Sitcom is the latest in a newish wave of French films. Jonathan Romneytastes both vin ordinaire and vintage
The current issue of the French cineastes' bible, Cahiers du Cinema, features a naked girl lolling distractedly between the sheets. The title of the film is L'Ennui. It's all too easy to stereotype current French cinema, and even long-standing cine-francophiles must sometimes feel it's had its day. Last year I was beginning to think I'd seen all I ever needed to see when I sat through the three hours of Arnaud Desplechin's Ma Vie Sexuelle (How I Got into an Argument), a languid saga of young Parisian philosophers and their angst-ridden amours (think Friends by way of Foucault). Still, it did have one cherishable moment, when the philosopher next door entered in anguish to announce, "My monkey is stuck behind the radiator".
The problem, in reality, is not so much to do with French cinema but with the French cinema we get to see here. British attendance figures for new French cinema have slumped since the days of that heritage cash cow Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), and so British distributors are inclined to play it safe with the sort of films that they assume will appeal to the sort of people who traditionally go and see French films - ie, middling films for the middle-aged. Films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's banlieue-blues story La Haine occasionally hook a younger, more critical audience, but somehow those sparks of energy aren't capitalised on (often because new film-makers don't follow through - Kassovitz's next film Assassin(s) flopped in France, after being heartily booed in Cannes).
Still, the past two years have produced something of a vintage crop. France's low-budget sector especially has produced some exciting, challenging though often low-key work, overshadowing the flashier products of the heritage costume school and the quasi-Hollywoodian cinema du look, which started with Beineix and Besson and has spawned countless imitations - the latest of which, the brainless Dobermann, opens here this month.
Some of the new French cinema may not seem spectacular, but think about it. Low-budget cinema rooted in the real, and yet formally inventive enough to make you rethink your assumptions about what can and can't work on the big screen - it couldn't happen here. British cinema needs to take a lesson from Sandrine Veysset's Will it Snow at Christmas or Erick Zonca's The Dream Life of Angels, this year's surprise art-house hit here and in France. And while British producers flounder around for the next shiny, jokey Sliding Doors-style romance, they could learn a lot about intelligent comedy from one of the French hits of 1998, Bruno Podalydes' Dieu Seul Me Voit - a shambling, elegantly diffuse and entirely unpredictable farce set in prosaic Versailles and described by Variety as a Gallic Seinfeld.
But, apart from these gentler pleasures, it's clear that French cinema is also developing a corrosive edge. Some of the most confrontational films I've seen lately are French - among them, Albert Dupontel's viciously black idiot savant comedy Bernie, and Sombre, a serial killer story by Philippe Grandrieux. Then there's Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone) by Gaspar Noe, a film that has already left festival audiences pale and reeling in London and Edinburgh. This story of an embittered butcher - equally influenced by Taxi Driver and gory European exploitation pics - is manipulative, mercilessly aggressive towards its audience, and entirely invents its own visual language. Assaulting you with a relentless stream-of-consciousness voice-over, Seul Contre Tous is the nearest cinema has yet come to the take-no-prisoners misanthropy of Celine.
This cinematic nail-bomb hits our screens in March, and I wish its distributor, Alliance, the best of luck with the BBFC. Meanwhile, Alliance limbers up with something lighter. Young director Francois Ozon has fast distinguished himself as one of the few certifiably "queer" voices in French cinema, with a series of perversely polysexual shorts. Some are breezily rude, like the cross-dressing vignette A Summer Dress, others considerably darker - the longer Regarde la Mer was a psychological nail-biter that felt like early Polanski with sapphic overtones.
Ozon's first feature promised to be extraordinary; in the event it's agreeable water-treading. Sitcom lives up to its title, set in the house of a well-heeled, daintily mannered bourgeois family magically touched by sexual omnivorousness after the arrival of a pet rat. The son announces he's gay and starts hosting orgies; the daughter becomes a sulky, suicidal dominatrix in a wheelchair; reasonable Maman wades in with an incestuous plan to restore tranquillity. Wilfully stereotyped supporting players - an over-sexed Spanish maid (muy Almodovar) and her priapic Cameroonian husband - join in the fun.
Sitcom is old-style epater les bourgeois stuff, but les bourgeois, being liberal sorts these days, will think: well, fair enough. Ozon's attempts to tickle our scandal cells remain on a distant, theoretical level; he shuffles the sexual combinations like Happy Families cards. He may have a commendably saucy way with teenage erections and extra-size aubergines, but there's something a little mechanical about his homage to late Bunuel and John Waters.
Yet Ozon does have an admirably poker-faced directing style and a great cast, notably the anxiously cooing Evelyne Dandry as Maman and Marina de Van, a rat-faced, bilious but weirdly seductive presence as the daughter. What these characters would do to the monkey behind the radiator I dare not imagine.
"Sitcom" (18) opens on 1 January at selected cinemas
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