Interesting per our discussion of Kevorkian
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Has Hollywood declared war on France?

From 'Marie Antoinette' to 'Ricky Bobby,' tense feelings show up on screen.

By William Arnold
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Anyone who goes to the movies very often might reasonably conclude that Hollywood has declared war on France. Consider:

•Sofia Coppola's biographical film "Marie Antoinette" opened Friday, and though it was given unprecedented cooperation (it was filmed in Versailles), it's so enthusiastically disrespectful of high French civilization that it was soundly booed in its Cannes debut.

•In August's Will Ferrell comedy, "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," the heavy is a farcical French Formula One driver who, at one point, wrestles the hero to the ground and makes him say he loves crepes.

•In May's "The Da Vinci Code," the conspiracy is mostly French-created and Tom Hanks is hunted not by just a brutish French police chief but by seemingly the entire nation of France.

•In February's remake of "The Pink Panther," Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau manages to encapsulate every contemptuous cliché conceived about the Gallic character.

•In last November's "Derailed," when Jennifer Aniston is brutally raped by a fiendish inner-city Chicago thug, the guy inexplicably turns out to be French.

•In last October's "The Legend of Zorro," Antonio Banderas' villainous adversary is not a gringo or a Spaniard or anyone else you might expect to find in Old California, but a French count.

It's an epidemic of caricature and vilification, and the slurs are, for the most part, neither subtle nor gentle. As one French critic noted recently, "Hollywood hasn't engaged in this kind of wholesale nationality-bashing since Pearl Harbor." What's going on?

It's a debatable issue, but it doesn't take a sociology degree to see that it mostly stems from two factors: American anger over the lack of French support for the Iraq invasion, and the absence of politically correct movie villains since the end of the Cold War.

Since 2003, a wave of anti-French sentiment in America has resulted in boycotts of French products and stridently Francophobic books such as Richard Z. Chesnoff's "The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us & Why The Feeling Is Mutual." We laugh about it, but the ACLU is not complaining, and it's had an impact.

At the same time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa has created a shortage of the kind of instantly recognizable national villains that, along with Nazis, have been the stock movie bad guys of the past half-century.

Francophile director Jim Jarmusch says, "We're at war with Muslim terrorists but we're afraid of caricaturing Muslims in films or even portraying them in a bad light. So what do we do? We take it out on the French. They're a safe target."

Director Oliver Stone, whose mother was French, adds, "And it helps that they don't complain about it. The French dish it out, but they can take it, too. Their arrogance does not mask insecurity. They're confident of their culture and have a long tradition of self-criticism."

Alain Braux is a French pastry chef who teaches at the Culinary Academy of Austin. He's also program director for the Alliance Française of Austin's Ciné-Club series. In an e-mail interview, he said he's "never enjoyed humor that makes fun of people that cannot (or will not) defend themselves." (He's looking at you, Ricky Bobby.)

"Who would waste their time and breath to stoop to their attackers' level?" he said. "Silence does not mean agreement but is construed as such.

"I believe that this recent backlash against French things in general (is) limited to a certain section of the population that either has been misled by their government propaganda or do not know enough about world history to judge that the French government was trying to stop their American counterpart from making a terrible mistake," he said.

Matt Dentler, producer of the South by Southwest Film Festival and Conference, was at the infamous "Marie Antoinette" screening in Cannes. He said the film received a deeply mixed reaction.

"As soon as the credits started to roll, you could hear these crashing waves of applause and boos," he said. International press seemed taken aback by the film's contemporary soundtrack and the American actors portraying French icons — without even a French accent.

Dentler, however, doesn't think that there's a wave of French-bashing, although he adds that Hollywood has always had a touch of xenophobia.

The blatant animosity that others see is a strange turnaround for a love affair that began with Lafayette and has endured two world wars. Traditionally, French characters have been totally sympathetic in American film; witness the Hollywood careers of Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier and Pepe le Pew.

French cinema also has been the darling of American critics since the silent era. Films such as "Grand Illusion" and "Children of Paradise" are on every U.S. critic's short list of great movies, and France has scored a record 32 foreign-language film Oscar nominations.

Moreover, the American art-film industry was built on the French New Wave of the '50s. The sensibility of French filmmakers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard was the dominant influence on the Hollywood Golden Age of the late '60s and '70s.

But the movie relationship began to sour in the '80s. The French were unhappy about Hollywood's increasing takeover of the domestic French film market. The U.S. didn't appreciate rising film quotas, an increasingly unfriendly press and all that fatuous veneration for Jerry Lewis.

("The Jerry Lewis thing always baffled me, too," Braux said. "Oh well, you can't account for bad taste, right?")

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, the relationship has become openly contentious, especially after the massive anti-American demonstrations at the '04 Cannes Film Festival. Not only have Frenchmen become the villain of choice in Hollywood, but U.S. demand for French film has plummeted.

In the past, France could always count on at least one big hit in the U.S. every year — a "Cyrano," "Camille Claudel" or "La Cage aux Folles." But there hasn't been a major Gallic hit here since "The Closet" and "Amélie" — both of which were released just before Sept. 11, 2001. Braux does point out recent French films such as "Caché" and "Joyeaux Noël" that were released in the United States to critical acclaim.

Dentler said he does see less veneration for French film.

"I think there are so many films now, and so much cinema happening globally, that it's hard to find a specific movement to focus on," he said. "Whereas, at its height, at its golden era, French cinema was it, was the place to be."

The film that, for a time, seemed poised to break France's dry spell at the U.S. box office was "OSS 117: Nest of Spies," a phenomenon in France that had its U.S. debut at this year's Seattle International Film Festival, where it was voted best film.

A spy spoof set in France and Egypt in 1955 during the formative months of the Suez Crisis, the film is not only a hilarious comedy, it offers a terrific star turn in French actor Jean Dujardin's uncanny evocation of the movie-star charisma of the young Sean Connery.

The film's director, Michel Hazanavicius, says he believes "OSS" has "a healing quality." "It makes fun of Muslim extremism but it's even harder on French colonial arrogance. In Europe, we've been embraced by critics of both the extreme right and left."

The film brought down the house after three SIFF screenings in June, and the assumption was that it would be quickly scooped up by a U.S. distributor. But that hasn't happened, and after four months of no bites, its chances of doing any healing here don't look good.

"The French can and will make fun of themselves at times, especially after they realize their mistakes," Braux said. "They don't take themselves too seriously and can be self-critical also. In this case, the movies tries to point out France's failed foreign colonial ambitions while at the same time make fun of its own mistakes. That should be a lesson to some American directors."

Meanwhile, it doesn't look the France-bashing is ending anytime soon. In the upcoming CGI feature, "Flushed Away," Jean Reno plays an animated rat villain named Le Frog. On Nov. 10, "A Good Year" stars Russell Crowe as a British banker who inherits a vineyard in Provence. He's seduced by the slower life, but the movie is not the valentine to France you might expect, and Crowe uses the "F" word (frog) half a dozen times.

The next week, Daniel Craig will be introduced as the new James Bond in a remake of "Casino Royale," but without the novel's French setting. The villains still have French names but the story, one of its publicists says, "takes place everywhere but France."

Obviously, Bond has joined the boycott.