Feature : French cinema: the comeback

As a phenomenon unique in the world, women in France today are assuming a key position in the new generation of film directors. In barely ten years they have managed to make an astonishing recovery! While each of them has her own style and personal world, together they shake up the way we look at social reality, family relationships and relations between the sexes. A group portrait.

Oddly enough, a movement reviving the cinema such as the New Wave, which nevertheless looked at society in a totally new way, was a missed opportunity for the emergence of women film directors: Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and the others were not prepared to yield an inch to them... In the 1970s, feminism pushed certain women directors, such as Agnès Varda and Nelly Kaplan, into taking their camera to sign militant works.

Today, political commitment is just one of the many facets of cinema in the feminine, because each woman film director has her own past history, her particular approach. Rewarded at the world’s main festivals, they tackle every genre and every style, make multi-faceted cinema, shake up generally accepted ideas, are often disturbing and provide actresses with roles they would not perhaps have had without them.

While no female director is like any other, women directors all face up to the same questions, whether about their view of society or their political commitment, the way they represent sexuality and relationships between men and women, or again their relationship with the family and childhood. The new generation of principal French film directors can thus be grouped together by "families" according to their sensitivity and the subjects they tackle, even if the borders we outline obviously have nothing unchanging about them...

Neglected for too long by the French film industry, social issues have been resurfacing since the beginning of the 90s, notably at the instigation of women directors. By distancing themselves from the microcosm of Paris, where the major part of the national production is based, some women directors are attentive witnesses to the fragmentation of work, to the fear of commitment and to the permanence of social divides.

Something new under social issues

An uncompromising observer of her time, Laetitia Masson denounces: in a terrible sequence in En avoir (ou pas) (1995), the protagonist (Sandrine Kiberlain) who has just lost her job, strips almost naked before an icy recruiting officer, while A vendre (1998) describes an unstable world which has lost its bearings and where selling your body or bedrooms amounts to the same thing.

A documentary maker by training, Dominique Cabrera revives the tradition of a Ken Loach or a Robert Guédiguian with Nadia et les hippopotames (1999): from the all-out strikes of December 1995, she retraces the "hell" of a young mother with no means of support while showing that union talk is sometimes totally out of step with reality.

With L’Age des possibles (1996), Pascale Ferran studies the twenty-five to thirty-year olds’ generation, completely at sea, their life force undermined by crisis: with a screenplay that is spot-on at all times, the female director orchestrates a choral narrative that conveys the fear of commitment of these young adults, tossed from one casual job to the next, going from one amorous adventure to the next and clashing with each other through fear of the future.

It is the rural world that interests Sandrine Veysset in the very fine Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël ? (1997). Taking care to avoid lapsing into the picturesque and rediscovering a rural theme that has disappeared from our screens, the film superbly shows that the life of an ordinary farm is not subject to the traditional social norms.

For her first production, Agnès Jaoui, a brilliant script writer and actress, writes a social satire lacking neither in humour nor in tenderness: Le Goût des autres (2000), César film award for best film of 2001, singles out bourgeois hypocrisy and everyone’s inability to extract themselves from their social sphere.

The same is true of Rien à faire (1999) by Marion Vernoux, (with Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), which proves even more seriously that the class fracture lines are virtually insurmountable. Female directors hold up an unflattering mirror to our society but, in so doing, they reopen the path to a militant film industry that we thought we had lost for good.

The family, whether small or large, regains its rightful place in the films of the young female directors. Relationships with one’s parents and childhood are often sources of innumerable psychological rifts, of unspeakable misery and traumas that are more or less accepted.

Families, I hate you!

Twice, actress Nicole Garcia, having moved behind the camera, evokes the painful impact of a family break-up: Un week-end sur deux (1990), with Nathalie Baye, sensitively retraces the desperate path of a divorced mother setting out to win back the love of her children, and Le Fils préféré (1995), with Gérard Lanvin, explores the unexpected reunion of three brothers separated by their father.

Likewise, Claire Denis, known for her radical stand, portrays the bitterness of the relationships between two adolescents and an absent father, unable to come to terms with his wife’s suicide and his daughter’s pregnancy in Nénette et Boni (1997), with Grégoire Colin.

