Of Christophe Honoré: New Wave Legacies and New Directions in French Auteur Cinema

Home , Chiara Mastroianni, Dans Paris, Louis Garrel, Making Plans for Lena, Pierrot le Fou, Stolen Kisses

SEC 7 (2) pp. 135–148 © Intellect Ltd 2010

Studies in European Cinema Volume 7 Number 2 © Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.7.2.135_1

ISABELLE VANDERSCHELDEN Manchester Metropolitan University

The ‘beautiful people’ of Christophe Honoré: New Wave legacies and new directions in French auteur cinema

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Drawing on current debates on the legacy of the New Wave on its 50th anniversary French cinema and the impact that it still retains on artistic creation and auteur cinema in France auteur cinema today, this article discusses three recent films of the independent director Christophe French New Wave Honoré: Dans Paris (2006), Les Chansons d’amour/Love Songs (2007) and La legacies Belle personne (2008). These films are identified as a ‘Parisian trilogy’ that overtly Christophe Honoré makes reference and pays tribute to New Wave films’ motifs and iconography, while musical offering a modern take on the representation of today’s youth in its modernity. Study- adaptation ing Honoré’s auteurist approach to film-making reveals that the legacy of the French Paris New Wave can elicit and inspire the personal style and themes of the auteur-director, and at the same time, it highlights the anchoring of his films in the Paris of today. Far from paying a mere tribute to the films that he loves, Honoré draws life out his cinephilic heritage and thus redefines the notion of French (European?) auteur cinema for the twenty-first century.

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1Alltranslationsfrom Christophe Honoré is an independent film-maker who emerged after 2000 and French sources are mine unless otherwise who has overtly acknowledged the heritage of the New Wave as formative in indicated. When page the development of his career as a director. Critics in France tend to discuss numbers are not provided, it is because his filmography in this light, while highlighting his auteur status and self- the sources were conscious style. This article focuses on the study of three films: Dans Paris/In consulted on the BIFI Paris (2006), Les Chansons d’amour/Love Songs (2007) and La Belle personne/The database in Paris which does not Beautiful Person (2008), identified as Honoré’s ‘Parisian trilogy’. It will use these indicate pages. films to redefine the notion of French and maybe even European auteur cinema, and address the question of the legacy of the New Wave in the twenty-first 2Thereweresimilar century. events in New York In December 2008, a debate was organized by the Centre Pompidou and (Museum of Arts and Design) and Paris (‘la the trendy urban French cultural review Les Inrockuptibles on the theme of Nouvelle Vague’ at the ‘filiation transmission and possible genealogies of current cinema’, including Champo). Arte devoted a special discussions on cinephilia and more specifically on the legacy of the New Wave ‘Thema’ to ‘La in current French cinema (Lalanne and Honoré 2008; Ferenczi 2008). Honoré, Nouvelle Vague a 50 who was a member of the panel, declared that he was wary of using the terms ans’. The Cannes Festival also of ‘filiation’, ‘heritage’ or ‘family’ when it came to the connection between his programmed a series films and the New Wave. He argued that films are not made ‘in the manner of events in 2009. of’, but rather that he prefers to think that covert references are at play in the film-making process. As evidenced from the extract below, Honoré believes that viewing films made in the past leaves memories, and that these, in turn, contribute to the artist’s identity:

Honoré noted the language pitfalls of terms like ‘filiation, heritage, family, failing to recognise himself in this silly notion that he would be the son of daddy Truffaut and mummy Godard’ (the parental functions are probably interchangeable). They all admitted that cinéphilia stops where practice starts, at least consciously. That one does not make films ‘in the manner of, but that there are underlying references, because the watching films of the past ‘memory’ more than filiation, insists Honoré – feeds into the identity of the artist-creator. (Ferenczi 2008)1

As the 50th anniversary of the New Wave was being celebrated in 2009, more publications have revived the discussion on the New Wave legacy. Sight and Sound and Cahiers du cinéma commissioned special dossiers. New books like La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une jeunesse/The New Wave: Portrait of a Young Generation (De Baeque 2009) were published, while The New Wave: Critical Landmarks was re-issued by the BFI during an anniversary conference held in London in March 2009 (Vincendeau and Graham 2009). Screenings were programmed in London at the Ciné-lumière and National Film Theatre in the spring of 2009, followed by ‘La Nouvelle Vague: Une génération d’acteurs’ at the Paris Cinémathèque in September. Amongst the highlights was the release of a new print of Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)2. In February 2009, Philippe Person wrote an article in Le Monde diplomatique, entitled ‘Un label devenu carcan: A-t-on le droit de critiquer la nouvelle vague?’/‘A label that has become a straight jacket: is it allowed to criticise the New Wave?’ (Person 2009), in which he blamed New Wave directors and their disciples for navel-gazing at subject matter that alienates French ﬁlmgoers. This argument is not new. Since the 1960s, many critics and journalists have been prompt to look out for the legacy of the New Wave or its most recent

