Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Whether to legitimize parochial French cinema

My editor has been away in Europe for the better part of a month, so I’ve been doing my best to tailor my theatrical viewings to things I thought it was important to review in his absence. He can still post my reviews from the road, but he’s only had the time to see and review one movie himself while he was gone: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which he saw in Rome just for the novelty of seeing a movie while on holiday. It’s a sentiment I can relate to as I enjoy that quite a bit myself. In order to keep the site feeling current, I’ve been trying to write about two reviews per week to compensate for the absence of his usual output.

Though there are always things out that a person can review, I’ve got this idea that we really should review something within the first week of its Australian release if we don’t want to miss the boat on it. He differs with me slightly on that, thinking of every review as contributing long-term to the repository of our searchable reviews, which means it doesn’t really matter whether you review it a week or a year or a decade after it’s released. You can tell I was once a newspaperman, as I have the old-fashioned interest in there being a “news peg” for something you write – even if, in the case of a movie, the “news peg” is the release date itself.

Anyway, that brings us to this week, surely one of his last out of town (though he hasn’t actually told me when he’s returning). Thursday is a bit light on new releases. Hotel Transylvania 3 is coming out, but I’m not going to see that on Thursday night when it will make a perfect movie to watch with my kids – though whether that will happen this weekend, in time for me to review it, or next, when it will be past my preferred seven-day window, I can’t be sure. In any case, a lot of the time they don’t even schedule evening viewings of kids movies, though I do remember having the odd experience of watching Finding Dory at like 9:40 at night.

One thing that’s coming out is a movie whose trailer I have seen a number of times. It’s a French movie called Two is a Family – the title probably sounds nicer in French. (It’s called Demain Tout Commence, which I think translates as “Tomorrow Everything Begins.”) It stars two semi-international stars, Omar Sy (The Intouchables) and Clemence Poesy (In Bruges, 127 Hours, the last two Harry Potter movies). Their characters had a fling on holiday that produced a child – something he’s only aware of when she shows up on his doorstep, hands him the kid, and then buggers off.

My 2018 film rankings are severely lacking in foreign language films – in fact, I don’t yet have my first. I really like both the stars and it looks like a sweet movie. But I am philosophically conflicted about whether to see it at all, let alone review it.

See, this is not a French movie released to cross over to a world audience. This is a French movie intended to be seen by French people. And Australians, apparently.

What I really mean is: It hasn’t been released in the U.S., and given that the movie debuted in France in 2016, it does not seem likely to be.

For a long time I have been interested in compiling year-end lists of movies viewed based on trying to share common references with American critics, such that we are comparing apples to apples when we name our top ten. I hesitate even to include Australian films that I don’t think will receive a U.S. release, even though this is the actual country in which I review films. I’ve lightened up on that, which seems like a good stance to take when I am a member of a body called the Australian Film Critics Association, which gets me into unlimited movies in the theater for $75 a year. If I’m not even reviewing movies made by and for Australians, I’m doing something wrong. (And I’m pleased to say that one of these, Sweet Country, is still in my top five for the year.)

French movies made for French people are a bit different. The fact that an Australian distributor saw it fit to release the movie here means that there is thought to be an audience. I don’t know if the readers of our website are that audience, but I like to think they could be, and besides, I have a philosophy of seeing and reviewing films from a wide diversity of sources and about a wide diversity of people. Seeing and reviewing a movie made by French people for French people would be good for me.

But I still feel like a U.S. release is what marks a movie as “significant on the world stage,” and not just the niche product of a smaller film industry that only produces a couple dozen movies a year, if that. Two is a Family getting released in Australia means it has exceeded those modest aims, but it may not cross my personal threshold of what warrants a review.

Why is this, though? Are the tastes of American audiences really such an important standard? Especially when Americans are the people who elected Trump as president?

Would that it were so simple, to quote Ralph Fiennes and Alden Ehrenreich. Foreign language films have never been released in the U.S. because the distributor thought they would appeal to Trump voters. The distributor is targeting American intellectuals, liberals, cultural snobs. And those people’s opinions are important to me.

If Two is a Family is not considered to be a good bet for American cultural snobs, is it really better suited to the French equivalent of Trump voters?

Well that’s a big no, too. As it stars a Frenchman of African heritage, Omar Sy, it’s already alienating those people in France, of which there are many. So it passes that minimum standard of liberal correctness. If it’s good enough for France’s intellectuals, and if it’s good enough for Australia’s intellectuals, should I even care if it’s good enough for America’s intellectuals?

And France and Australia are, of course, not the only two countries where this movie has been released. Its IMDB page shows it has also opened in Belgium, Hungary, Estonia, Germany, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, Israel, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Norway, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Sweden, Chile, Argentina, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

How can not having a release in one country – one increasingly stupid, frustrating and annoying country – give me pause?

It shouldn’t, and in fact, it won’t. Writing this blog post has given me the resolve to see and review Two is a Family. Done and done.

The only obstacle now might be that I may already be going to the movies on Wednesday and Friday nights. Wednesday, I’m thinking of going to the restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Friday, I may cap drinks with coworkers with a drunken viewing of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, as I understand that may be the best way to view it. It’ll be hard to convince my wife, and myself, that I need to fit in a random little French movie on the night in between.

But dammit, that random little French movie is being supported by its Australian distributor, and I want to be the kind of film critic that legitimizes it with a review.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

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