THE ATTEMPT by France to protect Saddam, even at the cost of a crack-up of NATO and the United Nations, has confused many Americans who had long believed that France was an ally. So speculation abounds: Is Chirac on the take? Is it about the oil contracts? Are French munitions going to show up in the wrong piles in Iraqi arsenals?
There may be a less obvious answer. It appears that the French film industry has tanked in so thorough a way as to be beyond rescue. French foreign policy is simply an attempt to divert attention from this deeply embarrassing fact.
The seventh annual City of Lights, City of Angels Film Festival opens in Los Angeles today, though advance publicity–not surprisingly–has been light. In fact, I have begun to wonder if the organizers are hoping to get through the week without anyone noticing a French event unfolding at the Directors Guild of America Theater. The sponsors list is a little thin as well. Last year’s screenings drew 4,000 people. I am guessing that unless the festival starts passing out the freebies to antiwar demonstrators at area campuses, this year’s crowd will be smaller still.
And not just because France has bedded down with a terrorist state and the sadistic family clan at its top. The films, allegedly the best the Gauls have to offer, seem like two-dimensional punishment cells. Here are some real, unedited synopeses of festival films:
“Love Thy Father”: A famous writer is on his way to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in Stockholm. His son lies in wait for him at a gas station somewhere in the French Alps. They meet. They confront each other. The confrontation turns into a chase. The chase turns into a lethal accident. The son kidnaps his father. The whole world believes the great writer is dead. The great man died in the accident. For the first time he feels free. No need for anything. Time for a new life.
“Monsieur Batignole”: Paris, summer 1942. France is under German occupation. Edmund, a butcher whose future son in law is an active collaborator, inadvertently plays a part in the deportation of his Jewish neighbor’s family. When the neighbor’s son, Simon, shows up on what used to be his doorstep, he finds that Edmund and his family are now living there. Feeling guilty and seeking to avoid trouble with the German authorities, Edmund hides the boy who is soon joined by his two little cousins, also orphaned by the war.”
“Almost Peaceful”: August, 1946. A ladies’ garment workshop in the Jewish tailors’ district of Paris. In the workshop amidst sewing machines, cutting and finishing tables, and bolts of cloth –and in the street in a cafe, a hotel room or an apartment that suddenly seems too large– four women, five men and their children learn to live again. Devastated but determined, hardened but joyful, they opt for life.
“Small Cuts”: Midway through life, torn between his wife Gaelle and his young girlfriend Nathalie, and with his political beliefs battered by history, Bruno, a communist newspaper journalist, has lost his bearings. After responding to a call for help from his uncle, who is fighting a losing battle for re-election as the communist mayor of a small town near Grenoble, Bruno gets lost in a dark forest. There he meets Beatrice who does nothing to stop him getting even more lost.
“Anything You Say”: Bastien works at the local television station, where he warms up the studio audience. However, his real dream is to host his own show. Bastien is invited by his boss and idol, the famous producer Jean-Louis Broustal, to spend the weekend in the country. Could Bastien’s dream really come true? Or do Jean-Louis and his beautiful wife Clara have other motives?
You couldn’t make this stuff up: Collaborators, dark forests, patricide, Holocaust survivors back in the tailor trade, and studio audience warm-up acts? These people need Chris Rock and Bernie Mac, Vin Diesel and Samuel Jackson, Adam Sandler, Jack Nicholson, and Steve Martin.
The festival’s organizers proclaim that “these eleven films represent a wide range of exciting new films from France’s most accomplished and innovative filmmakers.” I have no reason to doubt their assessment of the relative merit of these offerings versus the rest of France’s cinematic output.
Time for another Marshall Plan, this one run by William Goldman.
Hugh Hewitt is the host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, a nationally syndicated radio talkshow, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard. His new book, In, But Not Of, has just been published by Thomas Nelson.
