Jean-Pierre Jeunet (review)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is frequently regarded as the epitome of the slick postmodern director, always working with at least one eye on Hollywood, and whose films represent a triumph of style over content. Elizabeth Ezra successfully recuperates Jeunet, inserting him into a long tradition of stylized European cinema, including German Expressionism and poetic realism. In particular, the apartment-building set of Delicatessen (1991) and the cinéma de quartier of Amélie (2001) clearly evoke the great French tradition of social cinema from the 1930s. Ezra also insists that the hyperactive energy of Jeunet’s films and their use of new film technologies demonstrate a kinship with the New Wave, but here it is harder to accept her argument. The New Wave also worked with the cinematic past, but that history was approached with a sense of ethical responsibility rather than as a toolbox from which techniques, settings and references could be borrowed as decoration. The crucial Jamesonian distinction between modernist and postmodernist relations to the past is never adequately addressed by Ezra. Significantly, too, the New Wave was most famous for depicting the real lives of young people in France at the time of filming, something that Jeunet has never yet succeeding in doing—his only film set in the present, Amélie, almost universally recognized as presenting a fake, romanticized view of contemporary Paris. Of course, cinema does not have to be realistic. For Ezra, Jeunet belongs to a commonly over-looked tradition of the fantastic in French cinema, marked by directors like Clair, Cocteau, Tourneur and Franju. But a common factor among these directors is the tendency to use the fantastic to approach complex domains of adult experience, especially sexuality. Jeunet’s films, on the contrary, seem to be marked by a nostalgic idealization of childhood and a concomitant rejection of the world of adult sexuality. The synchronous ‘sex’ scene of Delicatessen is justly celebrated as a piece of rhythmic editing, but the scene’s sexual content is accordingly sublimated, becoming a kind of childish joke, just as in similar such scenes in Jeunet’s cinema, like the 15 simultaneous orgasms in Amélie. It is perhaps significant that the one character in this œuvre endowed with a grown-up sexuality—Élodie Gordes, played by Jodie Foster in Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004)—appears almost to have strayed from another film altogether. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films are imaginative and enjoyable and have done much to promote the image of a diverse French cinema abroad, while safeguarding the fortunes of that cinema domestically. Ezra’s book is a lively defence of this cinema that wears its theory lightly and contains some impressively detailed close readings. It can, however, seem a little disingenuous and over-generous to Jeunet in its tendency to absorb all criticisms into the film’s intentional thematic remit: thus Amélie and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995) both become films ‘about’ indexicality and the problem of ‘authentic’ images, while Alien Resurrection (1997) evokes ‘uncanny dread’ just by virtue of its ‘transnational identity’.