Unraveling French Cinema: From L'Atalante to Caché by T. Jefferson Kline (review)

son humble épouse (Kati Outinen) s’appelle Arletty, nom de l’irrésistible actrice illuminant Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945). On reconnaît Jean-Pierre Léaud, l’adolescent maltraité des films de Truffaut, dans le rôle du maniaque qui dénonce l’enfant traqué. En nommant le jeune garçon Idrissa, Kaurismäki salue le grand cinéaste Ouedraogo du Burkina Faso. Pour apaiser Arletty à l’hôpital, son amie lui lit une nouvelle de Kafka, Children on a Country Road. Avec le motif du pain et la présence lancinante de l’inspecteur Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), rappelant Javert, on voit passer des reflets renversés des Misérables. Accueil et humour, silences, sobriété et émotions sans aucune sentimentalité glissent dans des plans où dominent une gamme subtile de bleus et de gris, les couleurs de la côte du nord-est de la France (la photographie est de Timo Salminen ). La sélection musicale éclectique est en harmonie avec le style et le décor du film: l’accordéon contemporain de Chapelain, les blues de Blind Willie McTell, les chansons nostalgiques de Damia, un tango lent de Carlos Gardel, et le concert live du chanteur franco-italien Little Bob (Roberto Piazza). Cheveux gris et blouson rouge, rock dans la peau, tel qu’il apparaît dans le film, Roberto chante la fraternité dans sa vie réelle depuis plusieurs décennies. Film inattendu, plein de surprises, planté dans plusieurs niveaux de réalité, plus français que finlandais, mais aussi bien européen et international par son sujet et ses jeux intellectuels et artistiques, Le Havre est le bienvenu. Gettysburg College (PA) Marie-Jo Binet KLINE, T. JEFFERSON. Unraveling French Cinema: From L’Atalante to Caché. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4051-8451-9. Pp. 226. $31.95. This is one of the best books I have read on what makes French cinema, well, so French. One of the author’s principal contentions is that, from its inception, French cinema, especially in contrast to Hollywood film, explores, reflects upon, and questions the nature of the seventh art in the very films it produces. What comes forth, then, is an endless discussion or even debate out of which no single, pat conclusion can be drawn. French cinema is ambiguous, contradictory, blurry, disorienting, and frustrating. Without the penchant for Hollywood’s “happy ending,” that tying up of loose ends, French film again and again seems to confound our capacity to explain in any simple terms “what happened in this film?”, leaving viewers to ponder instead “why is this film?” Further, just because one is French does not mean one prefers French film to Hollywood film, nor does it mean that French films are not made outside of France, nor that one has to be French to direct a French film. What makes French film identifiable as such is that it simultaneously invites “enjoying a storyline and searching for a new understanding of the medium itself” (10). Conversely, in Hollywood film, the story needs to be “immediately accessible” (5), with all evidence of the filmmaking itself hidden from view and thought. Kline proposes, probably in an oversimplification, that this distinction grew out of mainly economic pressures. Because France could not compete with the big studio productions of Hollywood, it had to find its own niche. But Kline is careful to argue that finding this niche arose out of “cultural issues” connected to the “French tendency to theorize,” that is, to consider terms, mediums, arts, politics, education, etc., as things which must “constantly be defined, redefined, Reviews 169 debated and tested” (7). Subsequently, in eight of the nine chapters of his book, Kline offers beautiful, eloquent, and convincing readings of French films from Vigo to Haneke which demonstrate this “tendency to theorize.” Each chapter is devoted to a particular film with its particular kind of theorizing, which, when read in the chronological order in which the study is organized, offers a history of the ever-transforming reflections on the medium. Kline considers French cinema first as Poetry (Vigo’s L’Atalante), then the Real (Renoir’s La règle du jeu), followed...