It seems that France, the country that invented New Wave cinema and much of modern Film Studies, especially the auteur theory, has a growing distaste for art movies.
The public has seemingly lost trust in the nation’s critics who are seen as cossetted in a celluloid ivory tower, too pally with film-makers and too quick to recommend the same old bleak, over-intellectualised musings while snubbing popular hits such as Amélie. Even French cinema’s biggest names are facing meltdown.
I think the phrase the nation’s critics who are seen as cossetted in a celluloid ivory tower is my favourite, and one that could apply to many critics, and not just in the film industry. The article goes on to say:
Flandres, his 2006 winner of the Cannes film festival’s Grand Prix, about young French soldiers who leave their bleak rural lives to fight in an unnamed war, sold barely 80,000 tickets. The French public appeared to agree with The Hollywood Reporter, which deemed it “pretentious to the core” in its portrayal of “a clutch of dim-witted rustics”. Benoît Jacquot’s The Untouchable, about a woman tracing her father, won best actress prize at Venice. But it attracted a pitiful French audience of 35,000 and was named by Variety as a “strong candidate for empty French art film of the year”. Indeed, most of the shortlist for the Louis Delluc prize, France’s art house Oscars, were snubbed at the box office, including the winner, Lady Chatterley.
The only two art house films in France to attract more than 500,000 people last year were propped up by big stars: The Singer, in which Gérard Depardieu appeared as an ageing ballroom crooner opposite the nation’s sweetheart Cecile de France, and the Page Turner, whose star Catherine Frot attracted the crowds.
The decline in art house audiences is all the more galling as France’s low-brow commercial films are enjoying success. Last year was a golden year for the French mainstream when 190 million people went to the cinema. But the films they saw were not broody epics but rom-coms and a new crop of slapstick.
Another good one:
The veteran French film critic, Michel Ciment, editor of Positif, one of France’s oldest cinema magazines, told the Guardian that TV was partly to blame for turning turning out a constant stream of marketed but “uninteresting” comedies for bland family consumption.
Obviously, Monsieur Cimet doesn’t have a clue what audiences want.
“Part of the problem is a lack of credibility of film critics in France,” he said. “In the 50s and 60s they would have frontpage pieces and a huge influence. If they said an obscure film was a masterpiece, 200,000 people would go to see it at one cinema and it would stay on for a year. But critics in France have now lost their power to influence, the public feel they too cosily promote friends, are snobbish and only present esoteric films. The audience feels insulted.
Or maybe he’s just bitter at losing his status. The irony is that Epic Movie, from the makers of Scary Movie, another piss-take of Hollywood product, topped the US box office over the weekend.
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