The family can also prove to be an oppressive space preventing people from fulfilling their potential. In La Vie moderne (2000), a sort of fable in the style of Raoul Ruiz, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa shows a young girl, though well looked after, coming up against her parents’ lack of understanding. She ends up by announcing her intention of taking holy orders.

Noémie Lvovsky, too, follows the eventful career of adolescents fleeing family constraints in La vie ne me fait pas peur (1999), a chronicle that is both tender and violent. Agnès Merlet looks instead at the world of childhood. With Le Fils du requin (1994), the restless wandering of two kids abandoned by their mother, she signs a very dark work, between Truffaut and Pialat, where the lack of love is immeasurable.

Only Tonie Marshall, with Enfants de salaud (1996), chooses to deal with the family through humour. The siblings suddenly brought together again at the trial of an unknown father - brilliantly portrayed by Jean Yanne - provide a few juicy situation comedy sequences.

Probably less restrained and conventional than their male colleagues, female film directors choose subjects that disturb the conscience and paint some magnificent portraits of women who give free vent to their urges. Hence a bold look at the relationship with the body and sexuality.

As a film director of women’s desire with a hint of scandal to her, Catherine Breillat depicts the sexual relations between men and women as a violent struggle, and even as a killing. There is no sentimentalism or tenderness - only the search for pleasure, which is often accompanied by suffering, is important. After Une vraie jeune fille (1976) and 36 fillette (1988), she took another step forward with Parfait amour ! (1996), the account of a mortifying affair between a young man and an older woman, where carnal passion inevitably leads to the other’s physical destruction. Deliberately more graphic, Romance (1999) shows that sexual relations are primarily debasing, despite the protagonist’s search for the absolute. As for A ma sœur ! (2001), - once again punctuated with a provocative exclamation mark -, it reestablishes the film director’s primary obsessions: learning about sexuality.

Film directors of every desire

Again it is a young woman merely giving in to her desires that Jeanne Labrune portrays in Si je t’aime... prends garde à toi (1998): Nathalie Baye plays a refined, cultured heroine who, almost despite herself, enters into a physical relationship with a violent man in order to discover more about her own sexuality.

With more tenderness and humour, Tonie Marshall directs the same Nathalie Baye in Vénus Beauté (Institut). This time the actress portrays a beautician who thinks she can make free with her body but who, always despite herself, falls into the trap of love. An illusory freedom that Sandrine Kiberlain also feels to her cost in A vendre, by Laetitia Masson, before sinking into the servitude of men’s desires.

The heroines, driven by a deep desire for liberation, run right through the work of women film directors: Karin Viard, in La Nouvelle Eve (1999), by Catherine Corsini, and Haut les cœurs ! (1999), by Solveig Anspach, or Miou-Miou in Nettoyage à sec (1997), by Anne Fontaine, portray young women of today who categorically refuse to have their behaviour dictated by those around them. This does not prevent them from embarking on all-consuming amorous passions, sometimes regardless of social conventions, as in Love, etc. (1997), by Marion Vernoux, with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Post coitum, animal triste (1997), by Brigitte Roüan, J’ai horreur de l’amour (1998), by Laurence Ferreira Barbosa and Travolta et moi (1994), by Patricia Mazuy.

In France today, women are writing first feature-length films that often win critical approval, without keeping a low profile with the audience; just think of the great success of Le Goût des autres, of Vénus Beauté (Institut), of La Nouvelle Eve, of La Bûche (1999) by Danièle Thompson or of Ça ira mieux demain (2000) by Jeanne Labrune. And this is not the end: Trouble every day, by Claire Denis with Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo, La Répétition, by Catherine Corsini with Emmanuelle Béart (both in official selection for the Cannes Festival 2001), Made in USA, a documentary on the death penalty in the United States, by Solveig Anspach, La Repentie, by Laetitia Masson, with Isabelle Adjani in the main role, L’Adversaire by Nicole Garcia with Daniel Auteuil, or Dix-huit ans après, the sequel to Trois hommes et un couffin by Coline Serreau will soon be showing. Male chauvinists of all kinds will have to get used to the fact that women have become an established part of the French film industry, and will be so for a long time!