The French Persistence

“We are like Cyrano. We know we cannot win, but we fight. We are a loser, but a faithful loser.”

--Daniel Toscan du Plantier,

president,

Unifrance Film International

*

It’s hot here, jungle hot. The sultry air seems almost perfumed from the flourishing hibiscus and bougainvillea. I’m alone at Las Brisas, a celebrated pink and white honeymoon spot with private swimming pools and spectacular views, feeling, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler’s celebrated Philip Marlowe, as out of place as a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake. But it doesn’t matter. Like Marlowe, I’m on a case.

The death of a film festival is what I’m investigating. That’s right, in this boom time for fests, with unprecedented numbers thriving and new contenders clutching at life every day, one of them up and died. At least that’s what some people say.

Others, and there are always others, mutter darkly that it was hardly a natural death. Sometimes they even pull you aside, look furtively over their shoulders and insist the festival didn’t really die at all. It’s still alive, they tell you nervously, living in Mexico under another name, taking advantage of the cinematic equivalent of a witness protection plan. I knew I’d have to check this one out. Personally.

First, though, I hit the books, poring over parts of the dusty archives of what used to be the Sarasota French Film Festival, which for seven years (1989-1996) was a November adornment of a Florida Gulf Coast resort town described by Time magazine as “a spot so chic and pretty it might have been transported whole from the Cote d’Azur.”

Its aim, said critic Molly Haskell, the festival’s artistic director, was “to increase the presence and revenue of French film in America.” “It enabled,” Le Monde added with appropriate grandeur, “a minnow [the French cinema] to swim for a few moments in pike-infested waters [the American movie industry] and escape not only unharmed but reinvigorated.” And now it was floating belly up like yesterday’s tuna.

Sarasota was, by all reports, one hell of a party while it lasted. I scanned lists in French of local clubs and restaurants prepared for the more than 100 film notables who were flown in annually from France. And then there were all those elaborate festival meals: Chateaubriand Automne, Pates a la Chinoise, Tranche de Roquet au Saffron. Talk about a condemned man eating a hearty meal.

Just as my research was about to hit caloric overload, I got a tip. Go to Acapulco in November. Ask for something called the Festival de Cine Francais. See if anything about it looks familiar. The phone went dead and I booked my flight.

Once I arrived, it wasn’t only the honeymoon atmosphere of the festival headquarters hotel that was unsettling. Though it was Mexico, a good deal of public advertising was in English: billboards reading “Tony Roma’s Famous for Ribs,” “Hooters” and a picture of Col. Sanders with the message “Visita Kentucky Hoy” crowded the highway in from the airport.

At the modern, 1,400-seat Juan Ruiz de Alarcon theater in the city’s downtown convention center, my linguistic troubles took a different turn. Here were 15 French films showing over four days, all with Spanish subtitles. Not completely at home in either of those languages, with not a word of English in sight, I felt overmatched and uncertain how to proceed, but I didn’t want to give up. The very emotions, it turned out, that helped me break wide open the Case of the Fugitive Film Festival.

*

You don’t have to be a detective, of course, hard-boiled or otherwise, to understand the flip side of my Acapulco situation: As disoriented as I felt dealing with French films with Spanish subtitles, that’s how confused and left out foreign films feel when they attempt to penetrate what to them is the baffling English-speaking American market. With the non-English-language share of the U.S. box office consistently below 1%, it’s a crisis that affects film industries worldwide.

But while all countries have this problem, only the French refuse to accept the situation as a given. To fully understand why the Sarasota Film Festival lived, died and was reborn in Acapulco, you have to explore the singular attitude the French have to their current and past film heritage.

How seriously the French were taking the problem became apparent several years ago when Daniel Toscan du Plantier convened an elaborate lunch for key American film journalists at the Cannes film festival. An energetic 57, Toscan, as he is universally known, is a successful producer (“Cousin, Cousine,” Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” Fellini’s “City of Women,” among others) who for the past 11 years has been the president of Unifrance, the entity charged with promoting French film overseas.

