Patrice Leconte (review)

Described by Lisa Downing as ‘the most mild mannered and gentle provocateur in French cinema today’, the enigmatic director Patrice Leconte is in fact a surprisingly controversial figure. As the director of over twenty feature films since the early 1970s, Leconte has proved remarkably resistant to serious critical appraisal, an effect perhaps of his generic breadth and the resultant difficulties in positioning his films; however, Downing’s intelligent and delightfully well-written book provides something of a corrective to this dearth of worthwhile critical engagement. Admitting to a journalist that ‘j’ai un parcours totalement incohérent’ (p. 35), Leconte’s œuvre to date is indeed avowedly and unashamedly eclectic, ranging from the Les Bronzés (1978), which established Leconte’s popular credentials to the ‘intellectual’ period comedy Ridicule (1996) and the reflective L’Homme du train (2002). Despite his generic range and versatility, for Downing ‘one of Leconte’s greatest achievements [. . .], is to reveal cinematographically the performativity of the everyday; the extent to which identities and lives are constituted as poses, performances, repetitions and deceptions at every moment’ (p. 22). Ironically, it is here that Leconte has proved most controversial, with his representation of women earning him considerable critical censure. Films such as Monsieur Hire (1989), Le Mari de la coiffeuse (1990) and Tango (1992), which appear to privilege voyeurism and the objectification of women, are deemed to be ‘fetishistic’ and misogynistic. For Downing, such responses fail to recognise Leconte’s use of ‘ludic parody and exaggeration’ (p. 15) as a means of ‘denaturalising dominant ideologies’ (p. 37); performance, she argues, is central to Leconte’s filmmaking and in his exploration of gender he seeks to demonstrate the ‘constructed quality of identity’ (p. 47). In her careful defence of Leconte, Downing argues that ‘unfortunately [. . .], it seems that too often his films have been encountered by those with a tendency to read literally the content of a work, and to interpret description as endorsement’ (p. 15). To further counter the charges of misogyny levelled at Leconte, Downing argues that films such as Les Spécialistes (1984), Tandem (1986) and Tango (1992) demonstrate ‘ways in which cinematic masculinity functions as a masquerade’ (p. 54). It is Downing’s contention that Leconte’s exploration and representation of gender is in fact far more sophisticated than his critics have allowed for and there is a suggestion that the somewhat straitlaced response to his work has failed to recognise its inherent playfulness, its ‘wit’, to borrow from Ridicule. Structurally, Downing’s book opens by contextualising Leconte as a film director before moving on to explore the importance of comedy that runs throughout his filmmaking. Chapters on masculinity and femininity precede an exploration of the ethics of the couple and the book concludes with an illuminating interview with the director himself. Downing’s elegant book also provides detailed, sophisticated and convincing readings of a number of Leconte’s best-known films. Ultimately, Downing rescues this fascinating filmmaker from those who would write him off - the charges include ‘misogyny, flippancy and an apolitical stance’ (p. 6) - demonstrating with passion the value of this often misunderstood and misrepresented filmmaker.