Why French cinema is fascinated with dying
Currents in French cinema tend to follow demographic trends. This should not be a surprise: in any industry or art (and film is both), you want to cater to the greatest number.
Thus the nouvelle vague was all about being young in the 1960s — appealing to a large customer base at the time. The cinéma d’auteur of the 1970s and 1980s captured the mood of thirtysomethings who thought their glory years were behind them. After dreaming of changing the world, they found it hard to adjust to normal society. Young adults have always felt that way, but the sheer size of the baby-boom generation gave their Weltschmerz an outsize impact.
In France this mood infuses films by Alain Tanner (a Swiss who counts as French, like Godard), Jacques Doillon, Bertrand Tavernier — and, in ironic form, the comedies of manners of François Leterrier, Jean-Marie Poiré, Patrice Leconte, Michel Blanc and Gérard Lauzier.
Decades on, the boomers are seeing off their parents and preparing to follow them into the sunset (the author of this article, born in 1959, must declare his interest at this stage). Quite naturally, contemporary French cinema is now obsessed with dying.
There have been films on the subject in the past. One the more remarkable is Maurice Pialat’s La Gueule ouverte (1974, dubiously translated as The Mouth Agape - but Kicking the Bucket would have been closer to the meaning).
Over the past dozen years or so, however, French filmmakers have been particularly inspired by dementia, terminal decline and euthanasia.
Michael Haneke’s Amour deservedly won the Palme d’Or in 2012. It centres on an elderly couple (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, stars of the nouvelle vague in their prime) and manages to make you understand why someone should kill the person they love.
And the past three years have seen the release of the following movies (to mention only the ones I’ve seen):
- The Father (Florian Zeller, 2020): a French-British co-production starring Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins (both superb) and based on Zeller’s French play. It follows a daughter’s struggle to deal with her octogenarian father, largely through the eyes of the old man who is losing his mind.
- Vortex (Gaspard Noé, 2021): the bleakest of all. A writer lives with his dementia-stricken wife in a cluttered flat in Paris. He cannot cope. Their plight is unredeemed by love: he treats her as a nuisance and their troubled son cannot help. The writer dies of a heart attack and she kills herself.
- Everything Went Fine (François Ozon, 2021): after suffering a stroke that leaves him physically debilitated but as imperious as ever, a retired art dealer gets his daughters to illegally arrange to take him to Switzerland to be euthanized.
The latest film to mine the seam is Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning.
Although not a boomer herself — she’s a mere 42 — Hansen-Løve has fully embraced our obsession with senescence (another sign of generational dominance is the ability of a cohort to imposes its priorities and tastes on society: just as young adults in the 1950s felt compelled to read Dr Spock, those of today are learning fast about hospice care and sharing their expertise).
One Fine Morning is one of the best films I’ve seen since Amour. Its great originality is that the tragedy of old age doubles as a romantic comedy. The central protagonist is a Parisian single mother in her mid-thirties (Léa Seydoux) whose father has an incurable degenerative disease.
You follow the process of getting him to accept the need for care, the quest for a half-way decent home, the setting up of the guardianship, the disposal of belongings, etc. The process is accurately depicted (I know because I’ve gone through it with my siblings in Paris) and the tone is perfect. There is no melodrama. Everyone, family and professionals, is doing their best. Sometimes things get too much for the heroine, who leaves others to deal with a bleak situation.
The subplot involves a relationship with an old friend who is married. It features the staples of romance: the tentative flirting, the elation of young love, the Sturm-und-Drang and final resolution. In most films those formulaic ingredients are divorced from reality — whether the backdrop is Seattle, Notting Hill or South London (as in the recent, kitchly inane Rye Lane.)
But here they are handled intelligently and do not make the story less believable. It fact they add to its verisimilitude: reality, after all, is a mixed bag. More importantly, the introduction of lighter themes in an end-of-life drama points to the fact that the passing of the baby-boom generation is not the end of the world. As French cinema continues to follow demography, it will eventually rediscover more youthful themes.
