them were of either Spanish, Italian, or Maltese origin. Writer Albert Camus, whose mother was Spanish, is the most famous of these settlers, who later came to call themselves Pieds-Noirs  (Black Feet), a reference to workers in the coal bunkers of Mediterranean ferries. Pieds-Noirs  were the French born in Algeria, as opposed to immigrants from France and native Muslims, and they developed a distinct identity. For one, 80 percent of Europeans in Algeria lived in cities making them twice as urban as the rest of the French.

The main push for settlement took place between 1848 and 1890 and was carried out pretty much in the fashion of the times ? basically, the same way Europeans had settled the western United States, Canada, and Australia. The French seized the best land, bulldozed the Muslims into the worst corners of the country, and installed themselves in some seven hundred towns specially created for the settlers. However, contrary to what happened elsewhere, demographics worked against North African settlers. Between 1830 and 1954, the Muslim population in Algeria tripled from three to nine million. Settlers feared being overrun.

In 1848, the French government declared Algeria part of France - the way Hawaii and Alaska are part of the Unite States. From then on, Algeria would not be administered by a single colonial ministry; each French ministry would be responsible for its own affairs in Algeria. The settlers elected their own representatives to the National Assembly and the laws of the Republic were applied there. In 1870, the thirty thousand Jews living in Algeria obtained the same civil and political rights they were granted everywhere else in the Republic. And in 1889, the children of European immigrants in Algeria were granted French citizenship, as was customary in France. The indigènes musulmans  (Muslim natives) in Algeria had no civil rights; they were mere subjects of the Republic. Over the years, only several thousand Muslims managed to acquire French citizenship. They did so by proving they lived according to French mores, or by performing "exceptional service" to the Republic, in the army or as civilians.

The French government and some high civil servants did see that disaster was looming and periodically tried to improve the lot of Muslims by giving them more political and civil rights and improving services. But the government had to contend with resistance from the European settlers, who lobbied successfully to remove the most pro-native administrators. The settlers' interest was clear: they needed impoverished Muslims to work as cheap labor in their businesses and on their farms. If the government in Paris had managed to break the settlers' resistance to reforms early enough, there might never had been a war in Algeria. But the Muslims never got anything better than the right to manage their local affairs. Muslims in Tunisia and Morocco had retained some capacity of self-government within the French protectorate system, and there had never been as many European settlers in those countries as there were in Algeria. The Muslims' situation in Algeria just kept deteriorating. By 1940, only percent of native Muslims had a formal education of any sort. Settlers' land plots were on average eight times bigger than the Muslims'.

The situation proved to be fertile ground for the rising independence movement, which slowly gained momentum. Until the mid-1930s, Algerian Muslims had asked for the obvious-equal civil rights-but after decades of refusal and arrest, the native Muslim population became more stridently nationalist. Things did not improve under the control of the racist Vichy government. Before the Liberation, de Gaulle's plan was to grant Algerian Muslims citizenship and civil rights after war, but after five years of crippling war, the government in Paris was too weak to break the settlers' lobby. In 1947, when the French government finally granted equal political rights to the Muslim natives, it was too little too late.

Some date the beginning of the Algerian war to May 8, 1945, the day Germany capitulated. On that day, a crowd of ten thousand demonstrators gathered in the Algerian town of Sétif to demand the liberation of Messali Hadi, a nationalist leader who had been arrested two weeks earlier. When one of the demonstrators waved an Algerian flag, French gendarmes tried to pull it down and a riot broke out. Nobody knows who fired first, but dozens of Europeans and Arabs died in the massacre, and the strife spread across the rest of Algeria. Facing a rebellion, the French government sent the army and created local militia units to repress it. In the following two months, fifteen hundred Arabs were supposedly killed-although historians now agree that the figure was probably closer to eight thousand.

Nothing serious happened for the next nine years, but Algerian nationalism had reached the point of no return In 1954, Algeria was the world's last remaining Arab colony. The most extreme faction of the nationalist movement, the Marxist FLN (Front de Libération Nationale)  organized its own secret army, though it could only arm about eight hundred men. On October 31, 1954, the FLN launched seventy simultaneous attacks against police stations, sentry posts, and isolated farms-and this is generally recognized as the first day of the War of Algeria.

