Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema

Chapter Four: Feminine Cinema

FeminineCinema Concerning the rights of its female citizens, France has often lagged behind its Western neighbors. Reflecting this, a catalog of France’s belated efforts to enfranchise women is usually cited by both Anglo-American and French feminists. There was the so-called “first wave” of feminist intervention, symbolized by the 1949 publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, coinciding with women finally getting the right to vote in 1944, then having their equal status with men written into the 1946 and 1958 French Constitutions, which initially offered more theoretical than tangible support. A second phase of pro-female social overhauls emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, for many catalyzed by the widespread role of women in the mass civic protests of May 1968. Henceforward, French women began to gain control over their bodies and their fertility, through the legalization of contraception (1967), the decriminalization of abortion (for a fiveyear trial run under the 1975 Veil Law; then permanently in 1979), and the right to terminate unwanted pregnancy under the national health care system (1982). During the same period, women in France also made social progress: the right to obtain paid work and open bank accounts (1965), jurisdiction over families becoming a parental instead of just a paternal power (1970), and the right to divorce by mutual consent (1975). More recently, debates about women’s position in modern France reignited in the aftermath of the 1989 French Revolution bicentennial. Attention focused on French women’s lack of institutional parité, the infamous statistic that France had the C H A P T E R F O U R Toscan du Plantier, the president of UniFrance, says that French cinema “will be saved by women.” This may just be a formule, pretty words, I don’t know. But I do think that maybe the way we shoot a scene of two people making love is pretty different. tonie marshall, director of Venus Beauty Institute (Vénus beauté [institut], 1999) 152 b r u ta l i n t i m a c y lowest proportion of women in political office than any European country except Greece—in 1995 just 5 percent of those in public office were women, versus a 53 percent female electorate. As many historians observed, here the great inconstancy of the French Republic came into view once again: that France is underwritten by the notion of a universal model citizen defined by neither gender nor ethnicity, yet the French state will, under public pressure and often reluctantly, occasionally legislate for the needs of its more marginalized constituents. Feminist writer Geneviève Fraisse memorably describes this as France’s vertige identitaire, identity vertigo.1 In response to the parité campaign—which gained political traction after a proequality manifesto was published in L’Express in 1996—the French government enacted sweeping political reforms. In June 2000, this culminated in changes to articles 3 and 4 of the Constitution, officially requiring a 50/50 gender split among the candidates offered by parties for election. With tougher financial penalties enforced by a 2007 addendum, the law had a clear impact at local and regional levels; but while it remains popular among the general population, the quota system certainly offered no miracle cure for gender inequality. In real terms, moreover, the parité mandate punishes the smaller political parties less able Lola Doillon directs her cinematographer, Romain Lacourbas, on set for Et toi, t’es sur qui? Feminine Cinema 153 to pay the fines levied for a lack of female candidates, as happened during the 2002 and 2007 French elections, which raised the proportion of female members of parliament by merely about 10 percent. What remains is an intriguing, pivotal paradox about contemporary France, which ricochets between the most reactionary and the most forward-thinking contexts for women’s advancement. As Roger Célestin, Eliane Dalmolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron remark, highlighted by the parité case, France is unavoidably a country in which the situation of women is “broadly integrated into the fabric of national discourse. . . . [France could] change from one of the most backward societies in terms of women’s representation in the political sphere into one of the most progressive in this same area—at least in theory.”2 So while many obstacles remain, the actions of contemporary French women do have the capacity to secure recognition, sometimes acclaim, and, most important of all, change. As this chapter will...