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manifestations as reasons behind a number of subsequent trends in French 3SeeforexampleJill cinema. Recent examples include Aldo Tassone’s Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Forbes’s The Cinema in France after the New Vague?/What is Left of the New Wave (2003) and David Vassé’s Le Nouvel âge du Wave, 1992. cinéma d’auteur français/The New Age of French Auteur Cinema (2008). In the 1980s, the ‘cinéma du look’ had been seen as a new, new wave 4SeealsoKateInce’s (Austin 2008: 145), even though directors like Luc Besson or Jean-Jacques ‘Introduction’ to Five French Directors which Beineix (but not Léos Carax) mostly rejected certain values of New Wave cin- retraces the revival of ema, in part also to appeal to their younger audiences. In the 1990s, the return auteurism since the to more realist trends with a new generation of ‘young’ directors was received 1990s (2008: 6–11). She emphasizes the even more enthusiastically, as Claude Marie Trémois’s study Les Enfants de la plurality of the notion liberté/The Children of Freedom (1997) illustrates. of auteur cinema and the auteurist For 50 years now, the New Wave that admittedly revolutionized the way tendencies of the Jeune films are made has been used as a benchmark to measure the vitality and cinéma Français. potential for innovation of independent French cinema ‘leaving behind it a sense of freedom, an eternal youth, a fresh look of the things of life, a fatal plastic beauty’ (Palou 2009). Apart from Geneviève Sellier in La Nouvelle Vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier/The French New Wave: a Cinema in the First Person Masculine (2005), who draws overtly on gender studies, French scholars have tended to focus on the aesthetic and formal considerations of the films. Outside France too, the New Wave has represented a major point of reference for the identity of French cinema.3 In the United States, where the impact of French cinema is usually marginal, and where access to French films is often limited to cinephile audiences in a few large cosmopolitan cities, the New Wave directors have been revered by film critics since the 1960s. American scholars have pro- duced numerous critical studies of this period, the most recent examples being Richard Neupert’s History of the French New Wave Cinema (2002) and Naomi Greene’s The French New Wave: A New Look (2007). The New Wave has also been associated with the advent of the auteur as a key concept of film studies and is connected to the polarization of French cinema into auteur films versus commercial cinema. In auteur theory, the visible director who controls the film-making process offers his/her personal vision of the world, develops a style and explores coherent motifs from film to film. Although it exceeds the scope of this article to discuss ways that auteur theory has gone through a series of redefinitions and rejec- tions by scholars, these debates are well documented: Dudley Andrew’s essay ‘The unauthorized auteur today’ (1993) or Rosanna Maule’s comprehensive study Beyond Auteurism (2008) provide two relevant examples of reassessment. Auteur cinema today is used to refer to a broad category of artistically ambitious independent films aimed at cinephile audiences. Auteurism is still defended by many French critics, in fact it is even used as ‘one of the most successful of French cinema’s marketing strategies’ (Powrie 1999: 8).4 However, auteur films are also regularly dismissed for their lack of popular appeal due to their elitism and narcissism. For Person, for example, auteur cinema today promotes ‘professional inexperience and autobiographical narcissism as markers of artistic authenticity’ (Person 2009). In this context, the influences exerted by the New Wave and auteurist criticism on Honoré’s cinema can be interpreted in distinct ways: as a nostalgic look to the past which tries to emulate it, illustrating the very criticism developed by Person; or as a reflection of a revisiting of New Wave approaches in which the director seeks to create a personal style, related to, but not defined by, the New Wave, and which examines contemporary themes. Although the discussion will be informed by the production context of the films, their critical and public reception, their

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appropriation of New Wave iconography and style and ﬁnally by their self- reﬂexivity; my main interest lies in aesthetic and thematic considerations such as representation of youth, and the use of space and music.

