Nouvelle Vague was the name given to the films from Paris that briefly set the world alight in the Sixties, but it should be used about French cinema too.
All the best French films make things new. They supply, in suitable quantities, visual beauty and style, and they represent, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, the intriguing notion that somehow life can be comprehended through the act of filming. As much as novels and fashion, French films have come to define France. It would be hard to think of France without French cinema. And the best French films, like other good French things, are bizarrely, winningly simple. They don’t say or teach anything - they just are, miraculously, what they should be.
The special properties of nitrate film were discovered by the Lumière brothers, but the genius of French cinema remains Jean Renoir. His two greatest films are La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion, 1937), which is set in a WW1 officers’ prison camp, and La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of The Game, 1939), which describes an ill-fated shooting party on the eve of the next war. At present, my vote goes to La Grande Illusion, but that may be because I watched it most recently and Jean Gabin’s performance as a promoted-through-the-ranks-dur-become-officer lingers. Renoir’s sensibility is rueful, ironic, tolerant of failure, and, endlessly amused; but his son-of-painter’s eye comes with a large and generous heart. Both films were lost, largely forgotten, and rediscovered. Renoir’s star never dimmed, but he spent many fruitless years in Hollywood.
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The film-maker closest to Renoir is Louis Malle. He made many films, not all of them good, but Au Revoir les Enfants (1987) and Lacombe, Lucien (1974) are his two masterpieces and reflect his obsession with the dark side of the Occupation in which the director grew up. Malle was an anglophile and, like Renoir, went to America. His best American film is Atlantic City (1980), which features an unexpectedly down-and-out and rather un-Hollywood Burt Lancaster.
Few films have led to as much theorising as Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout De Souffle (Breathless, 1960). Nowadays, the charms of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg seem more appealing than the jump cuts and cute, touchingly dated appropriations of American culture. François Truffaut worked on the script of Godard’s film, and many consider him to be the greatest. I find his oeuvre uneven, often over-precious. But Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) is one of that period’s greatest films, and for Le Dernier Métro (The Last Metro, 1980), Truffaut puts together the outsize talent and beauty-and-the-beast presence of Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu within the crumbling walls of a Paris theatre during the Occupation.
One might want to argue whether Deneuve, her still more beautiful sister Françoise Dorléac, or Jeanne Moreau is the presiding muse of modern French cinema. My vote goes to the skinny half-English Jeanne. Jules et Jim won’t be to everyone’s taste these days, but she makes a late cameo appearance with Depardieu in Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses (ineptly retitled Going Places, 1974), playing a woman released from prison. Blier’s Seventies films are gritty descendants of the Sixties classics, unjustly forgotten.
Auteurism has become less fashionable, and much of recent French cinema has come to resemble out-takes from luxury fragrance ads. But there are many good, even great, French films - more, certainly, than in Britain. Erick Zonka’s La Vie Rêvée Des Anges (The Dreamlife of Angels, 1998) follows the muted lives of two check-out girls in Lille, and it owes a lot to the genius of Jean Vigo.
The most accomplished film-maker in today’s France is Jacques Audiard, who started as a scriptwriter and does, in the approved French style, write his own scripts. Audiard films are constructed out of giant perceptual mood swings, from banality to meaning and back again. The non-hero of Un Héros très discret (A Self-Made Hero, 1995) fabricates a Resistance past not just to get on, but to make life seem more interesting, while the protagonist of De battre Mon Coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, 2005) can’t decide whether to be a concert pianist or a gangster. Un Prophète (A Prophet, 2009) chronicles the struggles between rival Corsican and North African gangs in Scorsese style, with wit as well as brutality. But the personality of the doubting, questing hero, caught between French and Muslim worlds, makes the film not just a superior film noir, but everything a French film should be.
Nick Fraser is the editor of the BBC’s flagship documentary strand Storyville. Half-French, he has enjoyed the cinema of France from an early age.