The eight-year conflict went through many phases. The FLN was most effective as a guerrilla army in the rural areas, where it got support from local populations. Algerian fighters were never a match for the French army, so they concentrated on skirmishes, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism, both in Algeria and in France. In total, 330,000 Algerian fighters were involved at one point or another, and half of them were killed. The biggest push was in the six-month battle of Algiers, in 1957, which was in fact series of continual skirmishes and terrorist raids that the French army eventually broke. In 1958, the French built electric fences along Algeria's border with Tunisia, cutting the FLN from its main supply route.

In strictly military terms, the FLN's secret army had been defeated. It never managed to hold any ground agains the French army. But politically, the FLN won, partly because of their terror campaign, but more importantly because their denunciations of France's behavior gained the sympathy of the United Nations, and the French almost found themselves in diplomatic isolation. The two superpowers of the time, Russia and the United States, both stood for an openly anti-colonialist policy.

The French army's military victories only boosted the FLN's diplomatic success. The conflict was brutal, almost of another age. The French army used all the means of repression conceivable at the time. Both sides used torture and terrorism and massacred women and children. In 1956, the French intelligence services even went as far as to highjack a Tunisian commercial flight in order to capture five FLN leaders on board. It worked, but the FLN had no trouble convincing the international community that the French were the villains.

While they fought the enemy, both sides had to deal with severe infighting in their ranks. The Marxist FLN was conducting a war against the French army, but also against the more moderate segments of the Muslim population who wanted to reach a peaceful agreement with the French and non-Marxist factions who were attempting to negotiate with the French government. At stake in Algeria was the question of who would go on to form the independent government. The FLN won, but their internal terror campaign cost at least ten thousand Muslim lives. After the war, most of the thirty thousand harkis  (Muslim auxiliary troops in the French army) who remained in Algeria instead of taking refuge in France were hacked to death.

Infighting did not cost as many lives on the French side, but it did bring France to the brink of civil war, not once, but twice. For the most part, these divisions were the result of the French governments' ineptitude. From  1946 until 1958, France changed governments twenty times,  removing any possibility of a coherent policy. Each new prime minister stressed his resolve to hang on to French Algeria, then appointed a new set of generals, diplomats, and representatives to deal with the issue. Soon enough, Parliament ousted the government over an unrelated issue, and the cycle continued.

All the while, the Europeans of Algeria became restless and increasingly defiant of the government. On one hand, settlers appreciated the fact that the French army was acting with more resolve than it had during the War of Indochina (1945-54), where they were defeated by Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh. But they could not accept the fact that while the French army was fighting, the French government was  trying to negotiate a settlement. However, the majority of the French in Europe did not support the war. Some  actively opposed it, especially on the Left, and most French were simply indifferent. The government's dual agenda of trying to win militarily while negotiating a settlement was understandable, but the Europeans in Algeria felt betrayed. The most enlightened among the settlers realized that much of the Muslim revolt was fueled by poor living conditions and high unemployment, but they also blamed the French government for this. The situation required a strong hand in a velvet glove, a formula France's frequently changing governments could not offer. Europeans in Algiers became more and more strident in their protests at the same time Muslim nationalists did.

The French government also lost control of the army. Many officers, who had been in Algeria for a while, began blaming the government for the situation, too. That was new. In spite of France's agitated political history over the previous two hundred years, the French military had traditionally been very deferent to the government - except in the cases of Napoléon in 1799 and de Gaulle in 1940. Many soldiers, veterans of Indochina, did not accept the fact that politicians were busy conferring with the enemy while they were losing men in battle.

In the winter of 1958, rumors of a military coup started circulating. Generals let their view be known: France needed a strong leader to get the country out of the Algerian mess. The name of de Gaulle-who had been retired for twelve years - began to circulate. In April 1958, the government changed once more. Both the French in Paris and the Europeans in Algiers answered with barricades. A group of protesters took over the government's palace in Algiers and declared the creation of a comité de salut public (a committee of public salvation) - an allusion to the revolutionary government of 1792-94, which ran the New Republic and defended it against foreign invasion. The army interposed and appointed General Massu, a moderate faithful to de Gaulle, as head of the committee. Then, on May 13, the commander in chief in Algeria, General Raoul Salan, demanded the return of de Gaulle as France's president.

