French Comedy on Screen: A Cinematic History by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni (review)

Reviews 201 Lanzoni, Rémi Fournier. French Comedy on Screen: A Cinematic History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-0-230-33842-5. Pp. 265. $95. Do French comedies come with an asterisk? This might well be the implicit question answered in this book. As the author reminds us, comedies have often been left by the wayside.“Serious”cinema is an academic subject,has been studied,analyzed, and taught, while laughter is relegated to popular enjoyment. In 2009 for instance, Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis attracted some 20.5 million cinemagoers, breaking all boxoffice records in France, but was largely ignored by the 34th César Awards Ceremony. Lanzoni seeks to rectify this oversight and invites a broad audience of readers in film studies, Francophone culture, curious students, and Francophiles to dwell on French cinema’s poor relation. By reading and analyzing French comedies of the past eightyfive years (beginning with the talkies), the author offers a vast historical and social panorama of the genre and, in more ways than one, reaffirms its place and function in the academe. This useful volume traces the evolution and facets of French comedies by exploring an impressive number of titles, organized by period (early, postwar, modern and contemporary comedies), and helpfully subdivided into styles (social satire, ethnic comedies, etc.). Not only does Lanzoni frame the movies he selected with discussions of their genesis, actors and directors, as well as the censorship and reception of these films, but he also engages with the cinema industry at different stages of its evolution. He manages to astutely lead the reader in his intellectual escapades (“Can comedy exist without satire?”) in order to ultimately establish comic films as social, historical and commercial testaments of the French psyche (70). The enterprise proves as entertaining as it is instructive, and the in-depth discussions of particular titles (such as Pagnol’s trilogy or Tenue de soirée) that punctuate the broader generic analysis are certainly insightful.However these discussions,or rather the decision to analyze certain movies in lieu of others, do create a slight sense of imbalance. The book does not claim to be an encyclopedia, but a more nuanced account of his criteria for selecting his corpus would have been welcome. One could legitimately ask why Les kairas (1.2 million spectators) prevailed over Neuilly sa mère (2.5 million spectators), or Gazon maudit (3.8 million) over Pédale douce (4 million). Likewise, one could regret that the fourth and final chapter, with promising sections about “communitarian humor”and cinéma de banlieue, did not benefit from a more detailed cinematographic analysis to complement the refreshing examination of the films’ social significance. As an introduction to French comedy, Lanzoni’s work succeeds in its scope and aims; he creates a space where history, popular acclaim, and social issues intersect to enhance our understanding of the medium and its import. Boise State University (ID) Benoît Leclercq ...