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Looking beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis by Martin O'Shaughnessy (review)

2024; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 119; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2024.a916748

2222-4319

Cinema and Media Studies

Reviewed by: Looking beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis by Martin O'Shaughnessy Isabelle Vanderschelden Looking beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis. By Martin O'Shaughnessy. (Political Cinema) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2022. xii+ 208 pp. £89. ISBN 978–1–4744–4862–8. Martin O'Shaughnessy is a leading Anglophone specialist in recent French political film-making. In 2007 he published The New Face of Political Cinema : Commitment in French Film since 1995 (Oxford: Berghahn), a ground-breaking monograph on a somewhat neglected area of French film studies. Looking beyond Neoliberalism is the logical continuation of his approach to film criticism, which involves linking [End Page 157] cinema's power as communication medium with current theoretical debates in European social sciences. Focusing on neoliberal motifs and character subjectivity, the author puts his corpus in dialogue with a range of political themes in order to update his analyses beyond neoliberalism. While the films and theories are clearly contextualized, the book is primarily targeted at scholars and students specializing in film studies and political critical theories, and at social scientists interested in film as a medium of political engagement. Embracing the capacity of cinema to 'reveal new forms of life pressing against containment' (p. 9), the author revisits established political film-makers such as the Dardenne brothers, Laurent Cantet, Jacques Audiard, and Abdellatif Kechiche with fresh thematic analyses that shed new light on the consequences of neoliberalism. He also draws on a newer generation of political film-makers whose films were mostly released after 2010, some of whom are critically visible internationally, such as Céline Sciamma and Mia Hansen-Løve, and some of whom benefit from critical and public acclaim principally within France, such as Stéphane Brizé, and the duo Gustave Kervern and Bertrand Delépine. Brizé's La Loi du marché (2015) and En guerre (2018), for example, are discussed in terms of 'shutting down political alternatives' (p. 83); Kervern and Delépine's anarchic Louise-Michel (2007) and Le Grand Soir (2012) enrich the discussion, showing how offbeat, dark comedies can convey important messages, while demonstrating the limits of 'sustaining work on the self in a hostile context' (p. 95). In six thematically arranged chapters organized around the notion of 'crisis', O'Shaughnessy maps out how recent films—through a range of genres, narratives, and characters—engage with social violence, changes in the workplace, debt, precarity, and suicide. The carefully selected corpus brings together canonical arthouse works with more mainstream films and less commercial comedies and documentaries. These films often portray protagonists trapped in, or contained by, a crisis. Chapters 1 and 2 set the scene by presenting some protagonists from the perspectives of neoliberal subjectivity, social violence, and chains of debt (focusing, among other examples, on the Dardennes' Silence de Lorna (2008) and Cantet's L'Emploi du temps (2004)). Audiard's mainstream films tackle neoliberal subjectivity, deep socio-economic shifts, and possible alternatives for flexible collaborative and competitive characters. They open the way to 'radical political reimaginings' (p. 38), but show the limits of the liberation provided by stories of triumph, as Un prophète (2009) or Deephan (2015) illustrate. Chapter 3 tackles filmic treatments of suicide and death as means of exiting crises (Brizé, the Dardennes, Kervern and Delépine). In Chapter 4 Kechiche's polemical La Vie d'Adèle (2013) and Vénus noire (2010) are probed using the conceptual framework of deconstructive materialism (gender and body politics), aptly linking their political dimension to production decisions. In fresh analyses of Sciamma's films, the author also shows how the characters of Tomboy (2011) and Bande de filles (2014) attempt to construct alternative identities by remaking themselves in 'troubling encounters' (p. 99). What gradually emerges is that some narratives offer protagonists agency or, at least, some possibilities—through connections, encounters, and ethical gifts, for example. Returning to the [End Page 158] Dardennes, Chapter 5 discusses ethical exits and the notion of 'unwitting gift' as alternatives to systemic violence in La Promesse (1996), Deux jours une nuit (2014), and La Fille inconnue (2016). The last chapter applies the concept of 'enslavement' to cinema's...