An Unresolved Border Conflict

Flashing her Raggedy-Ann-dyed red mop of hair, Lola races nonstop through Berlin, legs pounding to a relentless techno beat. In Germany and the U.S., audiences poured into cinemas for “Run Lola Run” to see if the punk heroine could scare up 100,000 deutsche marks (around $53,000) in 20 minutes.

In France, despite a promotion campaign worthy of a George Lucas or Luc Besson film, they yawned at the German import.

“Lola,” directed by 35-year-old Tom Tykwer, is not alone in its U.S. success. In an astounding turnaround, more and more European imports are scoring better audiences in the U.S. than in neighboring European countries. Last year, the top three French films in the U.S.--”The Dreamlife of Angels,” “The Dinner Game” and “Autumn Tale”--reached more Americans than Europeans (excluding France), according to the latest figures from Unifrance, the agency responsible for tracking the country’s film exports.

Even films that do well in some neighboring countries flag in others. Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother” and Francis Veber’s “The Dinner Game” are prime examples.

Although the Almodovar film performed very well in France and Italy, the Spanish director’s seriocomic paean to motherhood, female solidarity and cross dressing left audiences cold in Germany and the U.K. In the U.S., where critics have universally applauded this melodramatic valentine from Spain’s former bad boy of cinema, it has been nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

With “ The Dinner Game,” Veber, the veteran scriptwriter of “La Cage aux Folles” and director of “La Chevre” (“The Goat” in the U.S.), sharply satirizes the smug class pretensions and cruelties of an upper-crust Parisian, adapting his theatrical hit with a literate cinematic translation that garnered $4 million in the U.S. Although the film also did well in Spain, it drew a fraction of the American audience numbers in the U.K. and still fewer in Germany and Italy.

Belgian director Alain Berliner’s “Ma Vie en Rose” (My Life in Pink), the top-grossing French-language film in the U.S. in 1997, was another promising export that died in Europe. Going further back, the 1994 British-Italian film “Il Postino,” Michael Radford’s story of the unlikely friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and a preternaturally shy island postman, was another European film that gained wider acceptance in the U.S. than elsewhere in Europe.

For decades, European filmmakers, despite generous government subsidies, have loudly complained about the difficulty of cracking the U.S. market. Worldwide hits like “The English Patient,” “Life Is Beautiful” and “The Full Monty” proved that it could be done. After these blockbuster successes, film distributors like Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax, USA Films, Lions Gate and Paramount Classics routinely scour the film festival circuit for promising films.

Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, the U.S. distributor for “Lola” and “Dreamlife of Angels,” says that a foreign film can make a profit if it grosses as little as $1 million at the American box office, depending on the costs of acquisition, film prints and advertising.

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The poor showing most European films receive from their neighbors is a sore point among the European film community, one that has led a number of government officials to propose radical incentives to boost cross-border exchanges.

Michael Naumann, the German minister of culture who is a former journalist and book publisher in the U.S., recently proposed a series of measures intended to provide subsidies and tax breaks for European co-productions and distribution agreements. In addition to the bilateral incentives with Italy and other countries, Naumann is encouraging German filmmakers to take advantage of the 400 million euros ($410 million) in funding from the European Union’s media program.

Despite these financial incentives, Naumann is less than sanguine about the future of European cinema crossing frontiers. “The major reason German films--and films from other European countries as well--have trouble traveling outside their borders is due to an overall decline in curiosity in one other,” says Naumann. “It’s one of the unforeseeable results of globalization.

Naumann also points to the disappearance of Continental stars as another factor contributing to the fragmented European cinema market. Except for a few stars like Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan, the European industry has failed to create a new generation of actors and actresses to replace instantly recognizable and highly bankable worldwide celebrities like Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren and Jeanne Moreau, he maintains.

Rising European stars like Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle have made their reputations principally in American and British films.

Unfortunately, the German film industry has focused too narrowly on comedy, a genre that is a tough sell abroad, according to the culture minister. “Frenchmen find it almost impossible to escape into German humor and vice versa,” he says.

In the U.S., German films have their work cut out for them. Except for Wim Wenders’ 1987 film “Wings of Desire,” which grossed $3 million in the U.S., “Run Lola Run” is the first German hit since the 1981 film “The Boat” and has so far grossed some $8 million in the U.S., Sony’s Barker says.

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Taking a page out of Peter Howitt’s 1998 film “Sliding Doors,” “Lola” starts three times with an identical beginning and presents three possible scenarios reaching radically divergent finales.

In Germany and the U.S., where critics lavished praise on the film, some reviewers divined metaphors for an evolving feminist independence. Others gave the film a political spin with the postwar German state racing, like Lola, through a series of historical imperatives. In these interpretations, the country moves from an initial paternalistic dependence on its occupying Western allies into a period of violent social polarization where young Germans accuse their parents of whitewashing their Nazi past, ending at last at the roulette wheel of capitalism, raking in the chips. Kids in both countries flocked to the movie in droves, not necessarily for the metaphors and political overlay, but for the techno vibe and music video pacing.

“Finally German young people could go to a German film that wasn’t boring and slow,” explains “Lola” executive producer Maria Kopf.

In the U.S., Sony pulled out all the stops to attract younger audiences notorious for avoiding foreign films, blanketing key markets with an unconventional advertising campaign over radio, television and music video networks.

“We didn’t keep it a secret that this was a subtitled German movie, but we didn’t exactly harp on it either,” Sony’s Barker explains.

American audiences for foreign films, traditionally the preserve of older viewers, are undergoing a sea change, says Barker, as younger audiences flock to films like “Lola,” “The Dreamlife of Angels,” “All About My Mother” and other imports.

Kopf says “Lola” stumbled in France partly due to the unfamiliar techno music and partly to an innate resistance to German films. “Since it was marketed as an international film, not a German one, French audiences felt betrayed,” she says.

When the tables are turned, not every French film dies in Germany, of course. “Asterix et Obelix,” the slapstick Gallic comeuppance on Caesar’s legions starring Gerard Depardieu and Laetitia Casta, proved one of the most popular French exports, not only in Germany, but across Europe. U.S. distributors, however, have so far shied away from the film, wary perhaps of its prototypically French sense of ribald humor and American audiences’ lack of familiarity with the comic-book series that spawned the film.

Despite the surprise success of a handful of French films in the U.S., French distributors and officials complain that the imports would reach still larger audiences if they had wider releases.

“Our films have to compete for the same screens as the films of Woody Allen and a dozen other independent American filmmakers,” grouses Daniel Toscan du Plantier, the feistily eloquent president of Unifrance.

Adds Philippe de Chaisemartin, vice president for international feature film sales at Gaumont: “The American public is ready for French films, but the American distributors are not.” With Gaumont’s “The Dinner Game,” De Chaisemartin points out that a single New York cinema had the exclusive rights to the film for a full month before allowing it to be shown in theaters elsewhere around the country.

“When people read positive reviews for a film,” the Gaumont distributor complains, “they want to see it right away, not four weeks later.”

If American distribution remains the Holy Grail for most European filmmakers, there are some who are coming to realize the importance of attracting European audiences outside their home countries.

While Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s film “The Celebration” was the sixth-highest-grossing foreign-language film last year in the U.S., taking in some $2 million, it reached a far larger audience in Europe. October Films (now USA) released the film in the U.S.

“It may still be true that upcoming European filmmakers have to go to the U.S. for their careers,” explains Lars Bredo Rahbek, one of the Danish producers distributing the film, “but there’s more money to be made in Europe.”