The Rest Is History - 242. French History on Film

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Tom and Dominic welcome film critic Muriel Zagha to discuss the home of cinema, France, and its history through ten films, spanning from Vercingétorix to Vichy. Featuring Jean Renoir, Isabelle Adjani, Louis de Funès and many more. Full list: Jeanne la Pucelle (Jacques Rivette, 1994) La reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994) Ridicule (Patrice Leconte, 1996) Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927) Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1943-45) J’accuse (Roman Polanski, 2019) La grande illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937) Le corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943) La grande vadrouille (Gérard Oury, 1966) La chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. Right, lads. Now, I know there's not a faint heart among you,

and I know you're as anxious as I am to get into close action. Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? Do you want to call that raggedy-ass Napoleon your king? Do you want your children to sing the Marseillaise? England is under threat of invasion, and though we be on the far side of the world, this podcast is our home. This podcast is England. So as every hand to his rope or gun, quicks the word and sharps the action. After all, Tom Holland, history is on our side.

Now, that was, of course, Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey in the film Master and Commander, adapted from the novels of Patrick O'Brien. Tom Holland, would you agree that that film as a portrait of French history is right up there with The Pink Panther Strikes Again? I knew you were going to mention Inspector Clouseau. This is what I was expecting. So today we are doing A History of France in 10 Films. And Dominic, you messaged me and said

you got a brilliant introduction. A world-class introduction. And I knew it was going to feature Clouseau. Right. And it did, if only obliquely. Very obliquely. But you didn't expect Captain Jack Aubrey, did you? My superb Russell Crowe voice.

Yeah, you know, some bloke with rope. You always try and bring him in. Right. But anyway, Tom um films in france are they're kind of synonymous aren't they in the anglo-saxon imagination um france is one of the great homes of of cinema and actually films are a really fun way to think about french history don't you agree we absolutely more i i'm looking forward to the deployment of your French accent in this podcast. So, Tom, we have with us the film critic Muriel Zaga, who has written and broadcasted widely about French cinema.

Muriel, bienvenue. Thank you for joining us. You presumably do want to see a guillotine and picadilly, but we'll gloss over that. Yeah. So France, the home of cinema, do you think? Is that fair to say? I mean, American listeners would be outraged by this, but do you think you would call France the home of cinema?

Well, yes, that's a long-running dispute whether Americans invented cinema or the French. I'm going to say the French did. I'm going to say French cinema is almost sort of playonistic, you know. But I would say that, wouldn't I? But partly because I think the French take cinema seriously. It's entertainment for everyone, but it is also an art form. So perhaps that's why they own it. We own it. That's a claim, isn't it, Tom?

So do you think, I mean, here in England, we often say people learn more about history from Hollywood films, I mean, terrible Hollywood films often, than they do through the written word. Is that true in France as well? I don't know. I mean, the huge question is whether history can can actually be taught through film it's people certainly um confirm their national narrative through watching films so perhaps things they've been taught at school are then reinforced on the screen. The teaching of history is changing in France. That's another thing, of course, is that sometimes for the younger generation,

possibly they will learn about absolutely essential events of French history through film or television for the first time, because these things simply won't have been covered at school. Yeah. And so we have asked you to compile a history of France through 10 films, which is a very, very tough ask. I thank you for this nightmarish challenge. So I'm very much looking forward to you choosing Asterix and Obelix as your first choice. So I'm very much looking forward to you choosing Asterix and Obelix as your first choice. So I'm assuming that will be your first choice. Will it? It's not my first choice because, well, okay, several reasons.

The books are better. The books are better than the film adaptation. So really, you're better off reading and rereading the books, which are very rich and very well historically informed. In terms of early French history or history of the Gaulois, there isn't a whole lot of films to pick from, partly because it's still a very obscure part of our history. And also my contention is that it's because the French have an inferiority complex because of the Romans, because the Romans are so crushingly glamorous on film. And it's very difficult for Hirsute Gaulle's to compete with that. So I'm just going to start with a counter example. I mean mean an example of a have not to do

