The Newest Wave in French Films

In the early 1950s, five young movie geeks with big ideas made a lot of noise writing for the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema. One by one, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol retired their essayists’ chapeaus and donned the berets of film directors. Over the ensuing decade, they would transform the face of international cinema with a parcel of groundbreaking pictures variously hailed and reviled under the umbrella heading of the French New Wave.

A half-century later, four of these mavericks are very much alive and continue to stretch the vocabulary of film. In a serendipitous union of good timing and fine art, three will be represented with new films at the 39th New York Film Festival, which is opening at Lincoln Center on Friday. Rivette’s “Va Savoir” begins the festival, and it is closing Oct. 14 with Godard’s “In Praise of Love.” The collective presence of these pioneering directors not only underscores the heavy French influence at this year’s festival--even a Taiwanese film (“What Time Is It There?”) embraces the late Truffaut with a homage to “The 400 Blows”--but also serves as a bellwether for a vigorous new wave of French movies that is washing up on American shores.

While the Yanks flocking to “The Closet” attest to the eternal popularity of old-fashioned French farce, film distributors are obviously banking on a taste for the vanguard as well. In addition to the seven state-of-the-art French films being highlighted at the festival (many of which will enjoy commercial release shortly thereafter), New York audiences can look forward to “Amelie,” a loopy romantic comedy bearing the idiosyncratic stamp of “Delicatessen” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Robert Guediguian’s “The Town is Quiet,” a panoramic drama of working-class Marseilles from the maker of “Marius and Jeanette.”

“I think it’s a great time for French cinema,” says John Vanco of Cowboy Films, which will be releasing the festival entry “Fat Girl” by Catherine Breillat. Vanco cites Breillat (whose sexually hard-core 1999 drama “Romance” incited much flapping of tongues) and Francois Ozon (“Under the Sand”) as examples of directors who are renewing French cinema. “I really look forward to what they are going to come up with next, which I think is the mark of a healthy national cinema. Like I can’t wait to see the next Wong Kar-wai or Kirostami film.”

Are we in the midst of a French renaissance, or are American audiences expanding their notion of what constitutes a good night at the movies? Both, says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which will be releasing Rohmer’s French Revolution-era “The Lady and the Duke” after its New York Film Festival premiere.

“There is definitely something going on in France,” says Bernard, “and it’s happening at the same time as the success here of the subtitled ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”’ Bernard, who brought in Truffaut’s “The Last Metro” for United Artists Classics and later imported “May Fools,” “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir les Enfants,” sees this renewed French activity as filling in a gap left by a dry American market.

“The American independent movement has gotten stuck in a lack of content,” Bernard says. “In the past it was always so difficult for new directors. You couldn’t get unions to work on it, you couldn’t get the money, you couldn’t find the cameraman. As a result, the filmmakers became very involved in every aspect of the creative process.

“Today, anybody with $500,000 can hire very competent technicians. But they really don’t imprint a style on it, like a Jim Jarmusch or John Sayles. The films that have something to say are coming from France. And it seems like some of the more traditional styles of French films are starting to work again.”

A Tradition Reinvented for a New Era

If French cinema traditions are in vogue again, it may be because they are being reinvented for the 21st century. “The French have an understanding of tradition, but also of putting it toward a new direction,” says Richard Pena, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who chaired the festival selection committee, which also included Newsday film critic John Anderson, L.A. Weekly’s Manohla Dargis, New York Times film columnist Dave Kehr and Seattle-based film scholar Kathleen Murphy.

Pena says this year’s French entries are a cross-fertilization of “the masters, the midcareer directors and people just starting out. ‘Deep Breath,’ the debut feature of Damian Odoul, clearly has its eyes on French master of emotional minimalism Robert Bresson, but he does something entirely new with those ideas.”

