V.

Recent Developments

In recent years, films from Hollywood, which in France are traditionally exhibited in both dubbed and subtitled versions (the latter in specialist or upmarket cinemas), have become increasingly dominant at the box office. France has tended to counter this with bigger-budget, more commercial packages, and has succeeded up to a point, with films like those of Luc Besson, such as Le Grand Bleu (1988) and The Fifth Element (1997). Although these are often successful at the international box office, the passion, excitement, and experimentation that distinguished the masterpieces of the Golden Age and the period including and following the New Wave are rare. Even many of Godard’s more recent experiments, or a highly personal project such as the Bertrand Tavernier film Daddy Nostalgie (1990; These Foolish Things), seem emotionally bland by comparison.

Part of the problem is that exhibition patterns changed in the 1980s, with the adoption in France as in other countries of Hollywood marketing policies: a large publicity budget and simultaneous release in up to 50 cinemas. Thus, throughout the world there is now less space for the more risky and personal film to build up its audience gradually, during a long run and as a result of good reviews and word of mouth. Gérard Depardieu is a star, and has achieved international success in a diversity of roles, from his early work for Duras, Resnais, and then Truffaut to more recent successes, such as Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), based on the play by Edmond Rostand. However, stars contribute to great films, they do not create them. Although throughout his career Depardieu has been prepared to take risks by accepting roles in projects that are other than safely commercial, even these receive less exposure in France and abroad than they would have had in, for example, the 1960s and 1970s. Only occasionally do triumphs such as Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991; Beautiful Troublemaker) break through to reach the audience they deserve.

Mathieu Kasovitz’s La Haine (1995; Hatred) proved, however, to be the first international success of a series of increasingly controversial French films. Its action commences the morning after a night’s rioting. In the week of its release similar riots occurred in three areas of urban France: a Paris suburb, Le Havre, and Rouen. Its account of disaffected youth from a racially mixed suburb, who respond to police violence with violence of their own, is shot in the style of popular American television series such as NYPD Blue, but following the antagonists rather than the police. It offers an image of impending crisis, which has touched sensitive nerves in British and American, as well as French, viewers.

La Haine was followed by a series of controversial low-budget international successes whose provocation derived more from explicit violence and sex than from an obvious engagement with social concerns. These included Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Tri’s Baise-Moi (1999; Fuck Me), Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Choses Secrètes (2003), and Gustav Noé’s pair Seul Contre Tous (1998; I Stand Alone) and Irréversible (2002). Many admirers of Seul Contre Tous found Irréversible unacceptable for the violence of the revenge killing with which it opens (this is, in fact, the climax of the story, which is told in reverse), and for the treatment of the nine-minute rape scene that motivates this revenge.

In the new millennium, French film-makers have been in the forefront of experiments with high definition digital technology. New Wave veteran Eric Rohmer used it to shoot exteriors in his story of revolutionary Paris, L'Anglaise et le Duc (2001; The Lady and the Duke) while Vidocq (2001), starring Gérard Depardieu, was the first 100 per cent digitalized mainstream feature.