French critics have cinema envy, too

Since Thursday, I've been attending the annual Autumn Festival in Paris. It's a long, far-reaching cultural event, and this year the film program is a joint collaboration between the critics at the legendary film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, and the editors of America's Film Comment. What they've come up with is something called Double Look, which means to consider or reconsider particular styles, themes or qualities of recent (or recent-ish) American movies from the perspective of both countries.

Open to the public (although most attendees have paid to see the movies under discussion), the forum is a combination of live debate, chat, and interview. But honestly, it's really just a lot of eye-opening talk -- no single form really explains what happens on stage. The selected topics include comedy ("Man on the Moon," "Fever Pitch," "Bottle Rocket") and politics ("The Insider," "Fight Club," Robert Duval's "Assassination Tango").

That last group of movies includes titles that really turn the French critics on. Tony Scott's "Enemy of the State" is another one -- it was shown in another batch of movies. Made before the Bush II era, to American critics it’s just a noisy chase picture. To the French, it’s a powerful look at government’s insidious omnipresence. And with the movie's screenwriter, David Marconi, on hand to defend himself (or not, as the case turned out to be), the debate that night was decidedly rigged. Gavin Smith, Film Comment's editor-in-chief, tried to get in a few incisive questions ("Is that the film you had in mind when you started your research?") but Marconi, who was bigger and blonder than Smith, remained unmoved: Hey man, Tony Scott made my movie!

Subsequent evenings were livelier and not because I was doing some of the debating and partaking in some of the discussions. Real issues came to the surface for the French critics and filmmakers and the engaged French audience. Apparently, there is immense admiration for the way American movies deal with political subjects and grave concern that not enough French movies deal with them at all. When I pointed out that the French have done alright in that department and that Hollywood isn’t that great at it, tossing out a bunch of titles (people generally seemed to think that documentaries come out of Hollywood, too), the director and debater Olivier Assayas said that the movies’ approach to politics is better in America: “You challenge the system,” he said.

What he was saying sounded somewhat persuasive. “Syriana” is a masterpiece because it dared to make sense of the nonsensical globalist mess in which we live. “Good Night and Good Luck” was great because it stood up to censorship and governmental hypocrisy. That both movies were done in by their need to think so big in “Syriana”’s case and so narrowly in the case of “Good Night” was irrelevant for Assayas: The miracle is that those movies got made, he said, sounding, for a moment, like a refugee from North Korea or Chad. Indeed, when someone in the audience reminded him that he was, after all, a highly respected French director who could be making political films of his own, he shrugged and said, wanly, “I’m trying.”

The point, though, is that Assayas has a point: As mediocre as some of Hollywood’s attempts to think politically seem sometimes to be, their mere existence is something to be thankful for (be it Richard Linklater’s “Fast Food Nation” or, alas, Paul Haggis’s “Crash”). These movies, with their best intentions, speak to people all over the world (regardless of what they say or, more importantly, how they say it). And for a few minutes that evening there didn’t seem to be much point in debating that.