Is it the end of le monde?

10 April 2012

It is time to man the barricades. Following years of resistance, the French have started making American movies.

The release of Amèlie, recently premiered in Paris, has created a rift between those who adhere to the notion of an indigenous industry against all odds and those who have bought into the Hollywood market wholesale.

Amèlie is an urban fairytale about a young woman - played by 23-year-old Audrey Tautou - who discovers she has the power to affect people around her. Like a benign, elfin vigilante, she rewards the good and punishes the bad, eventually finding love herself.

This seemingly innocuous movie has caused a furore the like of which we have never seen in Britain. It has occupied pages of newsprint in France as cultural commentators have fired volleys of opinion at each other over the effect of the movie on the French industry.

Some see it as a threat - the biggest hammerblow yet on to the wedge that has been driven between old-school French filmmaking and the new generation of Americanised movie-makers. But it goes further. The Disneyfication of Paris in Amèlie is considered by many to be deeply insulting and potentially injurious to French artistic and cultural life.

The International Herald Tribune reported the rift between the mainstream critics who loved the film for its "whimsy", "magic" and " enchantment" and those sterner voices (largely from the Left) who took it to task for its feelgood view of a Montmartre wiped clean of graffiti and cleared of ethnic minorities.

"Amèlie Poulain has been a success because it transposes EuroDisney to Montmartre," fulminated Philippe Lancon in Libèration. It promotes "the same logic, the same magical trompe l'oeil, the same use of cartoon figures, the same sadness disguised as joy," he continued.

Serge Kaganski, of the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, saw it as even more subversive.

He wrote that if Jean-Marie Le Pen "wanted a clip to promote his vision of the people and his idea of France, Amèlie Poulain would be the ideal candidate", declaring that it played right into the hands of "reactionary and Rightist" forces.

Amèlie is the apotheosis of a tendency that has been creeping through French industry for the past three or four years. In the vanguard is director Luc Besson, whose early films, Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle) and Subway, were prodigious and impudent movies with a high gloss and a commercial sheen. Since then, Besson has gone even further into Hollywood territory with Nikita, Leon and the big-budget Euro-extravaganzas, The Fifth Element and The Messenger.

With Nikita being remade by Hollywood as The Assassin, Besson was in his element - making French movies in imitation of Hollywood. And where he has gone, others have followed.

Mathieu Kassovitz, once considered the great white hope of pure Gallic cinema after his scorching debut, La Haine, nailed his colours to Hollywood's mast with his two following films, Assassins and The Crimson Rivers - which are only French in the sense that the actors speak in the French language.

Kassovitz, who has a double life as an actor, also compounds the felony by appearing in Amèlie. Significantly, this year's biggest home draws in France (Amèlie aside) have been The Brotherhood of the Wolf and Belphegor - both fantasy thrillers with special effects and oodles of action. In other words, American-style movies.

There has been an odd, and not displeasing, sideeffect to this burst of activity. The rise of this new generation of Hollywoodised film-makers seems to have galvanised the old guard. The release of not one but two films by Claude Chabrol here in the UK in the past month alone is an indication of the good health of the auteur side of the industry; the fact that anarchist intellectual Jean-Luc Godard is back with a new film (premiered at Cannes and chosen as the French Gala for this year's London Film Festival) reveals that he has lost none of his spirit for the struggle against American imperialism and is as obtuse and intellectually playful as ever. And both Jacques Rivette, 73, and Eric Rohmer, 81, are also back with new films.

While Amèlie's naysayers are in the minority, the fact that the issue has been debated at all suggests a level of patriotic conviction and cultural commitment unknown in the UK. Clearly, the market is there in the new generation of filmgoers weaned on Hollywood products who are happy to support the home team in similar ventures.

The extraordinary thing about Amèlie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amèlie Poulain) is its reception in France, where in the first month it sold 4.2 million tickets, a figure which helped French cinema in its long-standing battle against the threat from Hollywood. French films took 53 per cent of the domestic market in the first four months of 2001, up from 33 per cent a year earlier.

Boosted by the takings for Amèlie, the French box office for its own movies is at an all-time high, pushing the US market share down to 38.1 per cent.

Compare this with the same period over here, in which UK films (including co-productions) amounted to a pathetic 19 per cent of the market, while US films accounted for a whopping 72 per cent plus of the home market.

Thus, while Britain and the States may still be divided by a common language, they are increasingly united in their appetite for American movies.

It will be intriguing to discover what the British critics (who are, with one or two exceptions, a largely apolitical bunch) make of a feelgood French movie in which there are no adulterous couples, no gangs of disaffected Algerians or Moroccans roaming the streets and no unshaven flics mooching around in leather jackets planting drugs, consorting with prostitutes or shooting suspects. Mary Poppins comes to Montmartre? For terminal Francophiles, it could be the end of le monde as we know it.

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