After Adèle Haenel and her farewell to the cinema – where pathos competed with delirium -, Justine Triet, Palme d’or at Cannes, tells us about a world unknown to the public: a universe made up of wicked patriarchs, who would prevent “committed” films (understand: which combine almost all the clichés of benevolence)… without ever making admissions. But what are they talking about?
I advise everyone to pick a few synopses at random from the list of films released in theaters in France in 2022 to get an idea of our film production. The Farm Folies tells the story of a breeder on the verge of losing his wife: he opens a cabaret to save her; Show no mercy invites us to follow Adolphe, an old boy who lives with his disabled mother, and who accepts a role as a singer and transvestite dancer in a cabaret that has just opened while a far-right group tries to obtain the closed until murder; Kung Fu Zohra focuses on Zohra who is unable to leave her abusive husband Omar for fear of breaking their little girl’s heart and meets a Kung-Fu master who teaches her how to defend herself; The women of Square follows, in a comedy mode, the adventures of a group of exploited nannies who revolt and reveal their indispensable social role.
Without forgetting the documentaries, Come on children a dive into the Turgot high school in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris which integrates students from working-class neighborhoods through hip-hop dance (and not literature, knowledge, science, that would have been too good); Return to Reims (Fragments), filmed version of the miserable book by Didier Eribon and read by Adèle Haenel before she says goodbye to us; but also the indescribable Hello, celebration of a woman (Diam’s) subjected to the worst religious diktats – but it’s her choice so that’s fine – for which the Cannes festival rolled out the red carpet.
France produced 208 feature films in 2022, and none of these films – fortunately – celebrates male domination, violence against women, rape, murder or proposes to destroy the world under an exciting rain of gasoline. It’s been a long time, if it ever existed, that there hasn’t been a dominant patriarchal French cinema that spits on women, or the weak, or migrants, or baby seals. It’s not because Brigitte Bardot has the most beautiful pair of buttocks in the history of the 7th art that Contempt is a sexist film, it is not because the social and intimate relations were what they were in 1974 that Vincent, François, Paul and the others is an ode to rape, it is not because a woman is desirable that a film humiliates women, it is not because we film violence to denounce it that we celebrate it.
Haenel and Triet say anything
What is as distressing as it is grotesque in the speeches of Haenel and Triet is that they say nonsense, are not based on any reality. Because French cinema has been investing in films unwatchable by ordinary mortals for a very (too) long time. They cause a nervous breakdown of bourgeois guilt-ridden who attack anti-capitalism like others drowned themselves in absinthe in the hope of familiarity with the poetry muse.
From the (profitable) poetic realism of Prévert and Carné to today’s dominant social cinema, the dominant impression is rather that French cinema produces films that are generally not profitable. Recently, The Marginal, feature film with Corinne Masiero which cost the tidy sum of 4.2 million euros – largely financed by public money just like Justine Triet’s web-based film – was such a flop that the entire public service hastened to invite the main actress of the film to try in vain to make up for the disaster… Alas! The interviews only concerned… the pension reform.
Finally, what is this compulsive need to make a political speech by winning a film prize? As if art had to be justified by politics, as if art weren’t enough, that it was indecent. In view of the public successes of recent months, Top Gun Maverick, Avatar IIor The three Musketeers, viewers seem on the contrary to scream at us their desire for films that take them away from reality. Not to forget it or to be stupefied, no, to take the necessary step back, the breath of oxygen essential to confronting reality when the lights come back on.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity