As to the French cultural exception, contrary to what has been said by a PDG [company chairman] who subsequently lost his job, it is not dead: it consists in making exceptionally boring movies, exceptionally rubbish books, and in general works of art that are exceptionally pretentious and self-satisfied. It goes without saying that I include my own work in this sad statement.
FRÉDÉRIC BEIGBEDER, FRENCH WRITER AND LITERARY CRITIC, WINDOWS ON THE WORLD, 2003
Unsurprisingly, the general French public does not flock in droves to see these art-house films, which seem to be mainly designed as a French cultural export in the same way that the Merchant-Ivory genre of films were for Britain in the 1980s. (Existential angst in unfitted Parisian kitchens did for French cinema what lavish Edwardian period sets featuring top British actors – playing genteel heroes struggling with repressed emotions – did for British cinema in the same period.) ‘The French cinema lives off its comedies and gives awards to its dramas,’ the French comedian Michel Colucci (called ‘Coluche’) once observed. And true enough, the films that have traditionally been big hits in France are not art-house movies but Hollywood blockbusters, Disney animations and French-made situation comedies (although the art-house movies are generally the ones that carry off the awards at the Cannes Film Festival). In fact, the top-grossing film ever in France is the very American Titanic, and the top ten box-office hits include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gone with the Wind, Avatar and The Jungle Book. Of the top ten grossing domestic films, virtually all are comedies.14
French situation comedies present something of a puzzle for foreigners. Mainly because – to anybody who is not French – they simply aren’t that funny. The buffoonery, in fact, is much like that of Shakespeare or Molière – sharp wit to appeal to the bourgeois members of the audience and slapstick for the groundlings, with little in between. Take, for example, the French hit film Camping (2006).15 This is a comedy set on a beachside campsite, on which a stuck-up Parisian and his daughter land by accident. Horrified at first to find themselves in such unrefined company, they end up being spiritually renewed, their bourgeois hang-ups exorcised by the jolly camaraderie of the working-class campers. A key running gag in the film is an extended wordplay on the expression rouler une pelle (literally ‘to roll a spade’), meaning ‘to kiss with tongues’ (i.e. to French kiss). A woman in the throes of a midlife crisis reproaches her husband that he doesn’t kiss her with a ‘spade’ any more. The point is hammered home with repeated visual references to ‘spades’ both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Of course, at the end of the movie, sundry mishaps and marital affairs later, they do enjoy a raunchy ‘spade’ kiss. French audiences find all this hilarious.
THE TOP TEN HIGHEST-GROSSING FILMS IN FRANCE (skip)
1. Titanic (1998)
2. Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008)*
3. The Intouchables (2011)
4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938)
5. La Grande Vadrouille (1966)*
6. Gone with the Wind (1950)
7. Once upon a time in the West (1969)
8. Avatar (2009)
9. The Jungle Book (1968)
10. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
(* = French comedies)
Figures: J.P.’s Box Office, March 2013
THE TOP TEN HIGHEST-GROSSING FRENCH FILMS IN THE WORLD
1. The Intouchables (2011)
2. Taken 2 (2012)
3. The Fifth Element (1997)
4. Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008)
5. Taken (2008)
6. Amélie (2001)
7. Perfume (2006)
8. The Artist (2011)
9. Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008)
10. March of the Penguins (2005)
Figures: J.P.’s Box Office, February 2013
There is little doubt that there has been a general mésentente cordiale between the French and the Anglo-Saxons as to what is funny in a film. This is illustrated by the fact that many French comedies, huge hits in France, bomb when released abroad. For example, the tastefully named 1982 French comedy film Le Père Noël est une ordure (‘Father Christmas is a shit’) was a spectacular flop in the US. And yet the French can be considered world leaders in certain types of humour – satire, for example (as can be seen in the distinguished tradition of French cartoons and the daily TV satire of the French equivalent of Spitting Image, Les Guignols de l’info). And then there are classic French comedies of a nostalgically gentle kind, like Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953). The French are also masters of black humour – the very term humour noir was coined by the French Surrealist André Breton. ‘Humour is like coffee – best taken black,’ the French wit Bertrand Cèbe once remarked, and perhaps thanks to their heritage of the Revolution combined with existential angst and a blanket rejection of political correctness, the French love nothing so much as a wickedly morbid jest. Take a soupçon of the truly tragique, mix in a hint of the absurde, stir it up with a tabou or two, and a touch even of sadisme, and you have the classic French joke: as dark as a café noir and sharp as a guillotine. So why does this biting humour not come through in the traditional French comedy? Why was film noir an American invention rather than a French one?