French historical film about that period it's unkind to talk about it but at the same time it's worth mentioning there was in the early 2000s a film about Vincent Jeterix the chieftain of the Arvenians is that we call them the Arvenians and this starred Christophe Lambert

oh dear yes I know no exactly yes oh dear so there is a thing it's it's awful really there's a thing called the golden bidet so appropriately the opposite of a cesar i guess exactly exactly right exactly right so this film garnered three of those one for the film worst film one for worst director and i won't mention his name it's kinder i really want to see the worst actor christopher can take it well you can find it on youtube so go go and have a you know fun afternoon there's no way you could have a film about versingatrix winning a cesar so i i think that that is well that's the thing so the problem with

the film is microscopic budget very i mean huge ambition but no writing the acting is terrible everything just inexplicable facial hair it's a very hirsute hairy film anyway so this is the problem is that uh doing historical reconstitutions costs a lot of money and by and large french directors and producers don't have access to Hollywood-style budgets. So I think you can only tackle early or early-ish French history if you have a sort of minimalist sensibility, like Robert Bresson, for example, who did make a film about Joan of Arc. I'm not going to talk about him. I'm going to talk about another film about Joan of Arc. So we are going to leap in seven-league boots right over Clovis, Charlemagne, everybody, and go straight

to Joan of Arc because she is really the first figure, I think, really to crystallize national identity up to the present day. So she remains a really important foundational figure. And it is fitting that she's a woman because, of course, the Republic is a woman, liberté, égalité, fraternité, Marianne, all of these are potentially female allegories. Dominique, I've never heard of her, have we, Dominique? Never, never, never. I can't believe the French tried to pass the sauce off as the champions of liberty, Thomas. Anyway, go on, Muriel. Don't let us put you off there have been no never never keep going there have been many many films about joan of arc understandably because she's a i mean it's a word but she's an iconic figure obviously that lends itself herself to to screen treatment she's

been played by many famous actresses the film i've chosen i like particularly because it has some of those qualities of simplicity and austerity that I think are needed if you're going to try and evoke the Middle Ages on screen without a lot of money. So this is a film that was made by Jacques Rivette. Jacques Rivette is one of the directors who made his name with the Nouvelle Vague. And he worked all his life. He died recently a few years ago. And this is a film he made in the 90s, starring an actress called Sandrine Bonner in the part of Joan. So it's a two-part epic. It's very long.

It's five hours long, I think. So a bit of a commitment, you know, if our listeners are thinking of watching it. You can watch it in bits, of course. You don't have to watch it all at once. It's in two parts. It's called Joan the Maid, The Battles. And then the second part is Joan the Maid, the Prisons. And so it follows the whole arc of her journey.

And what I like about it is, I suppose, it's Nouvelle Vague qualities. That's to say, lots of natural light, lots of natural settings, lots of movement, and almost a sort of Western quality. So she's almost like Calamity Joan. She's often riding through these medieval French wilderness, immense sort of plains. And the battle scenes are minimal, are done with minimal number of actors, but they feel a little bit like the storming of Fort Apache. There is a really kinetic quality in the film

and also some very beautiful, dramatic monologues to camera because it is a little bit experimental. So that's by Joan and some other characters. And Muriel, how did he do the visions, the angels? Ah, okay, very interesting. I know why you're, yes. So he doesn't, he doesn't do the visions

and that might be disappointing why you're, yes. So he doesn't, he doesn't do the visions and that might be disappointing for you and other people. What he does instead is it's all internalized because Bonner is such an amazing performer. So she has a face that has it all in terms of Joan of Arc, I think she has severity, purity, determination, courage, you know, all of that, but she also looks a little bit sort of lit from within. And so she talks about her visions and she talks about being from God and having direct contact with God, which, of course, is why she's a heretic in the eyes of the church. But you don't see the visions. You know of them.

Everybody knows of them. So you have to imagine, you have to sort of join the dots in your head and imagine what's going on in her head. The spiritual dimension of her story is only under the surface. It's for you to fill in. And is it quite a, so it's quite a recent film, but is it as patriotic as it were, as previous renditions of the story of Joan of Arc would you say or is it more revisionist so that's interesting yes in some ways it's not openly

revisionist what it's doing I think is is reclaiming her from the the side that had taken possession of her at the time in the 90s which was was the National Front. So Joan, there's a tug of war throughout French history, starting in the 19th century, more or less, but between, say, the anti-clerical Republicans on the one side and the royalist monarchists on the other. So both parties are trying to claim Joan for themselves. Then there comes a point where she becomes really a Republican heroine. Then she is a central figure under the Vichy regime. She's reclaimed by Vichy. Then again, the Communist Party reclaim her as a sort of resistance figure after the war. All of this

