Le Cinéma français depuis 2000: un renouvellement incessant (review)

A mere twenty-one years after Pialat's controversial victory with Sous le soleil de Satan, Bertrand Cantet offered France a long-awaited Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in the spring of 2008, thus indicating that the French film production might not be as apathetic as its detractors had been claiming. Yet Entre les murs couldn't appear in René Prédal's study of the French cinema since 2000, curiously released two years before the end of the decade it attempts to describe in depth—and just before Cantet's success. This unorthodox scheduling, though it unfortunately deprives the book of the exhaustiveness it could have accomplished, doesn't prevent Prédal from delivering an invaluable overview of the French production of the past ten years.

The introduction and first chapter of the book identify the environment young and not-so-young auteurs need to navigate, emphasizing what Prédal perceives as the stifling and oppressive pressures of a television- and market-oriented business at odds with the blossoming of art cinema. The author contextualizes the importance of his project (calling attention to artistically ambitious films and auteurs) by emphasizing the changing nature of the public's viewing practices (i.e. the migration from public screenings at the movie theater to a more intimate and private consumption of movies on TV and DVD) and the massive distribution of a few blockbusters in large multiplex theaters at the expense of art films that lack resources and exposure. In this context, Prédal deplores that the notion of "first film" has been subverted by the industry to become a marketing branding instead of signifying the emergence of a new voice.

The rest of the book is devoted to the critique of directors and their films and is composed of two parts that categorize directors, Prédal claims, according to aesthetic principles that are nonetheless never clearly identified. The first part, titled "Un renouvellement incessant," focuses on auteurs who, according to the author, perpetuate the tradition of 1960s modern cinema and deal primarily with psychology, feelings and intimacy. They are divided in two categories: those who explore human feelings and behavior ("Les grands auteurs de la psychologie des sentiments," chapter 2), and those, never quite differentiated, who were trained at the FEMIS—école nationale des métiers de l'image et du son—first screened on television, or relying on the fond de soutien ("Les enfants de la FEMIS, de la télévision et du fond de soutien," chapter 3). The second part, titled "L'éclatement de la post-modernité," explores films with a strong interest in politics and social issues on the one hand ("Un cinéma citoyen," chapter 4) and underscores the plurality of voices on the other ("Une vivifiante diversité," chapter 5). This rather arbitrary and loose taxonomy proves unsatisfying and seems driven more by Prédal's palpable aversion to gender studies (p. 117) than by a coherent system of classification (the disparate titles of parts and chapters immediately reveal this structural weakness, as does the loose definition of modernity and postmodernity that justifies the separation into two parts). Still, each chapter provides insightful, thought-provoking and sometimes truly illuminating analyses of films that, for the most part, have not been released in the United States (and sometimes cannot even be found on DVD in France).

Chapter 2 mostly spends time reflecting on the works of well-known directors such as Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin (the latter receiving much more praise than the former), Bruno Dumont ("implacable pureté ascétique de la prise de vue"), Xavier Beauvois or François Ozon (whom Prédal, borrowing Emmanuel Burdeau's phrase, calls a "tâcheron exalté et prolixe"). The author also pays attention to other, lesser-known directors who directed noteworthy films that suggested their creative potential: Philippe Gandrieux (La Vie nouvelle), Jean-Paul Civeyrac (Fantômes), Eugène Green (Toutes les nuits), Laurent Bonello (Le Pornographe), etc. Chapter...