Middlebrow Cinema

10 ‘KINGS OF THE MIDDLE WAY’ Continental cinema on British screens Lucy Mazdon A list compiled by the BFI of the top twenty foreign-language films released in the UK between 2002 and 2013 reveals that eight of these films were either European or co-productions involving European partners.1 Among those films achieving over £2 million in ticket sales at the UK box office we can find: Volver (Almodvar, Spain, 2006; 2.9 million); Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, Germany, 2007; 2.7 million); Coco Before Chanel (Fontaine, France, 2009; 2.6 million); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Oplev, Sweden/ Denmark/Germany, 2010; 2.1 million); Untouchable (Nakache and Toledano, France, 2012; 2 million) and Untergang / Downfall (Hirschbiegel, Germany/Italy/ Austria, 2005; 1.9 million). Assessing this list, Huw D. Jones has noted the need to guard against ‘the stereotyping of the foreign-language film audience’ (2014). He points out in particular the diversity of genres on offer, ranging from Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (USA, 2004) and Apocalypto (USA, 2007), both non- English-language Hollywood-style blockbusters, to Chinese ‘wuxia’ martial arts movies such as Hero (Zhang, Hong Kong/China, 2004) and House of Flying Daggers (Zhang, China/Hong Kong, 2004). However, if we look carefully at the European films on the list, they can be seen to share one characteristic: they are all what we might label ‘quality’ or ‘prestige’ movies. A critically acclaimed melodrama from one of Europe’s great ‘auteurs’; a well-crafted Nordic crime drama adapted from the highly successful novel of the same title; an historical drama; a stylish biopic: these are not films to scare the chattering classes. Like so many other successful European films at the UK box office, films such as Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore, Italy, 1988) and Amélie (Jeunet, France, 2001), these are what we might term, bor- rowing from David Jenkins, ‘Sunday best cinema’, a well-crafted, intelligent, but not overly challenging set of films (2015). Indeed these are films that in many ways define middlebrow cinematic culture: high production values; a realist aesthetic; 182 Lucy Mazdon important cultural references; yet films that remain accessible and are neither overly obscure nor too challenging. In a Sight and Sound dossier published in June 2005, Nick James claimed that French cinema constituted, for British audiences, ‘the gold standard for art cinema in the UK’. ‘Without a regular flow of distinctive work from France’, he wrote, ‘there would be little sense of an alternative cinema to Hollywood’ (James 2005, 14). To some extent James’ claim makes sense: as historically the most widely distributed foreign-language cinema in the UK (with the exception of Bollywood), French cinema is the most obvious contender to take on Hollywood in a fight for British audiences’ attentions. But does it really set a gold standard for art cinema? As I have argued previously, also in Sight and Sound (Mazdon and Wheatley 2008), James’ comments are actually a little surprising given the British prominence at that time of French films such as Tell No One (Canet 2006) and La mme / La Vie en Rose (Dahan 2007), films that are firmly positioned within the conventions of mainstream, middlebrow commercial cinema (the thriller, the biopic), and, as such, do little to further the cause of art cinema. Indeed, James himself acknowledges that the films he perceives as challenging the mainstream (Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, 2003, and Olivier Assayas’ Clean, 2004, for example) are not ‘necessarily popular with the majority’: they were roundly beaten at the British box office by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s World War One love story, Un long dimanche de fiançailles / A Very Long Engagement (Jeunet 2004) and Les choristes / The Chorus (Barratier 2004), a nostalgic remake of a 1940s movie, La Cage aux Rossignols / A Cage of Nightingales (Dréville 1945), celebrating the power of music to transform the lives of a group of young boys. Of particular note is James’ admittance that Sight and Sound itself has at times been guilty of lambasting these ‘challenging’ films while simultaneously holding them up as a benchmark against which ‘unadventurous’ British cinema can be defined (2005, 20). Here he voices longstanding British critical discourse that champions ‘art’ cinema and turns to the ‘Continent’ as a model, while at the same time dismissing the ‘pre- tention’ and the overt intellectualism that both, at times, can be seen to display. So, rather than see French cinema as the saviour of the British art house, it would be more accurate to describe it as the bedrock of foreign-language distribution in the United Kingdom, the cinema which, along with other ‘continentals’, has been a constant presence at film societies and specialist theatres, and which has an enduring appeal for the typically culturally aspirational audiences looking for something a little more challenging, a