The French New Vague

As one is often reminded in France, cinema is a French invention. The Lumière brothers are credited with the first motion pictures at the end of the 19th century, and influential movements like the avant-garde, Poetic-Realist and New Wave have contributed to the French sense that historically, film is a realm very much their own. Paris has been known to boast more film journals, retrospectives, revivals, and movies playing each week than any other city in the world. Not even a century-long cinematic rivalry with America and an increasingly Hollywood-dominated French film market have seemed to drastically diminish France’s image of itself as pioneers of this cultural field.

But is France living in the past? Have the French lost their position as artistic leaders of the film world, their cinematic tradition slowly but surely losing its luster? Commercially speaking, the data is unambiguous. In 2004, six out of the 10 highest-grossing films in France were American, slightly down from seven in 2003 and eight in 2002. The single most successful film in France in 2004, however, was Les Choristes, released Jan. 14 in selected American cities as The Chorus and nominated this week for best foreign film and best song Oscars. Its hometown success is significant, as The Chorus is the rare recent French film that has more than held its own against an endless Hollywood invasion.

Indeed, France’s national cinema – once proudly associated with glamorous names like Bardot, Depardieu, and Deneuve, as well as wildly talented directors like Truffaut and Godard – has been gradually eroding as it struggles to compete with lucratively exported American films. In Europe, France is recognized as the country that has managed to maintain a relatively high degree of autonomy in the face of the Hollywood steamroller, but the extent to which American film dominates French cinematic culture is nevertheless astounding. The unexpected success of The Chorus—a crowd-pleaser about a school for troubled boys in the late 1940’s—has therefore been received in France as a pleasant indication that French cinema is still alive and kicking.

The bad news is that the movie itself is not very good. A remake of a 1949 French film, La Cage aux Rossignols, The Chorus is a shamelessly sentimental and improbable piece of fluff, a sort of Gallic, all-male Mona Lisa Smile. That film, however, as blatantly conventional as it might have been, at least captured rather convincingly the kind of controversial spell a charismatic young teacher can cast over her students. The Chorus doesn’t even bother to explore this hackneyed phenomenon of pedagogical inspiration. The affable Clément coaches a group of rowdy pubescent rebels into an angelic sounding boys’ choir, and the transformation, as portrayed, is immediate and utterly random. The film helps itself to every cliché of the genre—the tyrannical principal, the bad boy with a hidden talent, the climactic farewell scene—to tug impatiently at our heartstrings, yet nothing rings true. The Chorus may be a commercial redemption for the French film industry, but it is by no means a creative victory.

The film’s success can be explained away by the presence of an immensely likeable lead actor, Gérard Jugnot, an undemanding storyline fit for viewers of all ages, and an easy-to-swallow message: that inside every surly misfit is a gift waiting to be coaxed out. More bothersome than the film’s self-congratulatory moralism, however, is the bland, manufactured quality of the film-making. One gets the feeling, while watching The Chorus, that it might as well not be a French film at all, that the same movie could have been made by a Hollywood studio. None of this would be worth noting – it’s not the first foreign film to make an unabashed bid for global appeal – were it not for two key factors that are unavoidably – and troublingly – linked: firstly that The Chorus was the highest-grossing film of 2004 in France; and secondly that the film is almost totally incongruous with the long-standing tradition of exhilaratingly messy emotional realism in modern French film. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie may have been brazen in its effort to delight and dazzle, but it was also sprung from an undeniably fresh artistic sensibility and a canny sense of romantic Paris mythology. Perhaps more than any other French film released internationally in recent years, The Chorus seems to indicate a dramatic departure from the distinctive strengths of contemporary French cinema: the ambiguous, intricately mapped human relationships of André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds and My Favorite Season; the provocative overlapping of fantasy and reality in François Ozon’s Under the Sand and Swimming Pool; the unflinching dissection of female friendship in Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels; the wittily observed romantic complications of Agnès Jaoui’s The Taste of Others.