Anyone, that is, but its Irish distributor. Paul Ward of Abbey Films, showing his latest French acquisition to the press, was downbeat about its prospects. Sex appeal and continental chic were not enough. Betty Blue was French and therefore subtitled. And everyone in the business knew that subtitles were poison at the box office.
Business lore was wrong in this case. Betty Blue ran for almost six months in Dublin, pulling in an audience who didn’t seem to mind what language the film was in.
Yet Ward’s instincts were also right. The vast majority of cinemagoers dislike subtitles. Cinema is a visual medium and Hollywood special effects have conditioned us to spectacle. Trying to read dialogue off the bottom of the screen is too distracting. A foreign-language film needs a special something — a certain je ne sais quoi — to break out of the art-house ghetto.
A couple of times per decade a subtitled film generates sufficient momentum to reach a wider audience. Betty Blue did it in the 1980s, and La Haine nearly a decade later. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy, although slow to start, has become a classic on video and DVD. But most of the time foreign cinema is confined to its art-house niche.
Even within that niche, French movies no longer automatically claim pride of place. Film festival audiences hungry for an alternative to the Hollywood mainstream now have more choices. France does not seem exotic any more: if we want to savour an alien culture we look to Japanese or Iranian film-makers. French is just another European language, stuck in the queue along with Finnish and Slovenian.
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Although European film-makers still challenges Hollywood, the most potent rallying cry in recent years has come not from France but from Denmark, in the form of Lars Von Trier’s provocative Dogme movement (its manifesto advocates a back-to-basics style). French cinema has no contemporary successor to the 1960s New Wave or the 1980s “no wave”.
Yet the French still take their cinema seriously. They call it the “seventh art”, implying that a cultured person should already be au fait with the first six, along with their attendant muses. The nation hosts — in Cannes — the world’s most prestigious film festival, and Gallic cinema at its worst is hugely more varied and creative than anything Ireland can produce.
France views cinema as a key element in its cultural mission: through the Alliance Française they promote festivals of home-grown films around the world.
The latest of these, at the Triskel arts centre in Cork next month, includes mainstream films such as François Ozon’s 8 Women, starring Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert, classics such as Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, from 1945, and a wide range of new films from the French-speaking world.
But their influence is a pale shadow of what it used to be. Cinema buffs no longer instantly look to France for novelty, and Hollywood has shed its inhibitions about sexuality. The whole axis of European art cinema has shifted.
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French cinema has a glorious past, from pioneers such as Georges Méliès through to the New Wave directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, yet it is an increasingly marginal force in a world dominated by Hollywood.
In the past it was a more equal struggle. France had cinematic artistes such as the two Jeans — Cocteau and Renoir — while Hollywood had studio-bound journeymen who needed French critics to tell them that they were really auteurs. France had sex appeal, in the shape of Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau and Deneuve; Hollywood starlets seemed prim in comparison. And French movies had intellectual clout. Directors such as Godard and Alain Resnais became idols at the vanguard of radical film-making.
France itself was the anti-Hollywood. American movies were machines for turning entertainment into profit. France stood for something else — cinema as a mode of expression, offering an individual view of the world.
Godard saw it all 40 years ago. His 1963 film Le Mépris stars Michel Piccoli as a French screenwriter working on a Hollywood movie. His young wife (Bardot) despises him for reasons he never quite understands. Meanwhile, Jack Palance, as a brutish American producer, announces: “When I hear the word culture I reach for my chequebook.”
The iconoclastic Godard lays everything bare: the contempt Hollywood holds for culture is mirrored in a doomed sexual relationship, French artistry is revealed as a pretentious form of self-delusion and everybody rushes to prostitute themselves for the Yankee dollar.
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Godard is still making films (his latest, Notre Musique, was shown at the Dublin film festival) but nobody is paying much attention. He is seen as an elderly crank peddling increasingly tired variations on an ancient theme. His eccentric musings on art and commerce bear the mark of a man decades out of touch with reality.
Today Hollywood’s domination is almost absolute. American movies hold sway in the international marketplace while the very concept of an artistic, auteurist mode of film-making — a signature European style — is fading away.
Young Irish film-makers may work with European budgets but they have US ideals. Their style broadly derives from Hollywood. If they get a chance to work on a larger canvas, they turn to Tinseltown rather than the Left Bank for inspiration.
France can still be an inspiration but first we need to forget about the glorious past. There is no point in looking to Godard. He said everything he had to say about art and commerce in Le Mépris. His tricks, his innovations and stylistic flourishes have long since been absorbed into the mainstream.
French cinema has been fighting a losing battle since the coming of sound. Hollywood’s authority is a brute fact. Driven by the dollar and the English language, it has become the norm. The French — with the help of self-belief, self-promotion and a few geniuses — were able to stem the tide for a while. In the long run, however, their language confines them to the French-speaking world.
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France is not the anti-Hollywood because no single place can be. But cinema still needs variety, a sense that there are different worlds out there and different ways of portraying them.
The new francophone cinema is full of alternative views: documentaries, animation, films from various obscure corners of the globe. The Triskel programme includes works from Africa and the Middle East, as well as such unlikely spots as Tbilisi in Georgia.
The French are still too proud to dub their films into English as the Italians and Germans do. Subtitling reduces the audience in countries where French is not spoken. In the future, computer effects could solve this problem and make film into an international medium again but it is a long way off.
Meanwhile, the Gallic model still has something to offer Irish cinema, if only a sense of pride and cultural identity. Battered by Hollywood though they are, they refuse to lie down. Every so often a film such as Betty Blue pole-axes the critics and breaks through to a mass audience.
French cinema clings on to its grand ambitions by its fingertips. In today’s world this can look like delusions of grandeur, but nobody can deny their style.
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Cork French film festival, Triskel arts centre, March 3-13