There was a time, as everyone around the table knew, when French film needed little help in this country. During the 1960s heyday of the Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave, Americans became passionate about the work of directors such as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. If you wanted to be considered film-literate or even just culturally sophisticated, these were pictures you had to see.

But while the French still have more best foreign-language Oscar nominations than any other country, those days have vanished--not only for French films but for all overseas product. Though there are periodic breakout films like “Cinema Paradiso” “Il Postino,” “Like Water for Chocolate” and the current phenomenon “Life Is Beautiful” that gross more than $10 million in this country, in general foreign films do not do the business or have the cachet they once had.

This situation is especially galling because of the powerful lock American films have on world markets in general, France included. More American films were released in France in 1997 than French-language films, and the U.S. captured a mammoth 55% of the French box office. In 1998, French films in France fell below 30% of the total audience, with only three French-made films listed among the top 15 hits, a situation the newspaper Le Figaro reported with a scene from “Titanic” and the headline “Why French Cinema Is Sinking.”

As discussed by the journalists around that lunch table in Cannes and revisited by Toscan in an extended interview during the Acapulco festival, the reasons for the French fall from grace in the U.S. are numerous and interlocking. They range from broad societal changes like the ever-increasing competition for Americans’ leisure time to specifics like the willingness of successful French directors (Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Annaud and, more recently, Mathieu Kassovitz) to forgo their native tongue and work on English-language projects. But all discussions inevitably come back to a trio of circumstances whose cumulative effect has been devastating:

1) To put it as delicately as possible, the core audience for French films is aging into a time of life when moviegoing is not the passion it once was. “A coterie of middle-aged nostalgics” is how one writer unsympathetically described French-film partisans.

Though French director Bertrand Tavernier once complained about the inability of his country’s films to break out of certain theaters and cities by claiming “we are kept on reservations like the Cherokee or the Navajo,” those art houses and the elite press coverage that used to go with them are an endangered species these days, making extended runs for foreign efforts increasingly problematic. “These films are not going to make it with the public based on 30-second TV spots,” says Michael Barker, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Classics, one of the major distributors of French films in this country.

2) As French cinema has changed, so has the new American movie audience. Most European audiences (except for the French) prefer to have their foreign films dubbed, but Americans have stubbornly and traditionally rejected that system. What is new is that these days, subtitles are getting just as rough a treatment.

“If you want to reach a large audience with a film, you cannot put subtitles on it,” concedes Toscan, adding in mock exasperation, “Young people can read a computer screen, but for them the idea of reading a film is an impossible idea.”

3) The audience that traditionally went to French films in the 1960s has been cannibalized by the explosive growth of the American independent movement. In decades past, to experience films that emphasized character, that were true to life and not mechanical and simplistic, to experience, in other words, an alternative to standard Hollywood product, foreign-language films were your only refuge.

But now, with independent film the hottest aspect of the American scene, audiences can get those same kinds of films without having to bother reading subtitles or hearing dubbed voices. “Aside from artistic merit,” adds Haskell, “in the days of the Production Code, French films had the merit of sensuality. The cachet of French cinema is that it was more adult,more sophisticated, more ooh-la-la. It no longer is.”

In the face of these very substantial obstacles, other countries have to varying degrees given up on the possibility of their national cinemas making much of a dent in America’s chauvinistic viewing habits. A trio of Italian cultural organizations started Venezia a Hollywood last year, bringing five Italian films from the Venice festival to Los Angeles, and the American Film Institute in Washington hosts an annual European Union Film Showcase, but such efforts are few and far between, much to Toscan’s discomfort.

“It’s my despair,” he says, and he looks like he means it.

The French are different. Like Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, who persisted in loving the fair Roxane though he knew she would never be his, the French have refused to give up on the prospects of their film industry, both at home and abroad. And that is, at least in part, because their attitude toward cinema is akin to our own.