goes on. And then Le Pen claims her in the 60s, 70s, and she becomes associated with the National Front. And so I think what Rivette is doing, Rivette is a man of the left, broadly speaking, as most of those Nouvelle Vague directors are, is reclaiming her for the mainstream and saying she has no political colour. She is a heroine for everyone. So Myrna, the most recent Joan of Arc film I saw was by Bruno Dumont, who is a kind of enfant terrible, isn't he? Did you see that, the Joan of Arc film? I didn't see the film. I saw the clip you sent me. So it's in English, The Childhood of Joan of Arc.

And you talked about the need to do films on budgets. This, I mean, this must have cost about, I should think, 37 euros. I mean, it's a girl wandering around a load of sandbanks and it's very, very odd. And the music, it's kind of, it's a musical basically. And I just wanted to play, I don't know whether we're allowed to do this, whether we'll get in trouble with the copyright, but this is a sequence where Joan of Arc is, she's a a little girl she's walking up a sandbank and suddenly these two nuns appear and start talking to her about the nature of christ so uh can you hear that it's associated with guns and N' Roses or something?

It's weirdly effective, but kind of like nothing I've ever seen before. And I quite recommend it. Tom, if the budget really was 37 euros, you're very unlikely to be harassed by their lawyers. That's probably true. And it's worth it also for Joan's vision of um saint michael and the two saints which is excellent i won't i won't spoil it yes how are the um how are the english portrayed in jean lapucelle um are they are they villainous and um is that a hollywood style portrait yes no they are they are they are utterly villainous so they're called uh les godons i think was the word the medieval word that the french used at

the time which is a bit like the han for the you know the germans um during a different war they are cruel uh sadistic coarse beyond belief um really no redeeming features at all please oh this sounds terrible i think we boycott that. So, that's Joan of Arc. So, what is number two on your list? So, number two, again, we are leaping because we need to. We're leaping to The Wars of Religion and La Reine Margot. Ah, yes. Oh, yes.

Isabella Gianni. Yes, yes. Yes. So, this is an early 90s movie they are actually both from around the same time the uh the Joan of Arc and the and La Reine Margot which is La Reine Margot is based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas called La Reine Margot and he of course also wrote The Three Musketeers which is perhaps a novel that will be better known in England. So it's really more an adaptation of the novel than a serious piece of historical research. But that makes it really

fun because it's a really revolutionary take on the historical movie. So in a sense, it's a film about the 19th century as well as about the 16th century, would that be fair? That's the thing, is that there are endless layers wherever you look, because everything is always has a context of its own. It's looking back at different versions. It's a revision of something that came before. So yes, it's based on all kinds of 19th century ideas about Marguerite de Valois. So we get everything, you know, in a way, what it resembles mostly, or foreshadows, is Game of Thrones. It is very sexy and very violent, very gory. And there is nudity, which of course, you'd expect in a French film. But even then, it was pushing the boundaries.

And so Margot is represented with all the sort of legends associated with her run in facts. That's to say she's an infomaniac. She has probably incestuous relationships with her brothers. And then in a famous final scene, which is lifted from Stendhal's The Scarlet and the Black black actually it's mentioned in that novel in a romantic final image she sits with her lover's severed head bloody bleeding severed head in her lap and that's that's the last we see of her and all those things are probably completely invented and some some people say Protestant propaganda.

You know, there are things that are featured. Well, Dominic's a big fan of Protestant propaganda. I'm all about Protestant propaganda on this podcast. So for those listeners who don't know, it's set in the late 16th century, and it's the period when Catholics and Protestants are kind of fighting for control of France. And I guess one of the centerpieces

is the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, which even people who don't know much French history will probably have very vaguely heard of when it's the Huguenots who get massacred, isn't it? It is. And is there any, I mean, this is a pretty dumb question, I suppose, but is there any sort of, do these things have any traction in france now i mean do people care at all about the the wars of religion and the huguenots and and all that kind of thing or is it just ancient history a little bit of both it's very remote i mean i do remember for example from my own days in primary school being taught about the swiss called the massacre de la saint-barthélemy

french and i don't think i knew really then what Protestants were. You know, it was very abstract. So I think unless, and that's probably still true nowadays, that unless you are a French Protestant, because there are some left, not very many, but there are, there are some, and still some very powerful families, then you will probably feel the episode quite viscerally. The majority of people have probably forgotten that there ever was a serious challenge to Catholicism in France, I think.

