Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (review)

Brutal Intimacy takes us quickly into the thick of contemporary French filmmaking. Tim Palmer looks at films released since 2000 and his book offers a stunningly novel account of a decade of production in French cinema. Central to his thesis is the notion that the divide between art cinema and popular cinema in France has been overstated in the past and is demonstrably no longer relevant to the contemporary French filmmaking scene. Rather than dwelling on the many excellent critical and historical discussions of French cinema, Palmer draws expertly on the resources of industry data and on his own cinephilia and extensive cinema-going. There is an attempt to capture the actuality of cinema now in France. His account is divided into a full Introduction and four strong chapters: on young and first-time cinema, on the cinéma du corps, on popular cinema and ‘pop-art cinema’, and on ‘feminine cinema’. A wonderful dimension of the volume is its widespread interest in the work of women filmmakers. Where others have looked newly at beur, transnational, or queer filmmakers, the work of women in particular draws Palmer’s eye. With energy and vivid appreciation Palmer foregrounds women directors in different ways across the first three chapters and also devotes his fourth chapter to the work of women alone. He gives fine attention to the work of Mia Hansen-Løve as a first-time director, to Marina de Van’s traumatic body work in Dans ma peau, to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s popular art cinema, and to Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s reflections on femininity in Innocence. There is also new focus on horror in French filmmaking, with a reappraisal of this genre and a particularly rewarding reading of Robin Campillo’s unusual film Les Revenants. Brutal Intimacy manages the difficult feat of providing an integrated overview of a decade of filmmaking, sustained by more detailed, partisan readings of individual films. The book is further enhanced by its attention in its Conclusion to the influence of the French film school La Fémis. Palmer offers a first-hand account of the training at La Fémis and of the ways in which the school’s methods espouse cinephilia as ‘an active craft practice’. As a welcome Appendix, Palmer includes Alain Bergala’s list of 156 films that La Fémis students are advised to see. There is a lovely sense of congruence between the cinephilia that subtends Palmer’s approach and the abiding passion he identifies behind contemporary French filmmaking. The organization of Palmer’s study offers less room to recognize the recent work of those directors whose films have evolved over the decades. There is attention to Agnès Varda’s installation work L’Île et elle, but the terrific Plages d’Agnès has only the briefest mention; the director Alain Cavalier is absent entirely. But perhaps Palmer’s defence of the young and the new is precisely what French film studies needs at this present moment.