In Hollywood’s Eyes, the French are a Foreign Lesion

It’s an epidemic of caricature and vilification, and the slurs are, for the most part, neither subtle nor gentle. As one French critic noted recently, “Hollywood hasn’t engaged in this kind of wholesale nationality-bashing since Pearl Harbor.” What’s going on?

By WILLIAM ARNOLD, P-I MOVIE CRITIC

Anyone who goes to the movies very often might reasonably conclude that Hollywood has declared war on France. Consider:

• In last November’s “Derailed,” when America’s Sweetheart Jennifer Aniston is brutally raped by a fiendish inner-city Chicago thug, the guy inexplicably turns out to be French
•  In last October’s “The Legend of Zorro,” Antonio Banderas’ villainous adversary is not a gringo or a Spaniard or anyone else you might expect to find in Old California, but a French count
•  In last February’s remake of “The Pink Panther,” Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau manages to encapsulate every contemptuous cliché conceived about the Gallic character.
• In last May’s “The Da Vinci Code,” the conspiracy is mostly French created and Tom Hanks is hunted not by just a brutish French police chief but by seemingly the entire nation of France.
• In last month’s Will Ferrell comedy, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” the heavy is a farcical French Formula One driver who, at one point, wrestles the hero to the ground and makes him say he loves crepes.

And there’s more. We’ve seen a parade of French-speaking villains provoking a holocaust in “Hotel Rwanda” and French gangsters terrorizing the Midwest in “Crime Spree.” In the upcoming CGI feature, “Flushed Away,” Jean Reno plays an animated rat villain named Le Frog.

It’s an epidemic of caricature and vilification, and the slurs are, for the most part, neither subtle nor gentle. As one French critic noted recently, “Hollywood hasn’t engaged in this kind of wholesale nationality-bashing since Pearl Harbor.” What’s going on?

It’s a debatable issue, but it doesn’t take a sociology degree to see that it mostly stems from two factors: American anger over the lack of French support for the Iraq invasion, and the absence of politically correct movie villains since the end of the Cold War.

Since 2003, a wave of anti-French sentiment in America has resulted in boycotts of French products and such stridently Francophobic books as Richard Z. Chesnoff’s “The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can’t Stand Us & Why The Feeling Is Mutual.” We laugh about it, but the ACLU is not complaining, and it’s had an impact.

At the same time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa has created a shortage of the kind of instantly recognizable national villains that, along with Nazis, have been the stock movie bad guys of the past half-century.

Francophile director Jim Jarmusch says, “We’re at war with Muslim terrorists but we’re afraid of caricaturing Muslims in films or even portraying them in a bad light. So what do we do? We take it out on the French. They’re a safe target.”

Director Oliver Stone, whose mother was French, adds, “And it helps that they don’t complain about it. The French dish it out, but they can take it too. Their arrogance does not mask insecurity. They’re confident of their culture and have a long tradition of self-criticism.”

The blatant animosity is a strange turnaround for a love affair that began with Lafayette and has endured two world wars. Traditionally, French characters have been totally sympathetic in American film; witness the Hollywood careers of Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier and Pepe le Pew.

French cinema also has been the darling of American critics since the silent era. Films like “Grand Illusion” and “Children of Paradise” are on every U.S. critic’s short list of great movies, and France has scored a record 32 foreign-language film Oscar nominations.

Moreover, the American art-film industry was built on the French New Wave of the ’50s. The sensibility of French filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard was the dominant influence on the Hollywood Golden Age of the late ’60s and ’70s.

But the movie relationship began to sour in the ’80s. The French were unhappy about Hollywood’s increasing takeover of the domestic French film market. The U.S. didn’t appreciate rising film quotas, an increasingly unfriendly press and all that fatuous veneration for Jerry Lewis.

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, the relationship has become openly contentious, especially after the massive anti-American demonstrations at the ’04 Cannes Film Festival. Not only have Frenchmen become the villain of choice in Hollywood, but U.S. demand for French film has plummeted.

In the past, France could always count one at least one big hit in the U.S. every year — a “Cyrano,” “Camille Claudel” or “La Cage aux Folles.” But there hasn’t been a major Gallic hit here since “The Closet” and “Amelie” — both of which were released just before 9/11 .

The film that, for a time, seemed poised to break this dry spell was “OSS 117: Nest of Spies,” a box-office phenomenon in France that had its U.S. debut at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, where it was voted best film.

A spy spoof set in France and Egypt in 1955 during the formative months of the Suez Crisis, the film is not only a hilarious comedy, it offers a terrific star turn in French actor Jean Dujardin’s uncanny evocation of the movie-star charisma of the young Sean Connery.

In Seattle, the film’s director Michel Hazanavicius told me he believed “OSS” has “a healing quality.” “It makes fun of Muslim extremism but it’s even harder on French colonial arrogance. In Europe, we’ve been embraced by critics of both the extreme right and left.”

The film brought down the house after three SIFF screenings in June, and the assumption was that it would be quickly scooped up by a U.S. distributor. But that hasn’t happened, and after four months of no bites, its chances of doing any healing here don’t look good.

Meanwhile, for maybe the first time in 30 years, the fall film lineup doesn’t have a French film scheduled to play an open-ended theatrical engagement in Seattle. And the Hollywood list is full of movies that appear to sustain the anti-French bias.

First out of the chute on Sept. 22 will be “Flyboys,” a WWI aerial adventure which celebrates the Americans volunteers who flew for France in the Lafayette Escadrille. (Translation: We saved your butt, France. How can you be so ungrateful?)

On Oct. 20, Sophia Coppola’s biopic “Marie Antoinette” bows, and though it was given unprecedented cooperation (it was filmed in Versailles), it’s so enthusiastically disrespectful of high French civilization that it was soundly booed in its Cannes debut.

On Nov. 10, “A Good Year” stars Russell Crowe as a British banker who inherits a vineyard in Provence. He’s seduced by the slower life, but the movie is not the valentine to France you might expect, and Crowe uses the “F” word (frog) half a dozen times.

On Nov. 17, Daniel Craig will be introduced as the new James Bond in a remake of “Casino Royale,” but without the novel’s French setting. The villains still have French names but the story, one of its publicists says, “takes place everywhere but France.”

Obviously, Bond has joined the boycott.

P-I movie critic William Arnold – With kind permission from the author.