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Can Comedy Change the World?: Jean Yanne and French Comic Cinema of the 1970's

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esp.2011.0041

1931-0234

Dalton Krauss,

Historical and Political Studies

Can Comedy Change the World?Jean Yanne and French Comic Cinema of the 1970's Dalton Krauss As a number of historians of French cinema have noted, comedies account for the largest number of films produced in France each year, and many of the most successful French films of the last several decades, at least in terms of box office receipts, have been comedies. This success, however, has not come without a price. In order to appeal to a large popular audience, these films have generally been unthreatening and conformist in their politics. This timidity has caused critics such as Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie to consider comedy to be the most conservative of major film genres. 1 More pointedly, in his study of French cinema from 1958 to 1978, Jean-Pierre Jeancolas has described the temporal setting of many of the films of that era as "le contemporain vague," that is, "un cinéma hors du temps, détaché du présent," a time frame that would appear to exclude focus on contemporary social and political problems. This "présent de convention," he goes on to say, has been "depuis longtemps, depuis toujours, le temps de la comédie." 2 Comedy is also a difficult genre in which to express a socially engaged or militant politics because humor requires a rapport between the material of the film and the viewer, a relationship that frequently favors the most stereotypical elements of plot and character. In his chapter on comic films of the 1980's, Phil Powrie refers to this relationship as a "nostalgic consensuality" that unites the filmmakers and the audience, while denying "any political force" to many of the comic films of that decade. He notes with approval those critics who criticized such films as La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille (Chatiliez et Quentin, 1988) for their "ability not to offend, in other words, to stake out a middle ground for comfortably middle class spectators " (Powrie 159). Many popular French comic films of the 1960's do, in fact, conform to this pessimistic analysis. This was a cinema that owed much of its success to the presence of well-known actors including Bourvil, Louis de Funès, Francis Blanche, and Bernard Blier, ably seconded by intelligent and skillful albeit conventional directors such as Georges Lautner and Gérard Oury. These directors possessed, rather than an original and personal approach to filmmaking that would classify them as auteurs, an authentic flair for providing [End Page 104] their stars with the chance to display their vaudeville personae. The best of the comedies from this decade also benefited immensely from lively screenplays, especially those by Michel Audiard. Nevertheless, in spite of the cult status of several of these works today (especially Les Tontons flingueurs and Les Barbouzes), and the continued popularity of many of the films of Louis de Funès, posterity has not been kind to many of the film comedies of the 1960's. Even the most successful French comedies of the 1960's remained escapist entertainment compared with the spectacular explosion of Italian comic cinema that began in that decade and continued well into the 1970's. The films of Pietro Germi, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, and Ettore Scola proposed acerbic critiques of contemporary Italian society that went far beyond anything that was to be found in French films of the same period. 3 It was only after the events of May '68 that a new tendency of socially engaged comedies began to appear in French cinema, and even these films, in spite of the popular success that several of them achieved, mostly remained on the margins of French film production. Among the first comic films to manifest an interest in contemporary social criticism was La Grande Bouffe, the first film in French by Marco Ferreri, who had already had a long career in Italy, and whose French-language films can therefore be considered to be a link with the great Italian comedies of the era. Another major cinematic event in the same year (1973) was the release of Les Valseuses, Bertrand Blier's controversial and frequently obscene portrait of a pair of losers careening around a dreary...