Few French films do anymore. After decades of “navel-gazing” as one critic put it, the New Wave–that genre of self-conscious films dealing with themes of alienation, madness and erotic love–has finally gone into decline. “For three decades now, French film critics and writers thought the New Wave was the only cinema that mattered,” says Jeunet. “Now that is changing. We are fed up with seeing two people sitting in a kitchen talking for two hours.” Younger filmmakers, especially, seem eager to move on. “The New Wave has nothing to do with my life or my cultural references,” says Mathieu Kassovitz, 30, who costarred in “Amelie” and directed “Hate” and “The Crimson Rivers.” “When I was 15, Steven Spielberg was doing his best movies, like ‘Jaws’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ Those are the movies that influenced me. Not Godard or Truffaut.”
To longtime students of film, such words are sacrilege. The New Wave began in the late 1950s, when a slew of know-it-all French critics at the Cahiers du Cinema journal decided they could make movies better than the ones they were reviewing. They were devotees of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, both generally dismissed back then as commercial directors. Not so, claimed the Cahiers writers, who included Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard. “Hawks summarizes the highest virtues of the American cinema, the only one capable of providing us with a sense of moral value,” wrote Rivette in 1953.
First the Cahiers clan made a spate of short films, just to see if they could. Truffaut’s 1957 experimental short “Les Mistons” was so revolutionary it prompted one of his Cahiers colleagues to declare: “Truffaut has reinvented cinema.” Two years later, Truffaut, then 27, made the riveting coming-of-age film “The 400 Blows.” In 1960 Godard made the modern girl-loves-a-hood picture “Breathless,” starring the fresh-faced American Jean Seberg and French newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo. He shot it in four weeks on a minuscule budget with a handheld camera that he kept in the basket of a bicycle he rode from one location to the next. Wrote one critic, “This wonderfully daring film breaks all the pseudo-rules of film technique.”
It also confirmed the arrival of the “New Wave,” as it was dubbed at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Directors in France and around the world embraced this personal–or auteur–way of moviemaking. Unlike the Hollywood system, where teams of writers turned out scripts and scores of technicians filmed them, the New Wave directors did it all: wrote, filmed and edited. This approach influenced a new generation of Hollywood directors, from John Cassavetes to Sam Peckinpah, and set the standard for French haute cinema. While the French still churned out delightful slapstick comedies for the masses, commercial drama and thrillers gave way to New Wave introspection. “French cinema in the 1960s had a beautiful moment, with masterpieces like ‘Le Mepris’ and ‘Pierrot le Fou,’ " says Fremaux. “But after that, there was a distinct separation between auteur and commercial cinema. We lost the balance.” As a result, French cinema suffered for almost half a century.
No longer. In the last few years, Fremaux says, “something has definitely happened.” First, a new generation of well-regarded filmmakers–including Jeunet, Assayas, Kassovitz and Luc Besson–have established themselves as the mainstream in French cinema. These directors still make “personal” films, but they understand that their movies have to do well at the box office. And second, the new breed of film producers–unlike New Wave producers, who merely cut the checks–demand some control over their projects and hold filmmakers accountable. As Fremaux says, “They are in the movie business to make money”–a concept that New Wave directors found unconscionable. Money sullied their art.
They had a point. Some in the French film business are worried that by focusing too much on the box office, directors–and more important, producers–might start turning out too many “popcorn movies,” as Jeunet calls them derisively (though he made one himself with “Alien 4”). Indeed, some have already latched onto the American studios’ obsession with luring demographically desirable teenage boys into the theater, churning out testosterone-laden movies like “Taxi,” “Taxi 2” and soon-to-be “Taxi 3,” (all produced by Besson) as well as Stephane Kazandjian’s “Am-erican Pie” knock-off “Sexy Boys,” which relies heavily on sophomoric humor.
Still, it will take more than a few vacuous teen sex romps to kill off the New Wave completely. Young directors around the world–including Quentin Tarantino, Wim Wenders, John Woo and Kassovitz–worship the 1970s filmmakers who were the direct descendants of Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer. But the distinct division between art and commerce that the New Wave created is coming to a close. France’s young cineastes are free at last to create their own beautiful moment. Roll it.