CHRISTOPHE HONORÉ: MODERN OR SELF-CONSCIOUS AUTEUR? Honoré has made a name for himself first as an author and film critic (Honoré 1998), then as a director (and recently stage director). He has written screenplays – including co-authorship of Le Clan/The Clan/Three Dancing Slaves (Morel, 2004), Après lui/After him (Morel, 2007) and Les Filles ne savent pas nager/Girls Can’t Swim (Birot, 2000), as well as children’s literature, including for instance Tout contre Léo/Closer to Leo (Honoré, 2002a) which was also his directorial debut, but also novels and more personal books such as Le Livre pour enfants/The Book for Children (2005). He has directed seven films since 2002, which are either informed by his literary background or adaptations from existing works of literature. For example Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961) is referenced as the starting point for the screenplay of Dans Paris; La Belle personne is freely adapted from the classic French novel La Princesse de Clèves/The Princess of Cleves.TheFrenchcriticshavedefendedHonoré’sworksincehisfirst film Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard/Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Honoré, 2002b), referring for example to his ‘distinctive style and universe’ (Prédal 2008: 182). His second film, Ma Mère/My Mother (Honoré, 2004), an art-house project based on a book by Georges Bataille (Rees-Roberts 2008: 96–100), generated more critical controversy than the trilogy used for this discussion, which seems to signal a move towards more popular forms of film-making to which we will return. Dans Paris, Les Chansons d’amour and la Belle personne focus on the preoccupations of young people, albeit from privileged social classes, composing a deliberate ‘trilogy, a portrayal in three parts of youth, of love and of Paris’ (Honoré 2008). They are low-budget, independent films made in the spirit of freedom and spontaneity linked to Godard’s early films, for instance. Honoré stresses in interviews that they were ‘reactive’ acts, filmed fast, in one go and with a special attention to the present (Honoré 2008; Rigoulet and Pomares 2009). Dans Paris is in this respect exemplary. It was shot in 30 days, with a micro budget for cinema of e1.5 million. Canal was the only television + channel associated with the project, and the film only received the ‘avance sur recettes’ (the advance on receipts fund) retrospectively, possibly thanks to the unexpected critical attention that it received. Presented at the Cannes festival as part of la quinzaine des réalisateurs (the directors’ fortnight), it then attracted about 180,000 spectators in three weeks, and ended its cinema career with a respectable 298,000. Les Chansons d’amour benefited from the ‘advance’ and its budget was esti- mated at around e2.6m ($1.7) (Libiot 2007). It was again a fast production turnover as six months elapsed from writing the first word of the screenplay to the completed film being presented at the Cannes festival, this time as part of the official competition. 302,000 spectators saw the film in France (108,000 in its first week), and Honoré increased his audience base with this film, partly thanks to the popular success of Alex Beaupain’s soundtrack, which received a César in 2008 (Bizeau 2008). La Belle personne was a short-notice television commission for Arte that Honoré spontaneously accepted and filmed in twenty days. In addition to bridging the gap between literature and cinema, Honoré’s free transposition of