A serious Calvinist challenge. Lionel Jospin was a Protestant, wasn't he? I think Michel Rocard also was a Protestant. And people always mentioned it. People did say, oh, Rocard, who of course is a Protestant, you know, as if somehow it meant something. But they're not still called Huguenots? No. Okay. No. So that scene, the massacre scene, because it's very Game of Thrones, is incredibly hair-raising and dreadful. So it does actually bring home just how horrible, bloodthirsty, grislyly barbaric the whole thing was and there are afterwards and the aftermath in a way is worse it's piles of naked bodies on cars just horrific i i saw that film about 30 years ago i hadn't really thought of it till you i till you brought

it up and i have to say i mean maybe some listeners won't be surprised to hear this but all the nudity the intense intense violence. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I really enjoyed it. Mind you, I like Game of Thrones. I saw it. I'd done it for A-level, so I was very disappointed. I felt that it was historically inaccurate. Oh, Tom.

It absolutely ruined it for me. So I must go back and give it another go. I suspect you'll be very pleased with Muriel's third choice because I know what that is. So do I. It's a film that you love, Tom.

It is. I think it's the single best historical film ever made. Wow. Well, yes, it's very strong. So this is Ridicule, which presumably was released here as ridicule yes ridicule yes and by patrice lecomte and that is again a 1990s movie so people will say i'm

favoring the 1990s but i've i've tried to be even-handed in terms of the kinds of films and the quality you know having constant quality so quality. So, Ridicule is brilliant. Ridicule is a sort of historical comedy of manners and drama set at court in Versailles. So, this is towards the end of the Ancien Régime and the reign of Louis XVI. Although actually, we barely see the king. We catch a glimpse of Marie Antoinette, but it's not about them. It's about the courtiers and what goes on in those circles at court. So the main character is a young nobleman from the provinces called Grégoire Ponce-Ludon de Malavoie, which I think is an outlandish name because he is from the back from the back

waters and he is um enlightened young nobleman who's also a scientist a budding scientist he comes from a so where his sort of thief is is a very insalubrious marshy region. And he wants to drain the swamp in order to lengthen the, you know, the longevity of his peasantry. So he rides to Versailles in essentially a single shot to see the king, to seek audience with the king

and get some funding for his project. And when he gets to Versailles, he discovers, and it is explained to him, that you can't just see the king just like that. You have to catch his eye. And the way to catch the king's eye is by being a celebrated wit. So he has to make as many coruscating witticisms in the presence of the other courtiers compete with the other courtiers in this kind of jousts of wit.

Puns don't count, very importantly. You can't just... And it has to be... I think it's something... There's a French word which is persiflage. Persiflage is a sort of ongoing banter, often malicious and witty. And that's what he needs to access.

That's what we have on this podcast. They have a joke. I mean, it's a joke isn't it that that there is actually no translation between the english and the french words it's a joke that kind of you know the film always ends with that joke yes there's a great scene where one uh nobleman this is in a woman's salon somewhere in versailles one nobleman has just returned from england and someone says do they have wit there and he says no no not really they have they have something called humor and then he tries to explain what it is and it falls completely flat but actually the the last scene of the film has a lovely little trait d'esprit uttered by an Englishman, which is about, it's better to lose your hat than to lose your head. You know,

to carry on doing L'illusion. I've been here a very long time. But it is a beautiful film. And again, I mean, as with La Reine Margaux, but differently, it sort of shatters the expectations you might have of a historical drama because it's very impolite. It's rude, you know, and at the same time, it's incredibly sophisticated. It's just a wonderful alliance of things. So I said, I think this is the best historical film ever made. And I think the reason I think that is that it makes drama out of a completely different way of understanding the world, the rituals of Versailles, the, as you say, these kind of

duels of wit, that is something that only makes sense in that specific historical circumstance. And it's not about kind of importing our standards and imposing them on the past, as so many history films are and i i have i've watched it lots of times and i i think it is absolutely i think it's absolutely superb um and there there is one brilliant moment particularly brilliant moment there's an abbé who is a kind of voltairian um priest who uh is absolute master of wit and he gives a kind of brilliant sermon and the king applauds him and the whole court are in raptures. And then he says that I will demonstrate that God doesn't exist. And at that, suddenly you can hear a pin drop and he realizes he's gone too far.