Similarly, Breillat’s “Fat Girl” jumps off from the imagery of another festival participant, Rohmer. Cowboy’s Vanco says that “in a lot of ways, ‘Fat Girl’ feels like the world of Rohmer in ‘Pauline at the Beach’ and ‘A Summer’s Tale,’ in which teenagers have their first experiences at the beach, enjoy a certain freedom from their families and then nature takes its course. But there is a darkness here, a harsh reality. Those are not uncomplicated stories that Rohmer tells, but they are ultimately very sweet.

“Breillat has a real edge. She’s ultimately commenting on the whole tradition of French cinema, or at least what a lot of us think it is, based on all those New Wave conceptions of romance,” Vanco says. “It’s not only about these two girls growing up on the beach during this one fateful summer, it’s about the narrative conventions of French romantic cinema. It pulls away the curtain from a lot of those conventions.”

Veteran Director Embraces a New Style

Even Rohmer, at 81, is ripping the curtains down from his own signature conventions. Anyone walking in on “The Lady and the Duke” after the opening credits may not immediately identify it as the work of Rohmer, famed for his small-scale, endlessly chatty contemporary comedies about pretty young adults who don’t know which way is up. In spinning a tale of French Revolutionary upheaval, Rohmer eschews the elaborately realistic period detail and location sets usually seen in French historical films, creating instead an environment of authentic artifice through the mix of digital video, hand-painted sets and 18th century paintings used as backdrops.

“He’s sort of saying, ‘Here’s the new technology, and I don’t have to go to a certain location or build a set, I can just put it there,”’ says Bernard. “‘I can create an atmosphere by painting this picture in the back.’ He takes something as large as the French Revolution and downsizes it to a drama between two or three people, discussing issues and what should be the right decision. So it has his imprint in the characters’ interactions, but the landscape is something you’ve never seen before.”

Not all French auteurs are looking to reinvent the conventions of French cinema from days gone by. Director Patrice Chereau insists he can’t get far enough away from them. His feverishly carnal festival entry, “Intimacy,” adapted from writings of “My Beautiful Laundrette’s” Hanif Kureishi, is so against the grain of what Vanco terms “the French romantic cinema” that it’s filmed in English, with a largely British cast.

Chereau explains he was trying to effect what he calls a “genetic manipulation” between the interpersonal concerns of French cinema and the grittiness of British social cinema. “I was avoiding this terrible tradition of the French cinema: It’s sometimes very abstract, and very romantic. I wanted a truth, something harsh, something in the description of social reality. The British cinema knows how to do that. They are more real than we are.

“I myself am in a very strange, particularly peculiar situation. I always feel a little like an outsider. And I like that. I feel my food, my inspiration most of the time is in films from other countries rather than French films. All my films tend to be a reaction against the things I don’t like in French films.”

For all Chereau’s cranky rebellion against French cinema, his new film connects to old French traditions in its theatrical leanings and a preoccupation with toujours l’amour. As in “Va Savoir,” Rivette’s meticulously spun tapestry of adulterous yearnings, “Intimacy” utilizes a stage milieu and features several play-within-a-movie sequences. And in the spirit of the Brigitte Bardot films of another generation, “Intimacy” pushes the limits of sexual explicitness, requiring physical talents from his leads Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox that are usually expected of porn actors.

Explains Chereau: “I wasn’t attempting to be titillating. During shooting, I discovered it wasn’t exciting but rather moving to see two bodies trying to give each other pleasure, or even tenderness. Or even try and just be together. Because it’s never easy to be together. It’s hard work. You have to be very careful.”

As French-and English-speaking filmmakers continue to cross-pollinate as Chereau is doing, is it conceivable that an American director could make the kinds of films that are coming out of France?

“I don’t think that there is a mature filmmaker in America of the stature of a Catherine Breillat who would make ‘Fat Girl,”’ says Vanco. “I think that young American filmmakers with nothing to lose would make a very unpolished version, say, a 23-year-old kid making his first film with digital video, iffy acting and low production values. Fortunately, France has more than its fair share of filmmakers who are trying to do something different.”