This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Comedy and Social Change in French Cinema 1990-2010 The Rise of the Rom-com Harrod, Mary Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. 1 COMEDY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN FRENCH CINEMA 1990-2010: THE RISE OF THE ROM-COM Mary Harrod PhD Thesis 2 ABSTRACT This thesis focuses on the sudden proliferation of a highly popular genre in French cinema over the past two decades. While genre cinema, French and otherwise, and especially comedy have historically been under-examined in France, this study contributes to a gradual shift towards the application of more traditionally Anglophone cultural and gender studies approaches to the analysis of French cinema. It also looks at the question of generic evolution and the relationship between domestic practice and Hollywood paradigms, including the way in which the national cinema is being reconceptualised in the face of an increasingly transnationally conceived film market. Major lines of enquiry thus concern both the rom-com’s French specificity, including the extent to which the genre is ‘naturalised’ and/or exported, and its representational politics, particularly with regard to gender. Is it appropriate to see the rom-com as a feminised genre in France and, if so, in what sense? How does the genre negotiate major contemporary social shifts, particularly those linked to gender? Notable here are the extension of singlehood and the increased acceptability of female autonomy; the concomitant decline of marriage; and the increased range of ‘acceptable’ gender roles today - especially the rise of the professional woman, which in turn has implications for masculinity and for the family unit. Do films broadly reflect and embrace such shifts or do they resist, critique or downplay them? Finally, how are these questions inflected by considering production and reception contexts, as well as the issue of gendered authorship? In seeking to answer such questions, the thesis encompasses analysis of both formal aspects of the genre and specific narrative details. In so doing it hopes to pinpoint some of the ways in which the French rom-com has been mediating perceptions of key social trends over the past two decades, both at home and ultimately globally. 3 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 5 1. ROMANTIC COMEDY – AND ITS DISCONTENTS 25 ROMANTIC COMEDY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT o Literary and Cultural Studies Approaches o Rom-Com as a Cinematic Genre ROMANTIC COMEDY IN FRANCE o Romantic Comedy in French Film Studies o French Romantic Comedy in Anglophone Film Studies 2. ROMANCE TODAY 57 LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE o Post-Industrial Pairings o Coupling Choral o Romance, Religion and Race POST-ROMANCE o Romance and Adultery o The Trappings of Intimacy o Romance Reclaimed CASE STUDY: Vénus Beauté (Institut)/Venus Beauty Salon CONCLUSION 3. GENDERED IDENTITIES IN LOVE 139 THE NEW ‘NEW WOMAN’ o Feminine Rebellion o Sexual and Other Economies MELODRAMATISED MASCULINITY o Melodrama and Mockery o Postmodern Narratives and the Recidivist Male o The Buddy Film as Rom-Com ALTERNATIVE SEXUALITIES o Token Gayness o Queer Identities and Gay Sexuality o Homosexuality and the Family CONCLUSION 4 4. FAMILY AFFAIRS 210 THE ENSEMBLE FAMILY ROM-COM o ‘Familles, je vous hais’ o Dissecting Divorce: familles cassées et recomposées THE MUMMY MYTH o Eternal Mothers o Renegotiating Roles CASE STUDY: La Bûche/Season’s Beatings CONCLUSION 5. GENRE, STYLE AND TRANSNATIONALISM 269 GLOBAL ROMANTIC COMEDY: THE OTHER WITHIN o Stylistic and Other Borrowings o Reflexive Romance o The Anglo-Saxon Other... (Wo)Man o Reception of the Rom-Com FROM FRANCE WITH LOVE: ROM-COM FOR EXPORT CASE STUDY: L’Arnacoeur/Heartbreaker CONCLUSION CONCLUSION 333 Bibliography 343 Filmography 394 Filmography of French Rom-Coms 1990-2010 405 5 FIGURES 1 Postmodern intimacy in Irène 73 2 Sex and spirituality in Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite 86 3 The mistress as object in Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants100 4 An ordinary adulteress? Yolande Moreau of Quand la mer monte 104 5/6 Screwball intimacy in Ils se marièrent and Ce soir je dors chez toi 110-1 7 The archetypal ingénue in the big city in Fauteuils d’orchestre 123 8 A figure of fun: Alain Chabat in Prête-moi ta main 158 9/10 Fetishistic views in Ma femme est une actrice and L’Art (délicat) de la séduction 159 11 Enslaved to the beauty myth forever in Laisse tes mains sur mes Hanches 167 12 Metrosexuality in L’Âge d’homme... maintenant ou jamais! 186 13/14 Caricatural gay melodrama versus a ‘serious’ consideration of homosexuality in Pédale douce and Crustacés et coquillages 203 15 Dany Boon camps up the role-reversal in De l’autre côté du lit 252 16 Self-conscious artifice in Prête-moi ta main 279 17 Foregrounding performance in L’Arnacoeur 321 6 INTRODUCTION French filmmaking and love stories have gone hand in hand since the beginning. However, a form of film more readily identifiable with the internationally recognisable rom-com genre than were earlier examples has proliferated in France in the 1990s and 2000s. On the one hand, this development can be seen in the context of the increasingly transnational character of cinema. On the other, the phenomenon coincides with a period characterised by an identity crisis unprecedented in human history, one with both a global reach and specific resonance in France, provoked by the movement away from clearly delineated gender roles (Badinter 2010: 12). Since romantic comedy is a genre focused on coupling culture, its French variant can be expected to respond to this crisis. For these reasons, this thesis seeks to examine the factors behind and implications of the spectacular rise of the rom-com in France in the 1990s and 2000s from the perspective of social change, as it pertains to the film industry and to the issue of generic definitions, as well as more generally in terms of representations. In probing the significance of the contemporary French rom-com, this study not only takes stock of a new development; it also represents an intervention into the field of French film studies, in that popular cinema (and comedy in particular) originating in France has to date suffered from neglect by scholarly research. According to Richard Abel, ‘most historians would agree that it was the French who almost singlehandedly created film comedy’ (1984: 220). Moreover, Susan Hayward has shown how the genre has consistently outperformed others in the domestic 7 market and, specifically, been a key factor in the national mainstream cinema’s success since 1990, accounting for at least 50 per cent of domestic box office takings to 2002. Since then, too, the genre has year on year accounted for the lion’s share of production (between 20 and 35%) and comedies have featured in similar proportions in the nation’s annual box office top 20. No wonder, then, that Hayward remarks on the need for ‘an extended analysis of the processes and ideological function of French comedy’, at the time of her writing and still nearly two decades later ‘conspicuous by its absence’ (2005 [1993]: 304-6).