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5Sarkozycitedthenovelas an irrelevant topic for a La Princesse de Clèves into today’s Paris was a response to a public speech by the public administration home minister Nicolas Sarkozy in 2006, in which he questioned the relevance entrance examination in of studying this classic today.5 The film attracted 80,000 spectators at the cin- aspeechinLyonin2006, and again in 2008 once ema in 2 weeks after a well-publicized primetime television Premiere. It should he had become be noted that this was not the first time Arte used this strategy, indeed it illus- president, he stated that trates the changing partnership between auteur film-makers and television for ‘it was possible for someone to be promoted the financing and distributing of their films, whereby explicit marketing strate- without needing to sit an gies are tested out to publicize auteur films to the general public. This unusual exam or have to quote from la Princesse de strategy may have contributed to the success of the film, by channelling the Clèves!’.Honoréclaimed French media’s critical attention (Tessé 2008; Kaganski 2008; Regnier 2008). In to have been ‘shocked spite of this relatively good public reception, scholars and critics seem reluc- and hurt by so much ignorance. That people tant to consider Honoré’s films as auteur films appealing to broader audiences today could argue that than cinephiles, insisting instead in their discussions on the evocation of the there is nothing to learn New Wave. As a result, the three films have been distributed outside France from a novel written 300 years ago is the sign of a nearly exclusively through the art-house distribution networks of large cities as total misunderstanding A. Scott’s reviews in the New York Times indicate (2008 and 2009), and through of why art is so important for human experience. I the festival circuits. threw myself in the In France, the trilogy is generally associated with specific audience groups, project [La Belle personne] mainly cinephile and/or Parisian audiences and young urban and educated with the anger of one who wants to prove it is middle classes as suggested by the support of reviews like Cahiers du cinéma wrong’. (in Honoré 2008) and Les Inrockuptibles.Forexample,SergeKaganskidescribesLa Belle personne as ‘a film in the spirit of the New Wave without needing to refer to its exter- 6Seethefilmwebsite nal signs’, leading to an ‘authorial gaze’ (un regard singulier), a feature of the www.allociné.fr, for example. French auteur tradition generating ‘timeless films, at the same time marked by his [Honoré’s] time and exterior to it’ (Kaganski 2008). The box-office statistics 7 See Rees-Roberts’ indicate the films were more successful in Paris than in the provinces. More argument on this subject (2008: 112). surprising is the broader appeal of Les Chansons d’amour with young people – not just cinephiles – possibly a consequence helped by the publicity at Cannes, which contributed to an unexpected buzz as the comments on various websites forums or blogs devoted to the songs illustrate.6 Honoré’s image is one of ‘Parisianism’ and intellectual narcissism. The for- mer may come as a surprise considering that he was brought up in Brittany and only moved to Paris in his twenties. His early films are considered exercises in style, causing René Prédal to refer to him as a ‘mannerist painter of psy- chic suffering’ (2008: 182). Yet, they introduce some powerful personal motifs such as the family, sexuality and personal loss also found in the trilogy. Some of the characters share a state of depression for various reasons (bereavement, end of relationship [...]). Dans Paris/Inside Paris revolves around the contrast between Paul (Duris) who suffers a breakdown following a break-up with his wife, and the carefree sexuality of his bohemian, young brother Jonathan (Louis Garrel). Les Chansons d’amour/Love Songs relates the personal reconstruction of a young Parisian, Ismaël (Garrel), whose girlfriend died unexpectedly. The film draws on real-life events involving Honoré and Beaupain, namely the death of a close relation that is partly related in Le Livre pour enfants (2008: 142–3; see also Bizeau 2009). In La Belle personne, the 16-year-old Junie (Léa Seydoux), who has just lost her mother, moves to Paris and refuses, possibly because of the shock caused by her bereavement, to live a passionate love story with her teacher stat- ing that she is scared of being hurt. In all three cases, a form of trauma caused by a death underpins the narratives, incorporating serious undertones associated with loss which contrast with moments of lightness which accompany the periods of reconstruction of the protagonists.7 This motif seems to characterize Honoré’s authorial signature.