And it's such a brilliant, brilliant moment. And, you know, as you said, it's also about the revolution because that sequence at the end where the exile is standing on the white cliffs of Dover with the Englishman, you know, he's gone into exile because of the revolution, but our hero is now, you know, citoyen, whatever he is. And has managed to drain the swamp. Drain the swamp. Well, your next film, Muriel, does feature the French Revolution, doesn't it?

And it also features that raggedy arse that I referred to at the very beginning in the introduction. So this is Boney. I mean, we couldn't do a podcast about French films without talking about Napoleon, I think. So this is a silent film, isn, we couldn't do a podcast about French films without talking about Napoleon, I think. So this is a silent film, isn't it? It is a silent film.

So it's the famous Napoleon by Abel Gance, which is I think 1923 or 27, perhaps, a bit later, 1920s film. It's an amazing project. Gance wanted to make a... It's very long. Again, I've chosen quite a few long films that people can pick and choose. This is five and a half hours long.

And it's only a fragment because actually what Gance wanted to make was five times as much as that. He wanted to make a six-part epic, biopic, complete biopic, up to and including Saint Helena's. And of course, what he did because of the sort of artist that he was, is he blew his budget, his entire budget on the first.

We've all been there. And then ran out of money. But in a way, the fact that it's a fragment is part of the charm because it's a young Bonaparte. He hasn't been corrupted by hubris yet he's not become the emperor yet there is a sort of field of possibilities you know and more romantic idealism attached to the film because we don't get what came later and and Dominic you'll be very pleased to know that Nelson appears in it so um I've never I've watched the so I've seen kind of fragments, I think. Is that possible that the fragments exist? So I will tell you, I will tell you what happened because I met the person who I interviewed him, who put all these various fragments together again.

It was a man called Kevin Brownlow. Oh, he's a very well-known. As a very young man directed the film, It Happened Here about a Nazi occupation of Britain. And he was devoted to this and it became his great lifelong project to piece this film together. And it's still not entirely complete, but it's pretty much so. And I went and interviewed him, talked about the project, and saw it was screened in the, I think, in National Film Theatre. No, it was the Festival Hall, actually.

And they had a full-blown orchestra. And the climax of it is that what has for most of the film is it's it's a single screen at the end suddenly you have three screens and it's it's like in Beethoven's Ninth when suddenly people start singing you know it's so unexpected and it's that was that was groundbreaking wasn't it when they they the triptych or whatever Muriel that was that was i'm presumably impossible to do in most cinemas i think so i think that you have to be in a specially equipped uh auditorium yes it was incredibly groundbreaking and triptych is the right word because there is a religious dimension to the whole enterprise um so what's exciting about the triptych is that lots of different things are happening simultaneously. You get a real sense of epic destiny, you know, unfolding before your very eyes.

Why I say religious dimension is because there is, of course, a cult of Napoleon in France. There was while he was alive and then especially perhaps after he died, when he became a sort of martyr and secular saint really in the French imagination. Though again, I'm not sure that that's still with us. Martyr by the English again. Yes. And certainly, Gance very much channels that. So he saw the project as a sort of act of resurrection. And he talks about Napoleon as as a I think he says a sort of what is a radioactive heir to Christ you know his Napoleon on screen is going to fulfill Christ's republican mission you know Christ's famous republican mission

he's going to complete it so there's a lot of you might say idolatry there on the part of goss and and that and actually the images brownlow made the most amazing act of reconstitution historical remembering of this film it's a beautiful evergreen movie it's worth watching in its entirety but even a fragment will give you a sense of the beauty of the images. It's absolutely beautiful. Didn't Stanley Kubrick want to make a film about Napoleon? He did. He was absolutely passionate about doing a new version of Napoleon. But he didn't get very far. Is that right, Muriel? I don't know how much you know about Kubrick's Napoleon.

Yes, I think it's one of the great unrealised projects. Am I right in thinking it was going to be Jack Nicholson? I think so, yes. I think so. So you can imagine what that would have been like. Yeah. Okay. So that's Napoleon. And then what is number five?