De Gaulle could not be ignored anymore, and he declared himself ready to assume power if Parliament was willing to give him a mandate. On June 1, Parliament voted him prime minister and granted him state-of emergency powers for six months, as well as the mandate to draft a new  constitution. On June 13, de Gaulle went to Algeria and made the famous speech where he declared: "Je vous ai compris!" (I have understood you!) His words calmed both the army and the European population, though he never said exactly what or who he understood. De Gaulle then proceeded to reshuffle the army's command both in Paris and in Algiers, in order to break the defiant spirit that had grown among the generals.

De Gaulle accomplished two things. First, he understood that he  could not resolve the Algerian quagmire without solid political institutions at home, so he dedicated his time to changing the Constitution first and working to gain the support he needed to get the change accepted. Then he invested several billion francs in the economic development of Algeria, in the petroleum extraction industry in particular, which created dynamism in the local economy and satisfied the local Europeans.

The honeymoon lasted a year, until de Gaulle began floating ideas that made it clear he wanted to seek a compromise with the Algerians rather than crush the rebellion. De Gaulle had always demonstrated an extraordinarily good instinct for understanding what France's best interests were. He knew that, in light of the decolonization movement going on elsewhere, the war in Algeria risked damaging France's prestige and reputation beyond repair and undermining its position as a major power. Algeria could not remain French.

By 1960 he was speaking openly about self-determination and the possibility of a referendum in which the whole French population (including native Muslims) could choose between giving Algeria independence, granting it autonomy within France, and/or keeping a French Algeria with a  fully integrated Muslim majority. The French supported the referendum idea, but the Pieds-Noirs responded with violence, riots, and barricades. The army was having as much difficulty policing the white settlers as controlling the Algerians.

In 1961, European settlers decided that they would not trust Paris to defend their interests and created the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS). For the next year and a half, the OAS carried out military operations and assassinations, bombed the Algerians, and committed terrorist acts in France. The OAS killed a total of about five thousand people in Algeria and Paris.

On April 21, 1961, four retired generals who favored a French Algeria staged a coup in Algiers and attempted to seize power. Panic overtook Paris. Nobody knew who was involved in the coup and rumors circulated that paratroopers would be sent to attack Paris. The coup went nowhere, though, thanks to the personality of de Gaulle. In a TV appearance, wearing his uniform, de Gaulle appealed to soldiers in Algeria to not support the coup. He concluded in his peremptory style: "Français, aidez-moi!" (People of France, help me!). Rank and file soldiers and most officers remained faithful to the general and the coup attempt failed.

Two of the rebel generals, Raoul Salan and Edmond Jouhaud, escaped, went underground, and joined the OAS,which they ran for a year until they were captured in March 1962. Meanwhile, de Gaulle's government fought to maintain control over the army and the police in Algeria and remove elements sympathetic to the OAS.

Throughout 1961, de Gaulle's government conducted secret talks with the FLN. They finally reached an accord in the spa town of Evian, and a cease-fire was called on March 19, 1962. Two weeks later, 90 percent of the French population in France voted in favor of the accord, which granted total independence to Algeria. However, among the 10 percent of the population who disagreed with granting Algeria independence, the grudges were deep, and would last many years.

Realizing that it was fighting for a lost cause, the OAS changed its strategy and decided to fight a defensive battle in Algeria to protect settlers from the threat of massacre by Muslims, which was real. But the OAS also conducted terror operations in Paris, including two assassination attempts on de Gaulle - this was the backdrop for the famous novel and film Day of the jackal.

The French infighting over the question of Algeria produced deep fault lines in the society that are still visible today. Communists and socialists, with their powerful anti-colonial discourse, were vindicated. From this time on, a sizable segment of the French population became militantly and stridently anti-colonialist and denounced neo-colonialism in any form.

Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, pp 101-111

On Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

French general and statesman who headed the Free French government in exile during World War II, founder and the first President of the Fifth Republic. Born in Lille to a conservative and strongly Catholic family, he graduated from the Saint-Cyr military academy (1912) and served with distinction under Pétain in World War I. Between the two wars, he taught military history at Saint-Cyr and acquired a reputation for his new ideas about the deployment of mobile armoured divisions instead of relying on static defensive fortifications (Maginot Line). After the fall of France, he escaped to London and on 18 June 1940 broadcast his historic appeal, inviting his compatriots to join him in a Free French resistance movement against the enemy.  This June broadcast was the founding moment of the de Gaulle legend and gave him a sense of mission to represent and defend the 'greatness of France'. After the liberation of France, he returned to Paris and headed the Provisional Government. After twelve weeks in office, he resigned in 1946 because his proposals for a strong presidential government were rejected by the Constituent Assembly. He remained in a solitary self-imposed exile awaiting the call back to power. This occurred in 1958 when, following a military rebellion in ALGERIA, the National Assembly elected him Prime Minister and granted him emergency powers to solve the Algerian problem and restore political stability. He drafted a new constitution based on the principle of executive authority, had it approved by referendum, and was elected President of the Fifth Republic in 1959. Once in  office, he disowned the defenders of Algérie Française when he realized the Algerian FLN could not be militarily defeated, and agreed to Algerian independence in the EVIAN AGREEMENTS (1962). Re-elected in 1965, he resigned in 1969 and worked on his memoirs until his death in 1970. (Naaman Kessous) Francophone Studies, 2002.

OverseasFilm Review

By Edwin Jahiel

For France, a major colonial power through World War II, Algeria was, in theory, an "overseas department" rather than a colony. But native, separatist resistance began in 1945. The French, many of them in Algeria for generations, thought it inconceivable that this was not their land. Euphemistically, they referred to the growing uprising as "the events", somehow the way the Irish used to speak of "troubles." These "events," however, became the Algerian War (1954-62) which ended with a new, independent Algeria.

Actress Brigitte Roüan's first feature as director is partly autobiographical, complex and impressive film. Roüan chronicles three sisters, from 1945 to 1964, both as one story and as three, one per sister. Zon (Nicole Garcia) the oldest, is married to a French Navy officer, much too often at sea, while his spouse keeps producing kids. He is insecure and mercurial but nonetheless the center of Zon's existence. In one of several striking sequences, he lets Zon dance an erotic paso doble with another naval officer, while he chats away on technical matters with another colleague. The moment the dancing is over though, the husband heaps insults on Zon. Middle sister Malène (played by Roüan) loves her book-worm husband. He is such a do-nothing that the full burden of running their farm and winery falls on Malène's shoulders. The youngest, Gritte (Marianne Basler), becomes engaged to a young diplomat but keeps postponing the marriage.

The film's story-telling device recalls a little that of the Japanese classic "Rashomon." With zig-zags, flashbacks and new points of view, each section focuses on a sister, yet the entire group of family, friends and neighbors are included too -- something like an expanded tribe of Europeans. Initially, the French community is shown in what on the surface may look like an idyllic existence. In reality this is a blend of colonial and provincial life, limited and stunting. The French may also remind you of certain settlers in Westerns, who socialize with fellow-ranchers living miles away. While the comparison with the Raj -- the time of the British in India -- also comes to mind, things were different in Algeria. True, both the British and the French ruled, but whereas the Brits were essentially aloof and held administrative positions, the masses of the French were of the bourgeoisie and the working class. They toiled just as hard as their Metropolitan (mainland) counterparts. Even the respective paternalisms of the British and the French were quite unlike. Many of the French owned land and pitched in like farmers eveywhere. The nickname of the Algerian French, "pieds-noirs," (black feet) comes from their contact with the soil.

Each story in "Overseas" intensifies the psychological content and the political context. The "events" escalate into warfare between the French Army and the Algerian "fellaghas" (rebels). The country houses become fortresses with sandbags, the fields are protected by soldiers. As the stories develop, each one sheds more light on what we've already seen. Roüan directs perceptively, using an elliptical style, utter realism and telling details. She stays away from gratuitous dramatics and from spelling things out -- yet she makes point after point. Now and then the film could have used somewhat clearer editing -- though no real damage is done. Roüan's subtle feminist stance is sharp and explicit: the sisters are not "better" than the men, but they are much more interesting, complex and individualistic. Roüan neither fabricates this view nor thrusts it on the audience. She does it with convincing naturalness and naturalism. All of this may not be immediately apparent to all foreign, contemporary audiences, unfamiliar as they are of French history or of the colonials' special mentality and convoluted politics.