“We have many things in common with the U.S., including taking film very seriously in terms of power,” Toscan says. “We’re the only countries where the presidents, both Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac, think cinema is important enough to mention when they make state visits. We think the same; that’s why we’re fighting.”

In addition, the French, who’ve made some of the world’s greatest motion pictures in every decade of cinema’s existence, feel more consciously than Americans that film is part of their heritage. “ ‘Cultural identity’ is a pretentious word in English, a heavy word, but it means something, and to French people film is one of the most important expressions of cultural identity,” Toscan says.

Jack Lang, France’s former minister of culture and communications, echoed this sentiment when he told an interviewer, apropos France’s determination to penetrate the U.S. market, “it’s not so much a matter of making money. It’s more a question of moral satisfaction. For a film to be shown in America amounts to a kind of international consecration for a foreign filmmaker.” Added Toscan, when told by a U.S. trade representative that the film situation was the flip side of the cheese situation--i.e., we eat theirs and they don’t eat ours--”our films are just as good as our cheese.”

Along with that is the French feeling that more than being a nation-versus-nation situation, their position represents standing up for a different kind of cinematic tradition, the personal, individualistic works that in France are known as films d’auteur.

“If it’s either big Hollywood or little France, we are dead,” says Toscan, facing facts. “We cannot fight against American power; China and India aside, the U.S. controls 75% to 80% of the world’s market. It’s not America and France, it’s Hollywood and the rest of the world, including America. . . . What we want to be are leaders of the alternative.”

This is not just theoretical philosophizing. Especially when compared to cultural funding in this country, where even traditional arts end up as beggars, the French largess to film-related entities, which can amount to as much as $400 million per year (no, that’s not a misprint), is more than impressive. As a result, France supports close to 200 film festivals and ranks behind only India and the U.S. in numbers of films made.

But, as people are wont to say in Los Angeles, there is money and there is Hollywood money. In 1997, the average cost of a studio film was $53 million plus, while the average French film cost $6.2 million. In addition, the studios regularly spend more to promote their films--an average of $22 million last year--than the entire budgets of French efforts, which is why the French, determined to have an impact, have turned to creating their own festivals.

“If we had $50 million to open a film, we would not be making festivals; that is something for the poor,” is how Toscan puts it. To help open Hollywood-dominated markets to their films, the French have started and supported thriving festivals in Japan and Australia, and it was in this spirit that the Sarasota French Film Festival began. It was a question, Toscan says, of “organizing our survival.”

*

The notion of placing a festival in Sarasota came, however, not from the French but the Floridians, specifically from a veteran politician named Robert M. Johnson. A Republican who represented Sarasota in the Florida state senate, Johnson was able to gather pledges from business interests as well as a financial commitment from the state legislature that ended up being worth $250,000 a year for the festival’s first five years.

“Bob came to Paris with a delegation of eight old and rich ladies from Florida, and we were so surprised, no one wanted to receive them,” Toscan remembers. “We’d never heard the name Sarasota, it meant nothing to us, but on the other hand, in my life I’d never heard of public money in America being dedicated to cinema.”

Once they got to know Sarasota, the French increasingly warmed to the idea of a festival in a wealthy beachfront community that was considered a cultural oasis and was home to a well-known art museum founded by circus magnate John Ringling.

With the help of a luminary-heavy honorary committee (including Louis Malle, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Norman Mailer and Elie Wiesel, among others) the Sarasota festival became a reality in 1989, and at first everyone seemed happy.

Under Haskell, the festival programmed the cream of French cinema, including eventual Oscar winners “Indochine” and “Burnt by the Sun” (a French co-production). The Miami Herald generously proclaimed Sarasota “Florida’s best pure film festival,” the New York Times called it one of the world’s up-and-coming events, and headlines like “19 Frenchies for Florida Fest” became common in newspapers nationwide.

French flags appeared in windows of Sarasota shopping malls, the city achieved a name recognition in France exceeded only by Miami and Orlando among Florida cities, and, it was often reported, sales of Tropicana products spiked in France after the festival’s inauguration.

