Beyond the Cliché
Oct 16th, 2008 by Donagh
Seanachie of Pleasures of Underachievement has written a great essay on contemporary French cinema, and says that the popular perception is fogbound in cliché.
One of the favourite punchbags for self-appointed francophobes is French cinema. Boring, dull and talky are the epithets one hears most often, to the extent that for many people, French cinema has morphed into one type of film, a parody of early Godard or Rohmer, like the skits on the Fast Show ten years back, of moody, languid, heavily-mascaraed young women talking existential gibberish to chain-smoking Belmondo clones. As with all clichés, there is a grain of truth in it, but a grain that is isolated in one strain of French cinema, and a very narrow strain it is these days.
Read the whole thing on Irish Left Review.