Although this was not in Roüan's mind, in terms of films and cultures, "Overseas" also stands for the Atlantic, a sea of incomprehension between the USA and France. And since, even in France these days, the sense of the past is increasingly weakening among many of the younger generations, I suspect that several of the movie's subtler implications will be lost. The viewers should, however, at a minimum, recognize the exterior trappings of the period, such as the commotion among the French when insurrection leader Ferhat Abbas flies to Cairo; the car horns honking dot-dot-dot-dash-dash for Al-gé-rie FRAN-ÇAISE; De Gaulle on the radio stating his famous "Françaises et Français, je vous ai compris," ("French people, I have understood you,") a declaration that raised hopes but in fact was the prelude of the retreat from Algeria and a near-civil war in France. No matter. The powerful, accurate and deeply-felt "Overseas", both for the initiates and those less familiar with history, is an exquisitely constructed bridge between the present and another time, another place. [Pub. 9 July 1992]

 IMDB user comments for Outremer

A rather slow film about people who are not very likeable, but whose lives have interest and value. Through flash back the stories of three sisters are told; each different, each with both good and bad qualities, but each very real and very human. Of particular interest is the colonialist point of view relative the the Algerian war. These people do not consider that they are interlopers. The sisters were born there -- it is their home. In historic context France was a corrupt colonial power but this is a story on more human terms not terribly interested in geo political lessons. This is a film that will require that the viewer think. If you are a car chase, blow-em-up, blood spattered on the wall junkie, save your time and money. Don't rent this one. That way you won't have to turn your head on. (Reb9 - Houston, 25 June 2000).

4.  La Promesse  - A Film by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

Three Reviews

a)  Moral Rebellion at Heart of La Promesse

Morality is a given in the movies; everyone, even the worst of creatures, knows if they're bad or good. In "La Promesse," an exceptional film from Belgium, all of that is reversed as a sense of right and wrong struggles to emerge in a young man who never knew there was a difference. The conflicts involved are intense and absorbing, proving that compelling moral dilemmas make for the most dramatic cinema. An exciting discovery at both last year's Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, "La Promesse" makes being politically relevant and philosophically thoughtful so simple and involving that the story seems to be telling itself.

Written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, a pair of filmmaking brothers, it is made with such unobtrusive sureness that it's able to exert great power without forcing anything. Though relatively new to features, the Dardenne brothers have 20 years of documentary work in Belgium behind them, and their use of hand-held cameras and probing close-ups gives "La Promesse" the urgency and immediacy of total authenticity. Toss in unknown but persuasive actors and characters whose reality is unmistakable and you get an idea why this film is as bracing as it is. La Promesse  is set on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Liège and centers on a 15-year-old apprentice auto mechanic named Igor . An opportunistic sneak thief and smooth liar, Igor is like a small animal with dirty blond hair, casually amoral because in his world the opposite has never been presented as an option.

Igor's universe is completely controlled by his father, Roger (Belgian stage actor Olivier Gourmet). A pudgy, bearded and petty despot, Roger has a lie or a threat or a beating for every occasion. Hot-tempered, violent, a master of casual betrayals, Roger puts together scams without end, but he also cares for his son and values their almost symbiotic relationship. Roger's business is dealing in illegal immigrants--Turks, Ghanaians, Romanians and Koreans--who sneak into Belgium looking for a better life. Roger hides them in a clandestine rooming house, charging them exorbitant fees for false identity papers while collaborating with the police when a raid is needed to satisfy the local politicians.

In all of this, Igor, made in his father's image and hardened by sharing his lifestyle, is a willing second-in-command. Part man, part boy, he spends the spare moment when he's not conniving with the old man putting together a go-kart with his young friends. Igor's life begins to change when Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) and her small child arrive from Burkina Faso to join husband and father Hamidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo) in Roger's boarding house. Assita's individuality intrigues Igor, and then a jolt of fate shoves their lives closer. Hamidou has an accident working illegally, Roger refuses to take him to the hospital, and he dies after making Igor agree to take care of his wife and child, the promise of the title. It's difficult to do justice to how subtly the film develops from here, how unflinching it depends on documentary-style realism and expressive faces to make its points. Though the question of romance never arises, Igor becomes increasingly protective of Assita, which puts him in conflict with his father, the only person who's ever cared about him. It's a predicament that is as difficult as it is compelling.