There is nevertheless a wind of change blowing through French cinema. Since the early 2000s, a whole new crop of French films has been coming out: films that have a complex humour much subtler than wordplay or farce; films that are wickedly whimsical, reflecting out to the world rather than inwards to the director’s umbilicus. A renegade breed of French film directors has begun to break down the traditional French divide between ‘art-house’ and ‘commercial’, producing darkly funny, quirky or moving films that have been huge world box-office successes (Amélie, L’Auberge espagnole, The Artist, The Intouchables). Many of these directors have spent time studying abroad, outside the restrictions of the French cinema schools. They include, for example, Cédric Klapisch, the director of L’Auberge espagnole (‘The Spanish Apartment’, 2002), who was rejected by the major French film schools because of his apparent lack of reverence for the classics of French cinema, and so studied in the United States instead. The Intouchables / Intouchables (2011)16 is a so-called ‘buddy movie’ charting the relationship between an aristocratic quadriplegic and his carer, a young black man from a bleak local housing estate who has just been released from jail. The possibilities for crassness and mawkish sentimentality in such a set-up are legion. Yet the film manages to steer a course through all of these potential pitfalls, being moving and – most surprisingly of all – funny, in a daring French way. Only the French, after all, could make a joke as politiquement incorrecte as someone playfully pouring boiling water over a paralyzed (and hence unfeeling) person’s legs.
The Intouchables became, within months of being released, the second-highest-grossing domestic French film ever. As at March 2013 it was the third-highest-grossing film in France of all time. It has also recently become the highest-grossing French film in the world market, surpassing films like Amélie and The Artist. But the humour in The Intouchables could not be more different from that of the traditional French comedies, and its impact a world away from the navel-contemplation of the worst of the New Wave. In fact, it seems that the French are, at last, moving away from the concept of cinema as the lofty seventh art, and coming round to the idea of cinema as a commercial art. Finally, it seems, there is an alternative to the tedium of waiting for Godard.
Myth Evaluation: Was once true, is now increasingly false.
PART 8
CITY OF LIGHT
MYTHS ABOUT PARIS
THE LEFT BANK IS A HAVEN OF WRITERS AND INTELLECTUALS
Whoever has not experienced the Left Bank of the Seine, between rue Saint-Jacques and rue des Saints-Pères, knows nothing about human life!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC, FRENCH NOVELIST (1799–1850), LE PÈRE GORIOT, 1835
The Left Bank (Rive Gauche) of Paris is a quartier of legend. Its warm hotchpotch of bar
s, cafés and underground cellars is where the intellectual fabric of the early twentieth century was woven. Cubism, Surrealism, Existentialism, Impressionism – the cafés of the Left Bank (and to a lesser degree, of Montmartre in the north of the city) were the birthplace of most of the -isms of Modernism (if not Modernism itself). But what is meant by the term ‘Left Bank’? Geographically, it denotes anywhere on the left bank of the Seine (i.e. on the left-hand side while travelling downstream, or the river’s southern bank). However, ‘Left Bank’ as a cultural term essentially refers to the areas of St Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse, and the small network of streets in between. The Left Bank is also the student quarter of Paris, being the home of the university of Paris (the Sorbonne) and its various successor institutions. In this context, it is sometimes referred to as the ‘Latin Quarter’ (named after the Latin spoken at the university in the Middle Ages). What made this miniature piece of Paris the centre of the earth’s cultural map, and is it still the hub of the creative world?
The tradition of the Parisian café as a hotbed of artistic, intellectual and political life goes back a long way. Even under the ancien régime, King Louis XIV became so anxious about the incendiary political debates going on in the Paris coffee-houses that he sent his police prefect to spy on them.1 A Revolution and several regime changes later, many things had been turned on (or lost) their heads, but the tradition of the café debate continued. In 1867, the visiting American journalist Edward King observed that ‘the huge Paris world centres twice, thrice daily; it is at the café; it gossips at the café, it intrigues at the café; it plots, it dreams, it suffers, it hopes, at the café.’2 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, radical artistic groups – notably the Realists and the Impressionists – congregated in cafés on the Left Bank and later in Montmartre. These meeting places became centres of rebellion against the stuffy directives of the French art academy.
As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, GERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1844–1900)
The cafés were also temples devoted to the cult of a beverage that became both the nectar and poison of the French intellectual and working classes: absinthe. A lurid green and potently alcoholic cocktail of wormwood, anise and fennel with reputedly hallucinatory effects, absinthe – or the ‘green fairy’ (la fée verte) – was both the muse and the scourge of French poets and writers. Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine all struggled against its effects. Baudelaire noted in his diary: ‘Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23 of January 1862, I have received a singular warning. I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.’3 The ‘green fairy’ left her indelible footprint on the café art coming out of France in the late nineteenth century. To her potent spell have been attributed the psychedelic greens and yellows of Van Gogh’s paintings, as well as his incipient madness. And many a café portrait of the period reveals the paradox of the absinthe addict, surrounded by jovial company yet trapped in his or her private phantasmagoria of shadows – as in the gloomy Degas café portrait L’Absinthe (1876), featuring a working-class woman slumped dejectedly over a glass of green liquor in the cold light of an approaching day, or the lonely figures collapsed in a drunken stupor beneath the sulphurous yellow glare of overhead lights in Van Gogh’s The Night Café.
While Realists such as Gustave Courbet (he of The Origin of the World infamy)* hung out in brasseries on the Left Bank, the Impressionists tended to favour the Right Bank and Montmartre – the area around Batignolles, and subsequently the café La Nouvelle Athènes in Pigalle.