I assume it's, well, it's, I know because you sent the list, but I'm very disappointed. So we're now moving into the 19th century, but I'm very disappointed to see that it's not Les Miserables. So Dominic mentioned Russell Crowe at the top. Yeah, I could have sung in Russell Crowe's beautiful voice. Partly that's it. I think for me, there is always a slight problem with suspension of disbelief when something is supposed to be a historical French drama. And then people walk in and say, hello, my name is Captain Gervais.

And then you go, I'm not sure that I can really go with that. And then they start singing. I mean, that's even on bridges. And then there are angels in trees and it all. Yes. So this, my fifth choice is Les Enfants du Paradis, Children of Paradise, trees and it's all yes so this the my fifth choice is les enfants du paradis children of paradise i think it's called which is um a film by marcel carney and that was made under the german occupation and released at the time of the liberations it was made say in the mid 1940s and so again that is a part of the historical context, isn't it?

The difficulty of making the film, presumably. Yes, the difficulty of making the film under very difficult strictures from the Nazis and from Vichy, of course, as certain people not being allowed to work because they were Jewish or, you know, communists or whatever. So there were lots of... Most of the film was shot in the free zone,

in studios in Nice, where some extraordinary outdoor sets were built. So the action takes place... It's the Paris of Balzac, really. So it takes place mostly under Louis-Philippe, let's say, 1830s. And it's about that old Paris, the Paris before Hausmann's Paris,

and centres around what was then called Boulevard du Crime, the crime boulevard, which was not called that because it was a very dangerous place, but because it was a place where a lot of theatres showed melodramas, gory, sensational melodramas, and also pantomimes. So the film is about the world of the theatre. The title refers, the children of paradise are the poorest people who can't afford expensive theatre seats and who can only afford the ones at the very top

of the theatre. So it's like in English, the gods. The gods, exactly. And who are the people who bring atmosphere to any performance because they're the people who heckle and laugh and shout things and boo and hiss, all of that. So it's about the sort of interwoven destinies of a group of characters who are all in some ways connected to the theatre, really primarily, and centres around a woman called Garance, who is a performer and also just a pretty Parisian woman. So when we first see her,

she's promenading on the Boulevard du Crime, which no longer exists. The Boulevard du Crime is a nickname that was given to Boulevard du Temple, which no longer exists as it was because du Crime is a nickname that was given to a boulevard du temple, which no longer exists as it was, because that place of promenade and theatres and popular entertainment is gone. It's been replaced by other boulevards and perspectives. Was that replaced by Haussmann?

So that was Haussmann knocked all that away? Yes, yes. So you can't visit it, but you can go back in the amazing time machine of Les Enfants du Paradis. It is the most extraordinary super production in terms of French cinema. I think that set alone, the Boulevard set, which contains Trompe-l'œil elements, cost 5 million francs, which at the time is absolutely pharaonic sum. And so this is during the Second World War and the occupation. So it must have been challenging to raise the money. And to what extent does the circumstance of the occupation provide context, if any have been difficult, but at the same time, filmmakers were encouraged under Vichy to make non-contemporary films to portray the past.

For obvious reasons. For obvious reasons, it was perceived to be safer. And also, possibly people wanted to escape into recreations of the past because the present was not a barrel of laughs. So there was demand for those kinds of films and something that would not have any political agenda attached to it was would also be supported where the circumstances of the occupation are perhaps perceptible is in the general tone of the film which is so marcel carney is one of the exponents of Realisme Poétique, poetic realism, which is a 1930s school of film in France. And what that means is a sort of

proto film noir. So it's often a very fatalistic, pessimistic, tragic stories, often love stories, not always, and centering on characters who are not upper class characters, but ordinary people, ordinary people and their joys and pains, and then often impossible love. So the film is permeated with this air of tragedy. It's about a mime, a famous real life mime called De Bureau, who in a way invented the art of mime, and a tragedian, an actor called Frédéric Lemaitre, who was one of the great figures of the French stage in the 19th century.

