Mary Harrod

Sweet nothings? Imagining the inexpressible in contemporary French romantic comedy

ABSTRACT The impossibility of expressing the ‘uniqueness’ of romantic love through a language plagued by cliché is a staple of rom-com that has become increasingly explicit in the global genre since the late 1980s. This article considers the responses offered by the French rom-com of the 1990s and 2000s to this tension, in prominent and often commercially successful films by both popular auteurs (Christian Vincent, Pierre Salvadori, Yvan Attal, Tonie Marshall and Agn`s Jaoui) and more mainstream directors (including Olivier Baroux, Danièle Thompson, Pascal Chaumeil and Valérie Guignabodet). On the one hand, in a ‘post-screwball’ move that is markedly common in the French genre, romantic desire in several films is displaced into playful sparring, both verbal and physical. On the other, some film-makers reproduce romantic quotations and platitudes with acknowledgement of their status as such, allowing them to be at once appropriated and disavowed in a way that is typical of recent developments in the global genre. Indeed, the article invokes the Hollywood rom-com throughout as a point of comparison and contrast to French practice. In this way, it explores Franco-American differences in the representation of romance, as well as certain potentially more universal traits linked to sexual and romantic desire. Specifically, it suggests that a Gallic predilection can be discerned for acknowledging the socially constructed element of desire itself.

The réalisatrice and the rom-com in the 2000s

ABSTRACT Since 2000 in particular, French cinema has witnessed an explosion in romantic comedy production. Women film-makers across the board from popular auteur to more mainstream cinema have been instrumental in the phenomenon. This essay explores the implications of women adopting a genre traditionally associated with conservative ideologies. It argues for a more inclusive, hybrid approach to rom-com, exploring its mobilization by women directors in a range of films. Notable trends are the way in which conventional gender positions are made fluid, the genres frequent splicing with family narratives, and the prevalence of the ensemble rom-com, which is examined in the light of Tania Modleskis observations about the ‘femininity’ of episodic forms. The essay concludes that, despite its restrictions in addressing women within (usually white, middle class) heterosexual couples, the rom-com offers French women film-makers a means to speak in a widely understandable yet original and sometimes feminist voice.

Auteur Meets Genre: Rohmer and the Rom-Com

Eric Rohmer’s influence on filmic chroniclers of love within the auteur canon is widely recognized. This essay seeks to situate his oeuvre within a different cinematic historiography: that of genre cinema in general and romantic comedy specifically. In so doing it answers Celestino Deleyto’s call for a reappraisal of films usually seen as outside mainstream genericity from this perspective.1 Given that genre is a site of exchange between filmic institutions and audiences, both of which—even in the case of the more specialized audience targeted by Rohmer—interact with culture more broadly, the point of such an approach is to examine the role played by Rohmer’s work in mediating historically and locally specific notions about coupling and romance. In other words, this analysis will reinsert into a particular social context films that have most frequently been understood to exist as “pure cinema.” outside history.

New directions in contemporary French comedies : from nation, sex and class to ethnicity, community and the vagaries of the postmodern

Comedy, as is the case with many national cinemas, is one of the most dominant genres, if not the most dominant, in French cinema, as Raphaëlle Moine has shown (2014, 233–234). Comedies are even more popular now than they used to be in terms of spectator numbers. Since 2000, for example, French comedies have dominated the best-seller list in France, as can be seen in Table 1, which gives the 27 best-selling films since 2000.1 In the period 2000–2007 there were only 6 French comedies out of the 18 best-sellers in Table 1, representing a third (positions 11, 25, 26, 47, 57, 59), while from 2008–2014 6 out of 9 French films are comedies (positions 2, 3, 19, 51, 68, 96), representing two-thirds. This corresponds to a shift from a 39% share of the total number of French spectators in the first half of the period to an astonishing 72% of the best-selling films since 2008. And yet, surprisingly, while there are many coffee-table or popular books on the genre in French cinema, such as biographies of stars, there is as yet very little major academic work. General works on genre tend to focus on Hollywood comedies, occasionally with some nods to French comic stars, for example Olivier Mongin’s reflection on the genre which includes some work on Jacques Tati and Louis de Funès (Mongin 2002). There are few academic monographs on directors associated with the genre. There is a thesis on Pierre Colombier, active during the 1920s and 1930s, and director of major comic stars such as Georges Milton in Le Roi des resquilleurs (1930), Raimu in Ces messieurs de la Santé (1933) and Théodore et Cie (1933), and Fernandel in Ignace (1937) (Binet 2003), and a couple of standard introductions to the work of Jean-Pierre Mocky (Le Roy 2000; Prédal 1988). But there is as yet nothing substantial on Gérard Oury, JeanMarie Poiré or Francis Veber, directors of some of the most successful French comedies of the 1980s and beyond. The only two major works on French film comedy in recent times are both by Anglophone academics: Rémi Lanzoni’s broad introduction (2014) and Mary Harrod’s in-depth study of the recent development of the romcom (2015a). With the exception of some essential articles by Raphaëlle Moine, which we refer to in this introduction, there is as yet nothing major by French academics on contemporary developments. It is not difficult to understand why this is the case. Comedy, more than any other genre, is a ‘bad object’, a repository of low-denominator stereotypes and the source of the potentially guilty pleasure accruing from them that appears to be difficult to justify critically. This is particularly the case in France, where the critical establishment has until recently been more interested in auteur cinema than popular genres. As Moine has argued in her book on genre (2005, 66–85), whether one adopts the position of the Frankfurt School – that comedies like all genres function principally to maintain the status quo – or whether one adopts the position inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth – that comedy, like other genres, functions to express and reconcile social and cultural tensions – these two positions, antithetical in appearance, both operate to neutralise dissent, allowing bad objects to inculcate Sartrean bad faith as the audience unquestioningly accepts questionable representations. As Moine says, the guilty pleasure one may feel emerges from the fact that comedy ‘autorise un plaisir contre-culturel sans générer de danger social’2 (79).

French cinema in close-up: La Vie d’un acteur pour moi

in these cycles, different bids to establish the Europeanness of Spanish identity. Finally, Alissa Timoshkina discusses the films of Russian-Jewish director Pavel Lungin within the context of Russia’s conflictive relationship with Europe, tracing a trajectory from alienation to homecoming. Initially associating Europe with culture and freedom, his later movies celebrate the power and simplicity of the Russian village. This reflects a basic contradiction in recent Russian history between a desire for Europe and the preservation of its national autonomy. The versatility of the structure and the diversity of perspectives are combined in The Europeanness of European Cinema with a consistency in the commitment to the search for Europe on a variety of levels and through a variety of cinematic practices. Some chapters may be more far-reaching than others, but they all contribute to a harmonious whole. The occasional jarring note is inevitable, as when, in summarising the pros and cons of European integration, Thomas Elsaesser affirms that sudden wealth has been brought to Europe’s periphery at the cost of general impoverishment across the continent (21), an insight that betrays the type of condescending attitude from the ‘centre’ to the periphery that is breaking apart the European Union, and which sits awkwardly in a book that explores Europeanness. Otherwise, while French cinema takes a privileged position in this book, it nonetheless is a position that probably reflects faithfully its objective importance within the continent. This prominence stands in stark contrast to the virtual absence of British cinema within the book, an absence that is perhaps more surprising if we take into account that most of the authors are film scholars based in the UK. This may be simply due to academic compartmentalisation, but it retrospectively proves serendipitous once Brexit has become the reality feared by many and hoped for by just a few more.