Le Film M?diocre
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Le Film M?diocre What Keanu Reeves rejected, the French embrace. BY JOHN PODHORETZ The French cinema was once arguably the world’s best. The glorious fi lms of Marcel Pagnol (Fanny)...
...The authorities have ascribed his wife’s death to a serial killer...
...The cowriter/director of Tell No One, Guillaume Canet, has made a movie whose proper home would be on Saturday night as a Lifetime made-for-television feature...
...The praise and the awards indicate not only how far French fi lms have fallen, but just how easily seduced movie critics can be by a few subtitles...
...The beautiful work of Marcel Carn...
...Now, direct from winning many prizes at the 2007 C?sar Awards (the Gallic Oscars), comes Tell No One, a thriller that may be the best-reviewed French movie in years in the American press...
...Clair (Under the Roofs of Paris) and Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game) were among the highlights of the 1930s...
...It turns out that the pediatrician’s wife, his wife’s father, his fashionably lesbian sister, and his own father were all caught up for months in a child-abuse scandal about which he knew absolutely nothing, even though he seems like a reasonably intelligent fellow...
...In fact, the fi lm is based on an American potboiler by Harlan Coben that was originally purchased by Hollywood for Keanu Reeves...
...We cut forward eight years...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The French cinema was once arguably the world’s best...
...The police begin to think he might have killed them all...
...It’s a strong opening, but what follows from it is a muddle...
...but mostly it’s incomprehensible, and like all bad thrillers, relies on characters acting foolishly or knowing far more than it is possible for them to know...
...When the plot makes sense, it is ludicrous...
...What is Canet’s excuse...
...Children of Paradise) and Jean Cocteau (Les Enfants Terribles) helped keep French culture alive in the 1940s...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Of course, no imperialist power forced Guillaume Canet to make Tell No One, and no imperialist power compelled France’s cultural pooh-bahs to garland it with awards...
...But then some bodies turn up near the site where she was killed...
...And then he gets an email from his wife...
...But that was then and this is now, and the only arguably great fi lm made in France in the past three decades is Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette from 1986, a magnifi cent epic on a small scale about a disputed water hole in Provence...
...At the beginning, a nice pediatrician and his lovely wife are skinny-dipping when they have an argument...
...If Tell No One proves anything, it is that Jack Lang, the notoriously antiAmerican culture minister in the early years of Fran?ois Mitterrand’s government, may have had a soup?on of a point when, in 1982, he railed against “this domination, against—let us call a spade a spade—this fi nancial and intellectual imperialism...
...French fi lms that hit the export market have tended to be long on production design—like Diva, a fashion spread posing as a movie that made a sensation in 1982, or the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Besson, auteur of La Femme Nikita and producer of dozens of similarly well-photographed pieces of mindless nonsense...
...Time was, when a French fi lm was released in the United States, its audience would leave the theater with the distinct sense that they had just been present at a cultural feast no American movie could match...
...But it does demonstrate that France, once a great power in the world of fi lm, has become a provincial backwater eager and hungry to forage for Hollywood’s scraps...
...Otherwise, with the exception of the brilliant farces of Francis Veber, whose The Dinner Game (1998) and The Valet (2006) are among the funniest movies of our time, French cinema is all but moribund...
...Reeves, demonstrating that he is not as dumb as the characters he plays, wisely refused, and Canet secured the rights to it...
...The plot requires an industrialist to have had a team of people shadowing our hero for eight years when they have no reason to doubt that his wife (who is the subject of their interest) is long since dead...
...She swims away angrily onto shore and, out of sight, yelps...
...The wonderful productions of Max Oph?ls (La Ronde) made eyes pop in the early 1950s...
...And the spiky, quick, ultra-naturalistic “New Wave” fl icks by Fran?ois Truffaut (Jules and Jim) and Claude Chabrol (The Cousins) and Louis Malle (Zazie dans le M?tro) and Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) revolutionized the craft of moviemaking from the late 1950s through the early 1970s...
...At least when Fran?ois Truffaut decided to fi lm a dime-store American novel called Down There back in 1962, he came up with the stunning Shoot the Piano Player...
...That she is not, in fact, dead is actually a complete coincidence...
...The glorious fi lms of Marcel Pagnol (Fanny) and Ren...
...He goes to see what has happened and gets hit on the head...
Vol. 13 • August 2008 • No. 47