And then there are a couple of others. Lesner, the poet assassin, the darling of the surrealists, also features in the film. And they're all in love with this woman called Garance, who is also a performer. And it's about how everyone all in love with this woman called Garance, who is also a performer. It's about how everyone's in love with the wrong person, and in the end, happiness is completely unattainable. That's where perhaps there's a melancholy there that is to do with the circumstances. Just one other question on the wartime context, which is that this image of Paris, it's the Paris of La Boheme, the Paris of

the stage and of doomed love and of beautiful courtesans and all that kind of thing. I mean, that is a very popular foreign perspective on Parisian culture. Do you think that, was there any kind of awareness of that, that this was about reminding the world beyond France that, you know, La Belle Paris was still there, that she was still this city of great actors and prostitutes and courtesans and aristocrats and paup, and bohemians, that that was still going on, do you think? I think that's certainly true. I think it's very aware of the myth of Paris and of promoting and recreating

immersively that vanished, great old Paris of, as you say, culture, love, living on the edge, the underbelly of society, aristocratic salons, everything is in it. So in that sense, it's very Balzac and quite Dickensian also. It has everything. And the script was written by the poet Jacques Prévert, wasn't it? Does that suggest to us that film, is that a sign of film being regarded as one of the high arts in France in a way that perhaps it isn't in, well, certainly not in Britain, I suppose. I mean, obviously, great American writers have worked for Hollywood, kind of people like William Faulkner and so on. But Prévert writing the film was filmed from the very beginning, seen as something that, you know, very clever, cultivated sort of artistic people would work in? And does French cinema, do you think, does it run the whole spectrum still from the most populist to the most highbrow? Interesting question.

Yes, Jacques Prévert is a poet in his own right. He was also a screenwriter and he worked with Carnet several times. So he wrote dialogue, beautiful, witty dialogue that the courtiers in Ridicule might have approved of because it's often very beautifully, beautifully crafted. And at the same time, direct, limpid, unpretententious i think that's the genius of it and perhaps that is um the french less obsessed with class i think than the british i mean i don't know we can argue about that but i would say french cinema is less obsessed with class than british cinema which is perhaps a slightly different thing but uh and that's partly, I think, because the dream is always to create something that is a beautiful product that can be enjoyed by the majority of people. There are exceptions, and then there will be an example towards the end.

There are, of course, exceptions, and French cinema can also be hyper-pretentious and very, very sort of over-engineered. But the mainstream, high and low and middle brow is trying to give everyone the best. That's the idea. A bit like food, really. Same attitude towards food. Well, there is certainly nothing pretentious or over-engineered about this podcast or this episode. And I think we should take a break at this point because we're now halfway through your list, Muriel. And when we come back, let's go from six through to 10. So à bientôt. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. The Avenue, once again, everybody. We are charging through the history of France in tenor films with our guest Mireille Zagat, the film critic, who has given us five splendid films. I have to say, having listened to you on those five films, Mireille,

it makes me want to watch them, in the case of La Reine margot re-watch them uh immediately but you've got some great ones coming up haven't you because i can see the list and your next one is particularly interesting i think because of the controversy around it and because a lot of people probably don't even know it exists and so that is um, um, Jacques Hughes is a French title by Roman Polanski, but it has a British connection, doesn't it? It does because, um, it's an adaptation. So it's about the Dreyfus affair. Um,

so we are now from the Paris of Balzac, we've moved to the Paris of Proust, uh, the late 19th century. The, the film of Proust, the late 19th century. The film is, the script is adapted from a novel by Robert Harris called, I think, An Officer and a Spy. And I had not known, actually, I recently found out that Harris wrote the novel as a result of a conversation with Polanski. And then they decided to make the film together and make the novel into a film. But they both shared an interest in the Dreyfus affair. They're friends.

And so that's how the novel came to be. And then later the film. So the genius... So for people who don't know, because a lot of people won't, the Dreyfus affair, do you want to explain that? Well, are you happy explaining it? If I make any mistakes, you, the historian, can correct me. I'm sure you won't. So this is something that happened in, I think, 1894, thereabouts.

