Marianne and the Puritan: Transformations of the Couple in French and American Films (review)

The reciprocal influence of French and Hollywood film culture in terms of directors, themes and genres has been well documented. Grossvogel's book concentrates on a relatively unstudied area, namely the treatment of the couple in these two cinemas. It argues that Hollywood films about 'happy' couples, such as the screwball comedy and its more modern variant, the romantic comedy, assume the permanence of marriage. Even where a strong woman such as Katherine Hepburn or Irenne Dunne trades barbs with the urbane male lead such as Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy, 'Hollywood's comedy marriage is free of contingencies because of its unshakeable conviction that it will never be in question' (p. 116). Even Hollywood's more dramatic or tragic treatments of the couple 'end on an upbeat note that is not necessarily convincing' (p. 167). In contrast, French treatments of the couple tend to use them as a cipher to investigate the socio-economic milieu from which they originate. Chabrol's Madame Bovary (1991), like Flaubert's novel, is as interested in the restrictions and parochialism of provincial life as the fact of a failed marriage and adulterous relationships. Similarly, Renoir's Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) is a trenchant critique of bourgeois mores, in which marriage is only one of many institutions to be satirized. In French films, 'the formation of a couple is an anticipation of problems; for the French film-maker, however, the resolution of these problems is seldom predictable' (p. 142). Grossvogel's notion of the couple is however, rather hazy, and often 'the couple' becomes conflated with 'the married couple' with little theorization of this move. Homosexuality is entirely neglected other than in the introduction, where he claims that, while not ignoring Hollywood's or France's heterosexist proclivities, he will attempt to understand these films 'in the way that Hollywood assumes most audiences wanted to understand them' (p. 7), which leads him to discount entirely any queer couplings that may occur in these filmic cultures. The overwhelmingly male bias of views of the couple is also largely disregarded. Only two female film directors' films are analysed (those of Varda and Ephron) and the paucity of discussion of the gender of directors seems strange given the topic at hand. Equally frustrating is the lack of industrial contextualization, so that, for example, Grossvogel claims that, while a Hollywood film such as It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934) 'is the story of two stars' (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert), a French film such as Éric Rohmer's is peopled by actors whose names 'rate only the briefest of notations in today's film encyclopaedias — if they are noted at all' (p. 33), a statement that entirely overlooks the widely differing operation of the French and the Hollywood star systems, and indeed Rohmer's own particular and peculiar use of actors, which is unusual even in the French context. The choice of films also appears rather haphazard, and points to another problem for this study; the sheer wealth of films concerning this topic. One is, however, left wondering why such key films concerning couples as Kramer vs Kramer or Jules et Jim do not merit a mention. These considerable caveats in place, Grossvogel's study is nevertheless an enjoyable read, if a rather breathless canter through a century of film production in both countries, and adds an interesting slant to studies of these two distinctive film cultures.