La Promesse's actors have differing levels of experience, with Jérémie Renier, an impressive natural, having the least and Assita Ouedraogo (whose first trip to Europe was to make this film) having appeared in three films of fellow countryman Idrissa Ouedraogo. But they all work so seamlessly here we feel we're eavesdropping on a moral rebellion that is being played out for the highest possible stakes. Among the many things it does right, "La Promesse" refuses to even consider glib solutions. This film understands that moral choices are a painful, troublesome business, that decisions to do the right thing are not simple to take and hardly make things easier. Nothing in life takes more courage, and no kind of filmmaking offers greater rewards. © By Kennth Turan - Times Film Critic

b)  La Promesse, a rare import from Belgium, indicates how grim the mood of a film can become when there's almost no comic relief. Excepting one or two moments of gallows humor, there's little to break the relentlessly bleak tone. Fortunately, the script is written with such intelligence and the characters are developed so believably that, irrespective of the downbeat approach (or, perhaps, because of it), it's difficult not to be moved by the plight of 15-year old Igor (an unforced performance by newcomer Jérémie Renier), who is trapped into choosing between his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), and the demands of his conscience.

When the film opens, Igor is already wise beyond his years. He's an active participant in his father's shady, "immigration service" business. Roger is one of those crooks who makes his money by preying onthe desperation of others. For exorbitant fees, he smuggles illegal immigrants into Belgium, forges false work permits for them, and sets them up in slum-like apartments  (for which he charges unreasonably high rents). Many of the immigrants also work at Roger's construction site, where they are paid a pittance for hard, occasionally-dangerous work. Igor, who also works as an apprentice at a garage, serves as his father's assistant, and has learned to lie, cheat, and steal just as well as his old man.

 In addition to being a criminal, Roger is also a bully. When his son does something to displease him, he beats him mercilessly.  Despite all that, there's little doubt that he loves Igor, although he's unable to express his affection effectively. In addition, he has trained himself to objectify the men and women he smuggles into the country, adopting the same basic philosophy as the Belgian police: "Illegals don't exist." To Roger, the immigrants are a less-than-human source of income, and that is a philosophy he attempts to pass on. (This reminded me of a subplot in John Singleton's Rosewood  in which a father taught racism to his son.) 

Dad's lessons are leaving an impression upon Igor until an event occurs that forces him to re- evaluate what he has learned. One of Roger's workers, Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo), falls from a scaffold and is critically injured. As he lies dying, he extracts a promise from Igor to care for his wife, Assita (played with quiet dignity by Assita Ouedraogo), and infant boy, both newly arrived from Bugina Faso. Rather than taking Amidou to a hospital (where all sorts of difficult questions would arise), Roger elects to let the man bleed to death, then buries him under a thick layer of cement. He encourages Igor to forget the incident, but the boy cannot, and his attempts to honor his promise to the dying Amidou generate friction between himself and his father. Worse still, Assita is often a grudging, if not openly unwilling, recipient of Igor's aid.  

Essentially, La Promesse is a variation of that motion picture staple, the "coming of age" story. The difference here, however, is that the choices faced by Igor are more complex than is the norm. Becoming an adult does not mean, as his father asserts,  learning how to drive and "getting laid" -- it means assessing the value of his word and heeding the call of his conscience, regardless of the price. No matter what Igor does, he will betray someone -- the crux of the matter for him is determining which betrayal he can live with. Although La Promesse presents a resolution, it makes it clear that there are no easy answers for Igor or for us.  

As directed by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (who have been making documentaries in their native country for more than two decades), La Promesse has a "you are there" style that favors a cinéma-vérité approach to polished photography. In concert with a quartet of natural performances and a persuasive, insightful script, this method results in a film that one could easily accept as non-fiction. Indeed, while this particular story is an invention of the writer/directors, a host of universal truths can be found just beneath the surface.