* For more on Courbet and his controversial painting, see the chapter on French women and shaving, here.
The real heyday of the Left Bank came in the early twentieth century, in the period between the wars, when the cafés and bars of Montparnasse, and subsequently closer to the river at St Germain-des-Prés, became havens for the ‘Lost Generation’ that emerged from the devastation of the First World War. The celebrated café Les Deux Magots was an important hangout for the Surrealists in the 1930s, whereas the Brasserie Lipp was favoured by the political set. Drawn by the intellectual hubbub, laissez-faire morals, and a plethora of small printing presses springing up, hundreds of foreign literary and artistic members of the Lost Generation flocked to the area like moths to a candle-flame. James Joyce, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein… all contributed to the rich ferment of ideas brewing in the Left Bank cafés. Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were famed for their Saturday night salon, invitation to which was a passport to recognition for any aspiring artist or writer.
During the Occupation, many went to the cafés simply to avoid freezing. ‘Towards the end of the Occupation, in the winter of 1943–44, everyone came there to keep warm,’ remarked one writer of the Café de Flore. ‘One had the impression that the first-floor room was a classroom. Sartre was installed at a little table, writing Paths of Freedom, Simone de Beauvoir, at another table, was writing All Men Are Mortal… close by, Arthur Adamov was writing too, doubtless one of his plays…’4
America is my country and Paris is my hometown.
GERTRUDE STEIN, AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE ART COLLECTOR AND WRITER (1874–1946)
Jean-Paul Sartre was undisputedly king of the Left Bank. American students came to the Café de Flore just to sit in his usual chair, and the café scene made him a bigger star on the world student circuit than such distinguished French predecessors as Montesquieu, Voltaire or Diderot. Simone de Beauvoir was also a huge hit with nascent feminists at American universities: like Sylvia Plath two decades later, her combination of severe beauty and tortured women’s lib, ferociously feminist yet hopelessly in thrall to a dominating male, were the stuff of sophomore fantasy. Sartre himself wrote of the Café de Flore: ‘We installed ourselves completely: from 9 to 12 a.m., we worked, then we had lunch, and at 2 p.m. we came back and spoke with friends we had met, until 8 p.m. After having dinner, we received people with whom we had fixed an appointment. This could seem strange to you, but at this Café, we were at home.’ He later asserted that, ‘during 4 years, the road to the Café was for me the Road to Freedom.’ The actress Simone Signoret has even said, ‘I was born in March 1941 at night, on a bench of the Café de Flore.’ Not that everybody was amused. ‘Sartre?’ the owner of the Café de Flore later commented, ‘he was my worst client. Hours of scribbling on a piece of paper, sitting in front of a single drink, which he didn’t renew from morning to night.’5
Despite the furore around Sartre and de Beauvoir, however, after the Second World War the Left Bank was somehow never the same again. There continued to be a flow of writers and artists to the area – notably Samuel Beckett and the new Beat Generation of US writers, including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who established themselves in a seedy no-star hotel just off the Seine – but the golden age of the Left Bank was drawing to a close. Already by the summer of 1948, the New Yorker columnist Janet Flanner (a seasoned resident) was commenting disparagingly about the hordes of American postwar college students flooding St Germain-des-Prés:
‘The Café de Flore serves as a drugstore for pretty upstate girls in unbecoming blue denim pants and their Middle Western dates, most of whom are growing Beaux-Arts beards. Members of the tourist intelligentsia patronize the Rue de Bac’s Pont-Royal bar, which used to be full of French existentialists and is now full only of themselves, often arguing about existentialism.’6
The right-wing backlash after the événements of May 1968* made Paris seem dull and conservative, just as other cities around the world were beginning to let their hair down.
* For a closer look at the events of May 1968, see the chapter on the French as Revolutionaries, here.
The United States, for example, which had emerged from the repressive McCarthy era, was suddenly becoming an improbable haven for free speech, with important victories over literary censorship in the cou
rt cases concerning Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch. In San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the pioneering City Lights Bookstore, after many on the Parisian Left Bank had closed down – including the famous Shakespeare and Company, founded in 1919 by the American Sylvia Beach, a long-time refuge for writers and the original publishers of James Joyce’s Ulysses.*
* The original Shakespeare and Company closed down during the German Occupation of Paris in 1940, never to reopen. Another bookstore was later rechristened with the same name, in honour of Sylvia Beach.
Suddenly, Paris didn’t seem to be where it was happening any more. As the bookstores and artists moved out, the luxury boutiques and bankers moved in. Alain Souchon, a celebrated French crooner, captured the inexorable decline in his bleak chanson dedicated to the Left Bank, ‘Rive Gauche’:
Farewell, Rive Gauche of Paris, farewell my home
Of music and poetry; misguided salesmen
Who have taken everything
Come to sell clothes in the bookshops, the bookshops.
Tender as the night may be, it has passed;
Oh my Zelda, it’s finished, Montparnasse…7
They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 23