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8ExamplesincludeLa Although he is about to turn 40, Honoré is labelled a ‘young’ director. This Maman et la putain/The Mother and insistence in promoting youth is a recurrent leitmotif of the critical reception of The Whore (Jean French auteur cinema in the 1990s: Trémois labels the new auteurs of the 1990s Eustache, 1973), and ‘children of freedom’ (1997); Prédal’s Le Jeune cinéma français/Young French Cin- more generally, the 1970s films of ema (2003) and Le Cinéma français depuis 2000 French Cinema since 2000 (2008) Bertrand Blier for review the next wave of young film-makers. More generally, Honoré is fasci- example Les nated by the representation of the youth of the twenty-first century that he Valseuses/Going Places (1974) which finds very different to his own teenage years in the 1980s. He sees the issue of introduced new actors ‘immaturity’ as a central motif of his films and a generational symptom: his own like Patrick Dewaere who embodied generation (that grew up in the 1980s) was overprotected, so that it struggled rebellious youth and to enter the adult world and was often accused of immaturity, which in his view the rejection of was more ‘passively suffered than chosen’ (Rigoulet and Pomares 2009). This authority. André Téchiné continued the view may seem paradoxical as he grew up in the decade when young people trend giving Dewaere were brutally confronted by the harsh reality of the discovery of AIDS and its asimilarroleinHotel practical consequences following the sexual liberation of the 1970s, but which des Amériques (1981). is not mentioned in the films. This aspect of Honoré’s films is addressed in 9SeeforexampleTony detail by Nick Rees-Roberts in French Queer Cinema (2008: 112–7), and he sug- Gatlif’s films Gadjo gests that the trilogy (especially La Belle personne) deliberately moves away from Dilo/The Crazy Stranger (1997) and the time of the director’s youth to concentrate on the young generation of the Exils/Exiles (2004); early twenty-first century and to capture a specific historical moment. The cast- Klapisch’s films Le Péril jeune/Good Old ing of emerging young actors also contributes, anchoring the narratives in the Daze (1994), Chacun present. cherche son chat/When the Cat is Away (1995), L’Auberge espagnole/Pot Luck (2002) and Paris CAST AND REPRESENTATION OF YOUTH (2008). The trilogy is directly associated with themes of youth, love, freedom and modern lifestyles which can be viewed as universal themes and a direct legacy 10 See for example Gouttes d’eau sur from New Wave cinema, remaining a central preoccupation of French cin- pierres ema after May 1968.8 The films’characters are young people who as Honoré brûlantes/Water Drops ... on Burning Rocks points out ‘parlent de [leur] temps [ ]’ (they address the issues of their his- (2000), Huit torical moment). The director has given key roles to iconic young actors who femmes/Eight Women have become prominent in the last 10 years. Some are already established, like (2001) and Swimming 9 pool (2003). Romain Duris who was discovered by Tony Gatlif and Cédric Klapisch; and Ludivine Sagnier, a recurring actress in François Ozon’s films.10 But the actor that Honoré has really transformed into an alter-ego protagonist in Truffaldian fashion in his three films is Louis Garrel, the son of director Philippe Garrel. Associated with the legacy of the New Wave and May 1968, Garrel made his first films in the mid-1960s. He won the prix Jean Vigo in 1982 for L’Enfant secret/The Secret Child before filming Louis in Les Amants réguliers/Regular Lovers (2004) and La Frontière de l’aube/Frontier of the Dawn (2008). With his androg- ynous looks, Louis Garrel impersonates Honoré’s incarnation of glamorous, modern, maybe even timeless, youth, what Azoury refers to as ‘the excuse for a bit of glamour’ (Azoury 2006). As critics have noted (see Aubron 2007: 29), there is a striking resemblance of Garrel and François Truffaut’s New Wave icon Antoine Doinel played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, especially in Dans Paris. Honoré reinforces this link by bringing in other New Wave faces, for example, Marie-France Pisier, who appeared in La Nuit américaine/Day for Night (Truffaut, 1975). As for Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Catherine Deneuve, the star of Jacques Demy’s musicals in the 1960s, she occupies a striking median position between the New Wave and the present, enhanced by her striking

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physical resemblance to her mother. Casting her problematizes the position- ing of Honoré at the crossroads of traditional auteur cinema and more popular genres, like the musical and the melodrama (Rees-Roberts 2008: 110–1). Mas- troianni has supporting roles in Les Chansons d’amour and La Belle personne and stars in the latest film Non ma fille, tu n’iras pas danser/Making Plans for Lena (Honoré, 2009). Finally, Honoré introduces the public a group of emerging actors, such as Joanna Preiss, Clothilde Helme, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and Léa Seydoux whose characters redefine the notion of the modern individual, for example by introducing gay narratives or subplots that were not present in New Wave cinema. Honoré’s three films capture some contemporary preoccupations of young French adults, such as the quest for identity and the transition to adulthood. Dans Paris addresses the serious issue of depression and its destructive power, Les Chansons d’amour the trauma of loss and self-reconstruction. La Belle personne is an ensemble high school drama constructed around the metaphor of pure adolescent love. Honoré’s note of intention on this film helps to under- stand how he blends his personal auteurist project with an anchoring into the present:

I had wanted for a long time to film adolescents, avoiding the nostalgia and sociological approach which are the two main traps in the coming- of-age genre. It all started with words of Madame de la Fayette: ‘The court has never had such beautiful people’. They gave me the idea of another type of court, the courtyard of a Parisian high school, with a different group of beautiful people, today’s young people. This grave and graceful youth, which seems to me to be so different to my own youth in the 1980s and which, in my memories, was totally devoid of elegance. High school films often provide the opportunity to reflect on one’s own adolescence. In this film, I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to film them, the young people of today, including the inevitable distance that their mystery represents to me. I wanted to film their way of dealing with a world that attacks them, always considering them more or less as enemies [...]and in the very movement which places them as objects of desire while in fact seeing them as the canon of today’s beauty [...]. (Honoré 2008)

Honoré’s project of filming the present is thus complemented with an aesthetic and reflexive intention. This point is important if we wish to add nuance to the art-cinema image often attached to his self-conscious visual style. There is clearly more to the three films than mere tributes to the iconic characters and style of New Wave cinema identified by many critics.