La Promesse  is designed to challenge an audience. There are numerous instances throughout when viewers will find themselves wondering what they would do in similar circumstances. On each of these occasions, the directors proceed in a logical, intelligent manner, and rarely stray into melodrama (although there are a few minor slips here and there). Despite being a low-key production, La Promesse speaks volumes about how we treat other human beings and what it means to truly grow up.  © 1997 James Berardinelli

c)  Those whose Latin extends beyond "E Pluribus Unum" might just remember "homo homini lupus" (man is a wolf to man). That's what the first part of "La Promesse" tells us. But it is followed by "homo homini agnus" (man is a lamb to man). At least that's my reading of the third feature by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. The movie, premiered in a parallel section of the 1996 Cannes Festival, has been highly praised by American reviewers. It is mostly set in or near the city of Liège (Belgium). It is essentially a two plus two character drama. The first duo consists of young Igor and his father Roger. Igor is 15 -- as per information I gleaned in various documents. (The film proper is rather frustratingly vague about times, places and other factual information).

The boy, already a heavy smoker and beer guzzler, but still a virgin, is something of a Peeping Tom, works in a gas station as an apprentice mechanic. He swipes the customers' wallets and shows up at the station fitfully --which results in his dismissal. Igor is his father's main helper in an illegal operation of illegal immigrant workers, African, Eastern European, Korean, etc., whom the ring, for a high price, spirits into Belgium hidden inside automobiles carries on car-transport vehicles. Then Roger, charging outrageously again, gets the immigrants fake papers and houses them in stinking, disgusting hovels within decrepit buildings. The traffickers know no decency. When, for example, there is political pressure on the gang, the operators sacrifice some of the aliens by pretending they'll be sent to America (after due payment), but betray them to the authorities.

The story then focuses on an African couple (Amidou and Assita) and their baby. Amidou, working for Roger, falls off a scaffolding and dies, but not before exacting from Igor the promise that he will watch over Assita and her child. Since the body would cause an investigation, father and son dispose of it by burial in concrete. (It was unclear to me whether or not Amidou might have survived if taken to a hospital -- which Roger refused to do as unsafe for his business. So Amidou's death, may have to a killing by omission). The man's death is not revealed to his wife. She is told instead that Amidou had disappeared, run off perhaps to avoid paying debts. Roger now tries to get rid of Assita by sending her to nearby Cologne (Germany) where he would arrange for the woman to work as a prostitute.

About 40 minutes into the movie, Igor begins to feel pangs of guilt that keep increasing. He defies his father and attempts to come to the woman's help. The process of a rising conscience and consciousness takes up the rest of the film. It is intermingled with some local touches of racism and xenophobia. The entire process is filmed like a documentary, with a constantly mobile, moving and often handheld camera. There is obviously a desire by the filmmakers to keep a realistic look and tone, which is understandable and adds power to the movie. This technique is valid in principle. It distances the work from the smooth and slick Hollywood-type films. But it often goes overboard and could induce fatigue in the viewers. A modicum of using the Steadycam system might have helped. ( This gyroscope-like method, introduced in the mid-70s, puts a special harness on the operator and allows moving the machine without jiggling). The episodes are done with naturalness, economical dialogue and no traditional verbal elaboration. The burden is on telling details, on implications and on the facial expressions of the performers. Roger, and above all Igor, acquit themselves nicely, with the latter's gradual transformation following a credible development.

"La Promesse" is as far as one can go from commercial movies. It is well-meaning but also well-handled, never showing any traces of glop, sentimentalizing or romanticizing. Among its virtues is that if you imagine that this subject had been filmed in routine ways, it might have made of Assita a colorful --perhaps even wise -- character. Here, she is rather attractive but, like her drab surroundings, a sad figure. In a good touch, to find out if her husband is alive or dead, she consults the entrails of a chicken and later is taken by an older African lady to a witch doctor.

Both Assita and Amidou come from Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta), a small, poor country where, surprisingly, there is Africa's greatest ferment of movie-making, partly encouraged by the regular Pan African festivals in Ouagadougou, the capital. Director Idrissa Ouedraogo, a winner of major awards (e.g. at Cannes) is widely known internationally. Their real family names of Assita and Amidou are also Ouedraogo. It must be Burkina Faso's equivalent of Smith or Jones or else Idrissa's dozens of relatives have made it in cinema. A year or two ago, when Idrissa's latest film was shown at the Cannes Festival, the credits had such an unending list of Ouedraogos that at the press screening the critics kept bursting into laughter exponentially.  © Edwin Jahiel