French Film Blurred

One of the great themes of cinema is the experience of youth. This is partly because the medium lends itself to communicating the physical and emotional thrills of those for whom the body is effortlessly responsive and so much of experience is novel. Consider Alana and Gary running along the street in Licorice Pizza, or Buddy leaping through the air in Belfast, to pick two recent examples. But it also reflects the popularity of cinema among the young, which in turn means the demand for constant rejuvenation in a manner closer to popular music than literary fiction. Older, established directors and screenwriters receive due respect and can (usually) still get films made, but we hunger for new ways of seeing, new ways of telling stories, and that means new ways of encountering youth on the screen. This inevitably fuels the iconoclasm of youth, but that phrase is just a tired cliché. More interesting is the resentment of the old, specifically the generation who came of age in the 1960s - a time when TV was taking over from cinema but for that very reason the straitjacket was being eased off the older medium. Just as they criticised their parent's generation then, and derided the tame fare of the BBC, now they are criticising their children's generation, which came of age after the millennium and social media. 

I'm going to discuss this further by looking at three French films: two recent releases and one classic from 1960. Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades in the original French) is in cinemas now. Gagarine had a limited release at the end of last year but is available online. Breathless (Au Bout de Souffle), Jean-Luc Godard's famous (and infamous) debut, enjoyed its sixtieth anniversary during the first lockdown. That they are all French means they are related sociologically as well as cinematically, but the wider social and political points apply well beyond the boundaries of France. Looking at these issues at one remove from the UK avoids the risk of the parochial, which is something all too evident in films like Licorice Pizza and Belfast: the one an arch comedy about a self-satisfied society in which youth is a commodity, the other a sentimental erasure of the political in which aged wisdom schools the innocent young. While those films compartmentalise youth, the two recent French releases engage it as a problematic, but with very different intentions. One sees the problem as the deficiencies of the young themselves, as if these were somehow independent of society (or even a threat to it), while the other sees the problem as the growing antipathy displayed by society (i.e. the middle-aged and old) towards the young.

In Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District, Émilie (Lucie Zhang) and Camille (Makita Samba) are solipsistic and selfish twenty-somethings who come together for economic reasons (flat-sharing), enjoy a physical if catty relationship, change jobs and generally don't get anywhere with their lives while irritating their families. There are moments of grace and humour, and plenty of convincing sex, but neither character is sympathetic, despite subtle performances by the actors. At one point, having dissed his sister's plans to become a stand-up, Camille's father tells him, "No one gives a fuck what you think!" [because you don't care about anyone else]. This feels like the director talking. In the third strand, Nora (Noémie Merlant) is a thirty-something but still naive woman, fleeing provincial life and a coercive relationship, who has become a mature but still aimless student. Her path will cross with Émilie and Camille, the latter sexually, but her chief relationship, and arguably the film's saving grace as a story, is the burgeoning one she enjoys online with Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a cam-girl whom Nora is mistaken for by her younger classmates after donning a blonde wig at a freshers party. 

Though a technically accomplished film, notably in its black and white photography (more reminiscent of Manhattan than anything in the French tradition, unless you count The Battle of Algiers), it is an unfocused story. This is less because it is essentially a portmanteau - knitting together three tales by the American comic book artist Adrian Tomine, now combined in a screenplay with original elements written by Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius - than because it seems fascinated by the shortcomings of its young protagonists, which I suspect reflects Audiard's interests more than those of his co-writers. That Nora is a more sympathetic character suggests that this is where Sciamma's hand is to be found, a suspicion reinforced by Merlant's previous role in Sciamma's 2019 film, A Portrait of a Woman on Fire. Audiard is no stranger to misanthropy - A Prophet is a Hobbesian parable, Dheepan a French Taxi Driver - but here his target is specifically youth rather than mankind in general, and the chief charge is that they are stupid and unreliable because they are self-absorbed. 

Nora's classmates are presented as little more than a mob that is triggered into slut-shaming by the most trivial prop and the pernicious effects of social media. (As a rule of thumb, anyone who thinks social media is leading to the decline of civilisation does not know what they are talking about.) Though Nora satisfyingly clocks one of her tormentors in the street, there is little realism in this part of the story: none of her classmates appears to doubt the rumour that she is a cam-girl, while they appear to be as familiar with Amber Sweet as with a pop star. The developing romance between Nora and Amber is satisfying (both actresses are excellent) but it's also fantastical, and apparently designed to serve up the banal observation that relationships in meatspace are superior to hyperspace. While Nora's strand works better than Émilie's or Camille's, this is because it is closer to a fairy-tale: an innocent girl suffers a near-magical transformation and is saved from a hostile crowd and various predatory wolves through the intercession of a semi-divine character combining Godmother and Prince Charming. There is even a kiss straight out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In contrast, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's Gagarine is a story about youthful aspiration. The plot centres on the real-world decision to condemn and then demolish a Parisian housing project, the Cité Gagarine, which was named after the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gargarin, who ceremonially opened it in 1963 (we see archive footage, notable for showing an already racially mixed community who have all dressed up for the occasion). Alséni Bathily plays the suitably named Youri, a young man whose mother is absent but who is part of a clearly supportive community that tolerates eccentrics and a peripheral Roma family including Diana, played by Lina Khoudri (recently seen in Wes Anderson's The French Disptach). Youri has taken it upon himself, with assistance by his friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven), to repair as much of the project as possible in the hope, vain as it transpires, of stopping the demolition. As the residents are decanted and their community broken up, Youri retreats into his fantasy of space flight, transforming a hidden area of the project into a spacecraft with hydroponic cultivation. Diana and Dali (Finnegan Oldfield), a petty drug dealer who is also disgusted at the destruction of the community, discover Youri's secret but both are eventually forced out by the authorities and he is left on his own: increasingly ill and withdrawn in depression.

