Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (review)

Originally published in 1996, Guy Austin’s authoritative, wide-ranging and accessible study swiftly established itself as an indispensable introductory work for scholars of French films since the 1970s. The book interweaves incisive film criticism with discussion of public and critical reception, technology, economic structures and sociopolitical context. One of the major assets of the volume is its dual focus on auteurist and popular film, which allows for coverage of commercially successful yet critically denigrated genres such as the cinéma du look, porn and comedy. Moreover, any straightforward binary opposition between the cinéma d’auteur and the popular mainstream is troubled by Austin’s accounts of films with widespread appeal by directors with auteurist credentials, such as Coup de foudre (Kurys, 1983), and of auteurist borrowings and deconstructions of mainstream generic conventions. The second edition revalidates the study’s title by taking stock of the key cinematic trends and research perspectives that have emerged over the past decade and a half. These developments are charted in six updated and two new chapters, which incorporate analyses of around fifty additional films and productively complicate original evaluations of others. In the chapter on representations of the Occupation and colonial conflicts, for example, a revised assessment of La Guerre sans nom (Tavernier, 1992), now criticised for perpetuating a quasi-colonial vision through its shots of Algeria without Algerians, paves the way for discussion of how more recent films such as Caché (Haneke, 2005) tap into the national preoccupation with the repressed trauma of the Algerian War that began to inflect and displace the obsession with Vichy in the 1990s. Subsequent chapters on sexuality, women filmmakers and the polar, fantasy and heritage genres are brought up to date with evaluations of the recent output of some of the most acclaimed, controversial or high-profile directors working in France today, including Ozon, Breillat, Denis, Chabrol, Audiard, Besson, Jeunet, Caro, Morel and Gans, which pay particular attention to the construction of gender, sexual, class, racial, ethnic and national identities. The first new chapter, an illuminating consideration of comedy, spans café theatre-inspired depictions of unruly bodies in films by Blier, Poiré, Blanc and Balasko, Chatiliez’s and Klapisch’s attacks on the bourgeois family and reflections on national self-images in the Astérix and Taxi series (Zidi, 1999Zidi, 2002; Pirès, 1998, Krawczyk, 2000). Picking up where the first edition left off, the final chapter tracks the reverberations of the ‘watershed’ social unrest of 1995 and the sans-papiers affair of 1997 through the phenomenon that has been dubbed the jeune cinéma. Intervening in critical debates about the movement’s sociopolitical commentaries on the fracture sociale and fracture coloniale, Austin draws on trauma theory to raise compelling questions about the political efficacy of the ‘realisms’ of Kassovitz, Veysset, Zonca, Cantet and the Dardennes and acts of digital ‘witnessing’ by Varda and Sauper. This erudite and immensely useful new edition showcases the diversity of contemporary French cinema and, in foregrounding the reinvigorated sense of ethico-political urgency driving recent trends and subgenres, provides grounds for cautious optimism about its future.