Increased orange juice sales, however, did not captivate all the people all the time, and the Sarasota festival almost immediately faced obstacles. There were disputes about how many tickets were given away and with an irate local art-house programmer who felt disrespected. And, perhaps inevitably, there were persistent cultural clashes.

The French were irked when Sarasota Magazine listed Ten Commandments for those wishing to become French (“marry and get yourself a mistress,” “feel superior,” “believe that Jerry Lewis is really, really funny”). And Sarasotans were not amused when a correspondent for Le Figaro wrote, “In Sarasota, only the pelicans--gorged and dirty--possess vitality.”

The most long-lived and ultimately most damaging criticism had to do with the government money spent, money that, absent an American tradition of public spending for the arts, numerous local residents could not reconcile themselves to. Haskell recalled comments that Johnson had spent “$500,000 of Florida money so he could have lunch with Catherine Deneuve.”

Johnson’s role in this resonated with local voters. It surfaced in the 1992 Republican primary, when Johnson’s opponent ridiculed the festival as a “pork barrel project.” Johnson fought off that challenge, but despite his 16 years in office, he was defeated that November by Democrat Jim Boczar, who made the festival the centerpiece of his campaign.

With its main champion vanquished, it was only a matter of time until the French pulled the plug on Sarasota, which they did in June 1996 for a variety of reasons.

“It was a costly festival, we lost the subsidy of Florida, there was no more support from anyone, and if we do not have private sponsorship, we must leave,” Toscan explains. “We said, ‘It is enough. We are fed up with Sarasota, we must find another place.’ ”

Though the festival concept did not work in Sarasota, the French have by no means given up on the U.S. as a market for their films. Toscan has all kinds of schemes afoot, from hosting several smaller festivals to possibly supporting French films once they are released out of a special fund for prints and advertising.

Neither have the French given up on the festival concept as the best way to get their films wider exposure and distribution around the world; given their zeal for the cinema, there is no way they could. Which is how the Sarasota French Film Festival moved south, took advantage of government subsidies and became Acapulco’s Festival de Cine Frances, which in 1998 played host to journalists, distributors and exhibitors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela as well as host Mexico, a sizable potential market.

Things were not always this bright. When the French were considering Acapulco as a festival site, Toscan came here with director and cinephile Tavernier. “We went to a school classroom and asked, ‘Have any of you heard of French cinema?’ and the answer was, ‘No,’ ” he remembers. “In desperation, Bertrand asked if anyone had seen a French film, and a boy in the back raised his hand. ‘My father spoke about a French film,’ he said. ‘It was called “Emmanuelle.” ’ “

Despite this unpromising beginning, Acapulco, where young people make up a healthy proportion of the audience, is turning into a beachhead for French cinema. Congenitally upbeat, Toscan is delighted.

“If you are on a street full of hamburger shops, you finally want to eat something else,” Toscan sums up, brimming with passion. “If you hear there is an old lady who prepares cassoulet in a small apartment on the second floor, you will go there, you will seek her out. In a film world where there is too much noise, too much ‘Independence Day,’ French cinema is cassoulet on the second floor.” *

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Lights, Cameras, Accents

A key example of the kind of outreach the French film industry specializes in, as well as a chance to see some of the best films that country produces, is the third annual “City of Lights, City of Angels” mini-festival of new French cinema.

Running Tuesday through Saturday at the Directors Guild Theater, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, “City of Lights” includes the Cesar-winning ensemble effort “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train,” the animated “Kirikou and the Sorceress,” Bertrand Tavernier’s “It All Starts Today” and “Place Vendome,” the latest film to star Catherine Deneuve.

For tickets: (310) 206-8013.

The Schedule

“It All Starts Today”Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.

“Hinterland”Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.

“Mooncalf”Thursday, 7:30 p.m.

“Place Vendome”Friday, 7:30 p.m.

“Kirikou and the Sorceress”Saturday, 1 p.m.

“Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train”Saturday, 7:30 p.m.