NEW WAVE LEGACY Many reviews of the trilogy have highlighted how the constituent films pastiche New Wave iconography and style, reducing the films to self-conscious tributes. One element which enhances this impression is the choice of shooting locations in Paris; all three films are set in modern Parisian settings. Dans Paris recreates the grainy atmosphere of New Wave Paris, not so much in its 1960s sociological context, as through overt allusions to its mythical spaces. In particular, the scenes that depict Jonathan running towards the ‘Bon Marché’

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11 See for example the on the rive droite evoke the freedom of going through the city filmed by Truf- representations of this district in faut, Godard and Agnès Varda. They revisit the territories explored by Antoine Klapisch’s films: Doinel, the archetypal Parisian flâneur of Baisers volés/Stolen Kisses (Truffaut, Chacun cherche son 1968) and Domicile Conjugal/Bed and Board (Truffaut, 1970), as well as the iconic chat (1995) and Paris (2008). spaces of Bande à part/A Band Apart (Godard, 1964) and Cléo de cinq à sept/Cléo from Five to Seven (Varda, 1961). As a result, the city can be perceived as an ‘iconic space and a decor’, associated with a ‘museum of cinema’ (Morain 2006), which is different in Honoré’s view, from a ‘museum of New Wave Paris’ as suggested by some critics (Aubron 2007: 29). Les Chansons d amour is set mostly in the tenth and twelfth arrondisse- ments, between République and La Bastille, a trendy area of central Paris in full gentrification where many young people want to live.11 In compliance with the musical genre, the city is brightly lit and warm colours enhance its lively atmosphere. La Belle personne is also strategically set in the sixteenth arrondisse- ment, the district of affluent middle classes. In this case, cold winter tones are emphasized, and Paris becomes the décor of emotions and soul in true romantic tradition (Prédal 2008: 184). The city also becomes the perfect space for ‘flânerie’ as Varda, and Truffaut had already sensed in the 1960s. Honoré’s trilogy contains numerous intertextual references to New Wave films, as the titles of several reviews signal explicitly example: Jean-Michel Frodon entitled his review of Dans Paris ‘Jo et Paul vont en bateau’ (2006), evoking a film by the New Wave director Jacques Rivette, Céline et Julie vont en bateau/Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974); Gilles Azoury called his review ‘Bande appart’ (2006), a pun referring to Godard’s Bande à part. Thematically, the films evoke the free-spirited modern lifestyles and love triangles of Truffaut, Godard and later Jean Eustache. But the most explicit ones undoubtedly point to Demy’s musicals (Regnier 2007: 27). As Laurence Reymond shows compellingly in her an analysis of the jazzy soundtrack, the music directly ‘engages with the characters’ and ‘is anchored in day to day routine’ (2006). The songs are integrated into the narratives of each film establishing a correspondence between them, especially since Beaupain com- posed all three soundtracks. Singing is introduced tentatively in Dans Paris through the sung telephone conversation between Paul and his wife and the Kim Wilde song performed by Paul, which acts as the first sign of recov- ering from a nervous breakdown. Les Chansons d’amour uses songs more comprehensively. It presents eleven episodes sung by one or more characters which are choreographed to evoke the mise-en-scène and distinctive use of colour in Demy’s musicals, and also some of Godard’s early films, for example Une femme est une femme/A Woman is a Woman (1961) and Pierrot le fou (1965). In La Belle personne which is not a musical, a few songs are used to illustrate the emotional state of the characters, creating continuity with the previous film. The intertextual references noted by the critics are also fully acknowledged by Honoré who confirms his attraction for the freedom that characterized New Wave cinema:

What I like best about the New Wave films are their roughness, their teenage arrogance. They’d go from one thing to another without get- ting bothered by too much formality. I like that sense of something being unfinished, of films that search for themselves as they go along. (Anon. 2006)

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Honoré also deliberately adheres to some of its principles, such as the mixing of the popular and a high conception of cinema as art:

‘Take the trouble to make your desires match your means’ and ‘do not be scared of variety’, from the ’Declaration of Rights and Duties of Cin- ema’ as written by the nouvelle vague: these two commandments are like amottoforme.JacquesDemy’sLola is one of the greatest ﬁlms in the world, and therefore certainly one of the greatest ﬁlms of the nouvelle vague,followedcloselybyPierrot le fou.DemyandGodardarethesame thing, the same impulse, the same melancholy – a pop and popular culture married to a high conception of art. French cinema has never been so ambitious and widespread and desperate as it was in the 1960s. It’s our golden age, our empire, our lost paradise. In the nineteenth century there was Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert; in the twentieth, it’s Truffaut, Demy, Godard, Rohmer. A touch of national pride every century is not so bad. (Honoré 2009)

If his films forge metaphors inspired by the French cinematic or literary heritage, it is with a view to developing a personal style and his own thematic motifs including reconfigurations of the family, queer sexuality and loss (Rees Roberts’s 2008: 94). Already in Dans Paris, Honoré is considered an artist who ‘knows the difference between empty imitation and creative inspiration’ (Dargis 2007) and the film engages with an atypical family affected by the death of a sister and a partly-absent mother; Les Chansons d’amour includes a gay sub- plot which suggests that, since the New Wave, the representation of triangular relationships has evolved and that gay sexuality is less marginalized and more naturally integrated into middle-class narratives; this motif is explored further in La Belle personne where Junie’s cousin Mathias explores his gay sexuality, confirming that the film offers a free reading of a classic rather than its adaptation (Honoré 2008). The literary classic (which was very modern in its time) is transposed to the present and appropriated, thus revisiting the principles of auteur theory of the 1950s.

HONORÉ’S SIGNATURE: A BLEND OF ‘ROMANTIC LIGHT BANTER’ The intertextuality of Honoré’s cinema signals his own literary and filmic background, yet it also reveals a reflexive approach to film-making blending a range of influences. His personal tone, which to some may sound precious and literary, also accounts for more transient fashion and popular forms of cinema such as comedy, melodrama and the musical. Through distinctive features and motifs, his output displays his modernity, his engagement with the modern world and its contradictions. Honoré captures the air du temps (Zeitgeist) all the while depicting complex emotions and ambivalent feelings. Dans Paris recalls New Wave freedom, but it also populates Paris with twenty-first century characters and issues (some light ones like lovers’ tiffs and some more serious ones like depression and fragmented families). Les Chansons d’amour revisits the musical genre, yet it is anchored in the present through its characters and narratives, the modern soundtrack and the realistic locations. Moreover, this film’s association with queer cinema (Rees-Roberts 2008: 109–11) is another way of creating a distance with the New Wave’s portrayal of sexuality.

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Similarly, in La Belle personne, the characters are at the same time inspired by classic literature and by the attitude of young people today, making them at once universal and speciﬁc to the present. For example, Junie’s unconventional questioning of pure love echoes the qualms of Madame de la Fayette’s heroine, yet Honoré creates modern teenage characters. More generally, the characters of the three ﬁlms are alive and credible, characterized by their lightness, speed and energy:

The true feat in Dans Paris, is the way it rediscovers a form of lightness, in the spirit of or in the line of thought of pure cinema. What lesson does Honoré draw from the new Wave? None, thank God, but he proudly endorses some of its features. He chooses speed, energy, and adisrespectfultendernessforhispredecessors. (Reymond 2006)

The dynamic dimension of the three films can also partly be attributed to the production contexts of the films, which encourage a pragmatic independent approach. Honoré, like the New Wave directors in their early films, works ‘in a state of emergency’ (Azoury 2006). His films cannot be reduced to mere glossy tributes, but rather they combine the New Wave legacy and the appropriation of its flexible production models, as his intentions for Dans Paris confirm:

The plan was more to adapt my desires to my means: here is the legacy of New Wave cinema, the ability to grab hold of cinema and make ﬁlms which are what we want. (Morain 2006)

Indeed, it is here that we see the real issue of the legacy of the New Wave, whether it can really help directors to ‘adapt their desires to their means’ and bring new life into today’s auteur cinema.