Though it nods towards social issues, such as poverty and racism, Gagarine is really a film about sociability - extended families as well as the compact family (or crew) Youri briefly creates with Diana and Dali. The iconic moment is when Youri organises a community get-together to view a solar eclipse, rigging up screens to shield eyes and pointing his community literally at the nearest star. It is a symbol not of oppression or pessimism but of optimism and common purpose, as was the naming of the housing project, even if it turns out to be as fleeting as the eclipse itself. Gagarine is a film of much lyricism. Some of the photography is gorgeous and stands as a testament to the art and ambition of the novice feature directors, and it is ably supported by a lovely score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, the Russian brothers who provided the music for Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2017 film Loveless. For a French film, there are some notable British echoes, from Charles Crichton's 1947 Hue and Cry (Youri has a loyal following among the local kids) to Ben Wheatley's 2015 High-Rise (in which the protagonist must improvise among the ruins).

What distinguishes Gagarine from Paris, 13th District is that the young are not only varied in their attitudes and clever in multiple ways, but they are well-integrated into their families and wider communities. Houssam and Diana choose their families over Youri but never lose their respect and love for him. Youri's alienation from his mother is clearly atypical and presented as problematic, while in contrast Émilie, Camille and Nora's distance from theirs is presented as all too typical if regrettable (but with the blame mainly on them, Nora being a partial exception). It is also noticeable, by its absence, that social media does not dominate the lives of the young in Gagarine. The local gang, with Dali prominent, sit on plastic chairs in a common area to debate life and mock passersby, as such youth have done since time immemorial (of the two films, Gagarine is much the closer to I Vitelloni). The younger kids are occupied running around, doing what kids do. There's obviously a degree of sentimentalisation here, though thankfully nothing on the scale of Belfast (the feel-good sectarian bigotry film of the year), but there's also a lot of truth. The film orginated in a documentary about the break-up of Cité Gagarine. It didn't invent the community's cohesion or the kids' sociable behaviour, let alone manufacture its regret.

Breathless provides an interesting contrast to both films. The shallowness and self-absorption of the characters in Godard's startling debut - Jean-Paul Belmondo's petty criminal Michel and Jean Seberg's American drifter Patricia - have obvious parallels with Camille and Émilie, even if the latter are better educated and less pliable respectively (that's progress for you). The shock of the film in 1960 had as much to do with the director's use of characters that we struggle to actively sympathise with as the jump cuts, which weren't novel but had never been used so extensively. The latter were attributed to Godard's desire to cut the running time down to 90 minutes without cutting entire scenes, but perhaps by happenstance they also served to emphasise the characters lack of focus and disregard for consequentiality. Another recurrent trope is Patricia's uncertainty over the meaning of French words, which gives her a noticeably affectless air (I suppose that's the disadvantage of not speaking a second language, as Wire sang). It remains an impressive work, despite its rebarbative qualities, that mixes a fascination with American cinema (specfically what would become known in the 1970s as film noir) with the verité of war reportage (the Algerian War was still going on and Raoul Coutard, the director of photography, had been in Indochina) and the influences of Italian neo-realism and Franco-German existentialism.

What links Breathless and Gagarine is what the former occludes, namely the humanism of those others pillars of the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Agnes Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) which bookend Godard's debut. In other words, if Paris, 13th District sits within a tradition of cinematic misanthropy and contempt (Godard would go on to make a film, Le Mepris, on just that subject in 1963), Gagarine sits in the non-Godardian tradition in which sympathy is central both to the main character's engagement with the world and their treatment by the filmmaker. One thing Breathless shares with The 400 Blows is the closing shot, in which Patricia and Antoine Doinel each look directly at the camera. But while both are challenging, Patricia's is a look that settles into disinterest and a reluctance to accept responsibility while Antoine's remains hopeful and engaged. Neither Paris, 13th District nor Gagarine attempt anything so provocative, but their endings are both different and comparable to those earlier works, the one urging compromise and maturation - in other words, surrender - the other that the young should hang on to their dreams and light up the world. Both films are worth the ticket price, but its is Gagarine that will leave you hopeful for humanity.