French films are shit. Porquoi?

I am not an idiot, I am a dolt - as I explained somewhere else.

This is like..

Is that like the French version of Porky's?

you hate melies = you hate me

I would like to declare this the funniest thing any critic has said ever.

mark s loves melies = i love mark s (but you all know this)

ace french films (don't know if already mentioned up thread): la haine / nikita / rififi

Some classics for y'all to vibe with: pts 1 and 3 of 'The Trilogy' (tho you need pt 2 as well), 'Code Unknown', 'La Haine', 'Irma Vep', 'Read My Lips'....

The other day I actually saw a decent Francois Ozon film for once, too (8 Women).

Pete is surely trolling, as I can't even begin to list all my favorite French films.

Very torn on Trilogy. Liked One and Three, but felt none of them excelled as single films but the combined effect was really interesting. Apparently in France they showed them Two, One, Three: I don't think I would have gone back if I had seen two first. Yes to Irma Vep, and Read My Lips (thopugh it wastes its premise a touch). Last year was again a relatively mediocre year for French film though: if whatever Artificial Eye is distributing is to go by (but then every year seems a mediocre one for Artificial Eye: this year has already started with the ropey Kiss Of Life).

I saw a v good film in same vein which is out in France this month: 'Work Hard, Play Hard'. Hope it crosses channel.

If I could generalize a bit, one thing I notice in french films is a certain embodiment, and a linking of this embodiment to pleasure. This happens to two bodies: the bodies of the actors, and the body of the film.

The actors in french films have bodies, and enjoy them. (As opposed to British and American films, where plot and concept are seen to be the only legitimate concerns. I think this is what Pete is complaining about, in a very anglo-saxon way, when he says of 'Betty Blue' that they should have done the whole hog and made it pornography. He doesn't think the body has any business in anything except pron.)

Then there is 'embodiment' on the level of the film itself. The film has a body: it is not just a transparent 'window on life', but a thing we are invited to pay attention to as an artefact. In this sense, Godard is not so far from 'Les Demoiselles de Rochefort'. Both show an awareness of the film as something artificial, something being shaped, chopped, constructed, played with. The pleasure of playing with the medium is not restricted to the film-makers. The audience can share this pleasure.

My two eurocents.

Momus, much of what you say about French films re:the body is even truer of many recent Spanish films.

I'm off to see 'Lost in Translation' in a couple of hours. And I expect that I will find it full of cultural jokes, plot, character and situation stuff, but somewhat lacking in the bodily aspects of what it's like to be in Japan. But let's see.

i wouldn't make any generalizations about "french films," although if you break it down by generation one can notice different trends and counter-trends at work. france is "the republic of images" and the cinema here is simply too historically and otherwise extensive to sustain generalizations.

momus has a good point here, in that this DOES seem to be a cardinal (which is to say classical) aspect of the screenwriting ethos in america, which is unfortunate i think.

some american directors are able to animate their characters as COMMUNITIES and lend to the audience remarkably vivid and unpatronizing impressions of the secondary and even tertiary characters...john ford at his best does this.

and then there are directors who seem to aim for a level of abstraction even for the primary characters, like hal hartley. this achieves something different from the "centers of goodness" momus laments, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Any talk of French movies being all about people sitting about talking in cafés or dinner parties is about 30 years out of date. Actually, one of the interesting things about the French film industry today is that one actually exists, unlike anywhere else in Europe. The British, Italians, Germans etc. make movies but they don't really have a dedicated industry any more because the number of movies they make are so small.

There are an awful lot of crappy, middlebrow movies made in France which are never shown internationally, but no more so than there are crappy American movies. I can think of several French movies I've seen recently which I thought were pretty good - Irreversible, Harry L'ami qui vous veut du bien, L'Adversaire...

even here only Armond White, in his only moment of sanity, gets Téchiné.

No Assayas either?

So I saw the Eustache features this weekend. And right now I am so pissed off at male sexual entitlement I'm beginning to think Valerie Solanas had a point. But I'll listen to arguments otherwise.

Hmmm. I've only seen The Mother & The Whore, but felt v much like the Leaud character is supposed to be seen as an irredeemable prick? Not that that's a get out of jail free card or anything.

I agree with you that Leaud is supposed to be a chauvinist (who happens to have come through the events of 1968 with some very retrograde ideas about sexuality). But do viewers recognize that? Or that Veronika is less a whore or slut, but rather a target of men's sexual opportunism?

As for My Little Loves, it's overwhelmingly a coming-of-age piece--and coming of age defined very much in terms of accessing females, with no consideration of consent on their part. French society, either before or in the immediate wake of 1968, probably didn't think too much about recognizing a woman's right to say no, but sitting through these films was exhausting.,

The Mother and the Whore (1973)
Holiday on the Buses (1973)
Do you see?

"(who happens to have come through the events of 1968 with some very retrograde ideas about sexuality)"

The film is very much about the failures of '68.

But I say this as a man xp

Didn't just happen in France either.

But do viewers recognize that? Or that Veronika is less a whore or slut, but rather a target of men's sexual opportunism?

Is "some do, some don't" too flippant an answer? I try not to think much about what audiences might think, as the internet has shown me ppl can be super dense even about the clearest of messages. Which is not to say feeling the vibe of ppl reacting in certain ways doesn't sometimes affect me negatively in the cinema - grimmest example of this was some old chuckling appreciatively as the protagonist of "Thunder Road" berated the corpse of his drug addict ex-wife.