As a former Cherwell editor once famously remarked, ‘Oh hi French Cinema, maybe you’d be interested in using tripods and dialogue in future?’
It’s a sentiment we can all identify with. When you hear, ‘Maybe not a French film tonight,’ it is almost always code for, ‘Please don’t make me sit through two hours of people smoking at a cafe, occasionally saying something meaningful about life and then suddenly having vigorous sex.’ The Auteur theory, the Nouvelle Vague, existentialism – these are all interesting concepts, but not necessarily ones the audience wants to grapple with over popcorn. However, contrary to popular belief, a film can be very intelligent and very French, but still easy to watch and hugely enjoyable.
Director and writer Francis Veber teams his ingenious plots with first class comic performances to make winning French farces. He is still, perhaps, best known for his 1998 release Dîner de Cons (The Dinner Game), a perfect comedy about intellectual snobs who compete to bring the biggest idiot they can find to dinner. If you have seen Dinner for Schmucks, the recent American remake, try to erase this from your mind before giving Veber a go. The American release has been criticised for softening the satire of the class system and using the idea simply as a pretext for getting a bunch of comic actors to act up in a posh dining room, utterly failing to capture the intelligent wit of the original.
Veber has been likened to a modern Molière and perhaps his films are what you would expect from more traditional French theatre, with their intricate plotting and ridiculous situations. The brilliant 1978 farce, La Cage aux Folles, for which Veber co-wrote the screenplay, also originated in the theatre and is, after Amélie, the second highest grossing French film of all time in the U.S.
Another Veber film that’s worth a look is Le Placard (The Closet), a comedy about a man who pretends to be gay to keep his job at a rubber factory. Such a premise could so easily descend into puerile jokes and uncomfortable stereotypes under less skilful direction, but you can trust Veber to see the whole thing through with subtlety, sense and a lot of wit. It helps, of course, that the film contains two of France’s most talented actors, Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil, who both have a real knack for comedy. Depardieu has starred in everything from Molière’s Tartuffe to the Asterisk and Obelisk films, and makes the recent release Mammuth enjoyable despite a vague and anticlimactic storyline. Daniel Auteuil, though less well known in Britain, is equally versatile. He is in his element in the understated satirical comedy from 2006, Mon Meilleur Ami, directed by Patrick Leconte, where he plays a successful but aloof Parisian who has to find himself a best friend in ten days to win an argument.
So next time you feel like a laugh, it may be worth braving the subtitles; you may find there’s more invention and wit in many French films to more than make up for any existential chain-smoking and louche sexual deviancy.