CONCLUSION: ‘BE CINEPHILE AND BE ALIVE’ Honoré has found a place within a small family of artists (Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Depleschin, Ozon and others) who have managed to negotiate the burdensome heritage of the New Wave, channelling it into new film-making energy. His films are modern in their artistic expression because he has left behind all inhibition about heritage and legacy to create ‘a cinema with no com- plexes’ (Libiot 2007; Aubron 2007: 29), a cinema that has ‘come to life’ (Azoury 2006). Discussing Dans Paris,aFrenchcritichadalreadysuggestedthat‘the cinema of tomorrow is no longer afraid of that of yesterday’ (Lalanne 2006). Honoré overtly acknowledges his New Wave heritage as an integral part of his identity as a cinephile, he even ‘rethinks the cinema as a memory to be shared’ (Regnier 2007: 27). But he also uses the prerogative of the auteur’s creative freedom and personal desires to explore his own distinctive motifs. For instance, he is not afraid of mixing lyricism and Romantic motifs (‘le Romanesque’) with sexual hedonism and light banter (‘badinage’) as the terminology used in reviews has highlighted. Honoré’s films blend the serious and the light: ‘Time has passed and the cult of the New Wave is no longer an inhibiting surmoi.Cherishedimagesare less revered than hummed lightly’ (Lalanne 2006). The films also engage with

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the world, as auteur cinema is expected to do, but not necessarily by making specific social commentaries. Beyond preoccupations of sexuality and gender, recurrent existential motifs emerge, such as the ‘tragic irruption of death and the futility of life’ (Prédal 2008: 183). However, the trilogy overtly opts for a singular gaze on the world, namely one that is different from the realist trends in French auteur cinema today, for example the multiethnic characters and ‘métissage’foundinAbdellatifKechiche’sfilmsforexampleL’Esquive/the Dodge (2004) or the classroom of Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs/The Class (2008), or even the hyper-realistic social outcasts depicted by the Dardenne brothers in L’Enfant/The Child (2005). Honoré’s trilogy represents a Parisian cinema – possibly a little elitist, overtly trendy and middle class, which is universal enough to appeal to wider audiences. Honoré’s films also champion original forms of ‘literary’ expression through dialogue and modern songs recalling the ‘nouvelle chanson française’ (New French song) trends pioneered by Etienne Daho in the 1980s and further traceable in the recent literary songs of Vincent Delerm. For some, Honoré emerges as an example of the redefinition of the ‘auteur’ for the twenty-first century, whose films ‘effortlessly breath[e] the classicism- modernity mix’ (Kaganski 2008). He himself rejects the model of ‘tradition of quality’ that in his view has resurfaced in French cinema recently (Honoré 1998: 5), and which he perceives as a ‘threat’ for French cinema (Regnier 2007: 27). In this sense, he participates in the renewal French auteur cinema, while retaining two key elements that characterized the New Wave, namely flexible production values that enable maximum artistic independence and a freedom of tone that allows some artistic distance in the treatment of the recurrent motif of the three films: the overcoming of a loss (or trauma) as the starting point for a new start. Beyond the personal aspect – Honoré lost his father when he was 15, and Les Chansons d’amour was inspired by the death of a close relation – could this be interpreted as a metaphorical motif? Honoré’s auteurist project would include the catharsis for the ‘trauma’ of the New Wave legacy which has (allegedly) paralysed several generations of young French film-makers. If so, his films could contribute to the creation of space for new forms of expression within the auteur cinema of today, while playfully recycling New Wave iconography. The fact that Honoré’s films find their genesis in death and rebirth could partly explain his own impression that they are increasingly becoming ‘inter- rogations on the status of French cinema today, its strengths and qualities in an attempt to renew them’ (Rigoulet and Pomares 2009). In other words, by being ‘cinephile and alive’ (Lalanne 2006), Honoré offers fresh premises for the French independent cinema of the first decade of the twenty-first century. He makes films about his life by representing the lives of others, films that inform the desires of a modern auteur and those of the engaging, energetic characters that populate them.

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SUGGESTED CITATION Vanderschelden, I. (2010), ‘The ‘beautiful people’ of Christophe Honoré: New Wave legacies and new directions in French auteur cinema’, Studies in European Cinema 7: 2, pp. 135–148, doi: 10.1386/seci.7.2.135_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Isabelle Vanderschelden is Senior Lecturer in French studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her recent research focuses on contemporary French cinema. She has written articles on popular French stars, French directors, comedy, subtitling and transnational issues in French cinema. She has also published a book-length critical study of Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (IB Tauris 2007), and has co-edited with Darren Waldron a book on recent trends in French popular cinema France at the Flicks (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007). She is currently ﬁnishing a monograph for Auteur Publishing: Studying French Cinema. Contact: Department of Languages, Mabel Tylecote Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, Cavendish St, Manchester M15 6BG, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

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