little more distinctive than the products of Hollywood, a cinematic experience which is ‘safely exotic’ (Mazdon and Wheatley 2008, 39). Recall once more the BFI’s list of the top twenty foreign-language films released in the UK. Four of the films are American, or American co-productions, and topping the list we find Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto directed by, and featuring, a well-known Hollywood star; eight films are Bollywood productions, their large audiences essentially drawn from Britain’s South-Asian community. Nowhere in the list do we find the challenging ‘art’ films lauded by James, and, as I have mentioned, the European films that feature are quality genre movies whose only real distinction from the mainstream is through their subtitles. ‘Kings of the middle way’ 183 Drawing upon research carried out by the BFI in 2011,2 Huw Jones draws some conclusions about the typical audience for foreign-language cinema in the UK: a picture begins to emerge of the typical foreign-language film fan as some- one who is young-to-middle-aged, well-educated but not necessarily well-off, highly knowledgeable about film as well as other cultural activities, and usually living in an urban environment. Put simply, foreign- language films appeal most to those with a high degree of cultural capital. (Jones 2014) My own research (Mazdon and Wheatley 2013) would nuance this account to some extent. While Jones’ conclusions may well be appropriate for the broader foreign-language film audience in the UK (witness the relative success of Tartan Distribution’s Asia Extreme series in the early 2000s), the audience for European cinema is typically just a little older, a little less adventurous and a little less ‘high- brow’ than the BFI data suggests. Director René Clair, whose films enjoyed significant success in the British market in the 1930s, remarked in an interview with Caroline Lejeune in 1939: Make no mistake about the French cinema. The ordinary, bread-and-butter French picture is just the same as ever. We have as many bad films in France as you have in England, only you people don’t see them. The vogue for French films abroad is largely mere exoticism. You admire French films as we in Paris admire the big Hollywood production. They are foreign and interesting. (Lejeune 1939) The British success of Christophe Barratier’s previously mentioned The Chorus, which made £133,000 on its opening weekend in the United Kingdom in March 2005, and went on to top the tables for French releases in Britain that year, provides a very good example of British appetite for the tastefully ‘exotic’. Back in 1946, as British audiences began to get a taste of recent French filmmaking after the dark days of the war, A Cage of Nightingales, source for Barratier’s remake, was similarly appreciated. Writing in Sight and Sound in 1946, Roger Manvell praised the film’s ‘humanism’, which he compared to other recent French releases and re-releases Farrebique and La Femme du Boulanger / The Baker’s Wife (Manvell 1946, 154). This focus on the film’s ‘humanism’ recalls characteristics of so much European film that is successful with UK audiences: strong dramas; powerful character acting; high production values; a grounding in the ‘real’. Interestingly, Manvel’s men- tion of The Baker’s Wife provides us with another example of the endurance of certain attitudes towards French film in particular as cinematic treatments of the work of Pagnol have long proved popular with British audiences. Claude Berri’s adaptations of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (1986) were immensely popular as they embodied and reinforced notions of an idyllic, if impoverished, rural France, notions later echoed in a whole series of representations ranging from 184 Lucy Mazdon Peter Mayle’s best-selling account of his life in the Luberon, A Year in Provence (1989), to a Stella Artois advertising campaign in the late 1990s. And such affec- tion for this gritty, yet simultaneously picture-postcard, version of French life has a long and enduring history, as Jean Queval revealed in Sight and Sound in 1953 when he noted British love for the 1930s–50s films of Pagnol that were, in his opinion, ‘vastly over-estimated in Hollywood and Hampstead for obvious reasons of exoticism’ (Queval 1953, 106). As British audiences fell in love with Audrey Tautou’s Amélie and her adven- tures in a highly stylized Montmartre, we were reminded once again of this love for films that are recognizably and yet unthreateningly French: much-loved locations, familiar genres and forms, and perhaps a recognizable star. These are the movies that seem to appeal to those cinemagoers with a taste for the films of France. As the relative failure of the more challenging ‘art-house’ fare championed by Nick James and populist products such as the Taxi series (Pirès, Krawczyk, 1998–2007), which do little more than ape Hollywood, reveals, attempts to move beyond these clearly defined and quite limited tastes more often than not fail to succeed.

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