twenty french films

I don't hate French film in general. I don't even hate French New Wave. In fact, some of my favorite films are from the French New Wave.

But (here's where I deny the Holocaust) I do think much of what Americans find ridiculous about French film truly deserves ridicule. I'm talking about fatalistic, manic-depressive bohemians spouting non sequiturs. Non-acting. Non-plot-driven, nonsensical fantasy sequences. Pathetic pastiches of Hollywood icons. Mimes.

I bring this up because I just sat through Au hasard Balthazar. I don't know what I was expecting; maybe something like L'Ours (The Bear). Or Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows). What I got was the stereotypical blend of amateur direction, pretentiousness, and pointlessness Americans have come to associate with the French New Wave and its legacy.

The irony is the New Wave's Auteur Theory (which, simply put, says that a film is the creative vision of the director, as opposed to a collaboration of the writer, actors, crew, director, producer, etc.) meets its greatest negative expression in the New Wave's descendants of the late 60s and 70s. If what makes a great movie like, say, Vertigo great is the omnipresent hand of a dictatorial genius like Hitchcock, then what should we make of films like Au hasard in which the director doesn't direct the actors; where he omits any coherent narrative, character development, or any reason at all for the viewer to care what goes on inside the frame? I'll tell you what I make of them: steaming donkey turds.

Just watch the interview of film scholar Donald Ritchie on the Criterion DVD. The guy can't come up with a single concrete reason the movie is actually worth watching. Just attempts at coining a bunch of meaningless jargon to try to cover up the fact that he has no idea what constitutes a good film. Amusingly, he goes so far as to say one reason he loves it is that his friends (with whom he makes a point of saying he shares much in common) hate it or are bored stiff by it. WTF?

I guess that's why I felt the need to post something. There is an epidemic (an epidemic that started in America cinema with the French New Wave) of movies being well-regarded simply because film aficionados say they are important. Call this "Modern Art Syndrome". The problem: experimentation is fine, but learn to recognize when you've failed and move on. Simply being audacious enough to claim you've discovered cold fusion doesn't mean your botched experiment should be featured in every children's museum.

The cure is simple: a mixture of wide-ranging critical film viewing leading to the development of concrete, if subjective, criteria for what constitutes a classic film - a film which speaks to multiple generations and changes the way they see the world. And why can't a great film be good entertainment as well? There must be something important lacking when we fall asleep half a dozen times trying to finish what is ostensibly a classic. That goes for War and Peace as much as it goes for, well, War and Peace: The Movie.

Anyways, there are plenty of famous French films which I feel fall woefully short of even that loose definition of a classic film. So without further ado, I present:

The Top Ten Most Overrated French Films of All Time (Not All of Which Are From the French New Wave, and Freely Admitting I Haven't Watched All That Many French Films Because I've Been Burned So Many Times)

10. La môme (La vie en rose) — Olivier Dahan, 2007
    Assembly-line Hollywood singer biopic, a genre that had already seen a few too many curtain calls by the time Edith Piaf first sang La vie en rose.
9. Mon oncle — Jacques Tati, 1958
   Mildly amusing, in the same way a Hummer is a mild hybrid.
8. La règle du jeu — Jean Renoir, 1939
   Truly classic foreign film engages us by revealing universals of human nature in an exotic setting. This film, on the other hand, leaves charitable viewers asking, "did people ever really act that way?" and me asking, "who cares?"
7. Les diaboliques — Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955
   My problem with this film is not that it's too French, but that it's typical of bad suspense films. The plot and characterizations are beyond implausible, making it difficult to empathise with the characters, thus keeping any suspense from building.
6. Au hasard Balthazar — Robert Bresson, 1966
   No acting (on purpose), no plot (on purpose), no character development (on purpose) — in general, no purpose.
5. Ponette — Jacques Doillon, 1996
   Not technically overrated, in that few bother to rate it at all. Think Au hasard, only Ponette has even fewer lines than Balthazar.
4. Alphaville — Jean-Luc Godard, 1965
   Sadly, one of the most accessible and least mentally-masturbatorial of Godard's films. I tried one or two more Godards after this, but finally decided to cut my losses and salvage what was left of my wasted life.
3. La belle et la bête — Jean Cocteau, 1946
   A classic of the silent cinema—not. Before you start making excuses for the age of the film, realize that it was made in the same year as It's a Wonderful Life, four years after Casablanca, seven after Gone With the Wind, and a whopping nineteen years after the far superior Sunrise (one of the last, great silents).
2. La charme discret de la bourgeoisie — Luis Buñuel, 1972
   Less well-conceived (and engaging) than the original Infiniti ads.
1. La passion de Jeanne d'Arc — Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928
   The unfortunate role model from which the stoic streak in French cinema developed. You see, the French weren't always this way. In fact, Dreyer wasn't French. Wanna guess his nationality? Let's just say he'd be very proud of Dogme.

But just to prove I'm not a French-cinema Nazi (and have watched more than ten French films), I also list ten French films that are not only lasting contributions to world cinema, but fine entertainment as well:

Top Ten French Films of All Time As Given in the Gospel According to Moi

10. La science des rêves — Michel Gondry, 2007
    Actually, it's just okay. But Eternal Sunshine (an American production) was absolutely brilliant. So I'm sneaking in my (second) favorite French music-video-cum-feature-film director.
9. La Haine (Hate) — Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995
   Describing this as a two-hour, Parisian The Wire only begs the question of just how much David Simon was inspired by the earlier French film.
8. Les enfants du paradis — Marcel Carné, 1945
   Just to show there's no hard feelings, this one even has mimes.
7. Hiroshima mon amour — Alain Resnais, 1959
   This one has all the elements I hate about French New Wave failures, and yet I think it works. Perhaps it's Resnais' more classical training.
6. Bande à part (Band of Outsiders) — Jean-Luc Godard, 1964
   Yes, Jean-Luc too had his moments of clarity. Godard makes his own stab at...
5. Jules et Jim — François Truffaut, 1962
   What Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves and Dogville were to Dogme, Truffaut, Jules and Jim were to the Nouvelle Vague: not truly part of their respective movements, yet all came to be associated with those movements, at the same time transcending them and leaving us different people than when we walked in the theater.
4. Léon (The Professional) — Luc Besson, 1994
   One part cowboy-samurai, one part mental, one part Natalie Portman crying in the hallway. Allow 110 minutes to rise. Voilà!
3. Delicatessen — Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991
2. La cité des enfants perdus — Caro & Jeunet, 1995
1. Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain — Jeunet, 2001
   Along with Besson (Besson, not Bresson, mind you) and Gondry, Jeunet is one of the wave of French "MTV" directors. Looking like a French Terry Gilliam (and even specializing in the same genre), Jeunet draws from the best of the fantasy and experimentalism of French cinema, while dropping all the phony stoic fatalism.

Say what you will about me being biased towards Hollywood-style films and directors. I need only respond that the founders of the French New Wave themselves adored Hollywood directors (e.g., Hitchcock) and stars (e.g., Bogart).

France is welcome to share its unique worldview, its wanton sex, its existentialist musings. But if they want to earn the price of admission, dammit, French directors need to make some attempt to connect with their audience.