An officer in the French artillery called Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was French but from Alsace and also Jewish, crucially, was accused, well, found guilty, accused and then found guilty of treason, of specifically passing on military secrets to the Germans. And he was then expelled from the army. He was, there was a, so yes, I'll get onto that afterwards, but he was then sent to Devil's Island in French Guyana for lifelong imprisonment. A living death, wasn't it? A living death. And the film opens with a famous scene of his literal degradation in the courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris,

where all his epaulettes, the gilt buttons on his uniform, everything is torn from his uniform. And then the soldier who is doing all this to him breaks his sword on his knee, breaks it in half. And at that point, Dreyfus exclaims that he is innocent and that it's a terrible miscarriage of justice. Vive l'armée, vive la France, he says. The genius of the film, which is, of course, the genius of Harris's novel, is to tell the story centering not around Dreyfus himself, who is a tricky character because he was quite a chilly sort of cold fish, you know, he's not very charismatic, or centering around Émile Zola, the French writer who wrote the open letter to the president entitled Jacuzzi, which outed the whole story in newspapers but on another officer called

george picard who was dreyfus's commanding officer at the time when he was first convicted and who is then promoted as head of the secret service the french secret service and in the course of that of these new activities, discovers that actually Dreyfus was telling the truth, that he was innocent, that he's been framed, that proofs of his guilt have been fabricated and he sets about to set the record straight. And what's interesting is that this Picard character, who is played by Jean Dujardin, so Jean Dujardin is perhaps today the biggest male French star. He's very, you know, he's tall, dark and handsome

and very debonair. But here he plays against type because he's playing what I would call un cello, so thoroughly unpleasant individual who is himself a staunch anti-Semite. And of course, perfectly mainstream opinions to have for a man of his class and background in the army at the time. But this is not a Hollywood scenario where he starts off perhaps

a little bit anti-Semitic, but then he gets to know Dreyfus and they become best buddies and he warms to the plight of the Jews. Thank you, Alfred. Thank you for being there. It's not like that. What drives him is his love of the army and his sense of duty and so he wants to um exculpate dreyfus bring him back for another trial and also make sure that the actual culprit the man who was selling military information to the germans a major esterhazy is uh pursued instead. I haven't seen the film, but I have read Robert Harris's book. I think I read it in proof before it came out. And I remember it was one of those reading experiences that sort of stays with you because

I started reading it, you know, at sort of six o'clock at night and was still reading it at two o'clock in the morning or something. Even though I knew the story, I think it's by farbert harris's best book and i was absolutely riveted but the tragedy is that the film hasn't had um the exposure that it should have done because of course roman polanski is a very controversial figure because of his own sort of sexual history and so on but is that that's presumably not the case in france muriel or? No, it's interesting because in terms of history in the making, France had its, is having really, perhaps, its Me Too moment with a slight lag after Le Monde Anglo-Saxon, as ever, we're always sort of chasing the, running after the train slightly. And the release of the film coincided with that.

So I won't go into the Polanski affair, which is a separate thing, but yes, Polanski admitted to having had non-conceptual sex with an underage girl in the 70s. And he's still really a fugitive from American justice for that crime. He's been tried, but he hasn't been in prison. He jumped bail, didn't he? He jumped bail and he's never been back to the US. So he's now 88 years old, maybe Polanski,

87 years old. And this is still hanging over his head like a sword of Damocles. And occasionally it's sort of wheeled out, you know, again. And this was a case in point, partly because the Dreyfus affair is the story of you know an innocent man being unjustly uh hounded by uh by the authorities by the media and so on it's so there was um disapproval and resistance in in France to the film being lionized at the Venice Festival for example and a lot of people I, people in the press said they would not promote the film, they would not talk about it. Planned interviews with some of the stars in the movie, Jean Dujardin, Louis Garrel, who plays Dreyfus, who's also a famous French actor, were cancelled. So there was certainly a reaction. This is all

happening in a wider context in France, where for the first time in my own living history, the penny is dropping in French society that it is not okay to pursue underage girls with sexual intent. Because actually, the Polanski affair, although it happened in America, in a French context, happened in a context where it was all perfectly acceptable and even applauded that young women nymphettes lolitas were fair game and that it is it was hilarious to pursue them capture them seduce them well also that's one aspect of french seduction which is at the darker end of the i mean there's also with polanski there's also uh sharon tate he was married to sharon tate wasn't he and and she obviously was very brutally murdered by um the manson family

the manson family so uh it's there is this kind of very dark background to it but um i haven't seen it i've like dominic i read the book and kind of read it in a single sitting so i love the book um but i feel quite inspired to go and see the film now i must say um just one quick question about drafus if i may um the drafus affair you would have thought was kind of closed until recently but i'm not right in thinking that there's say for example the um the sort of hard right candidate sort of gadfly eric zemmour who is himself jewish very odd unbelievably he said at the beginning of the recent french presidential campaign well maybe dreyfus was was guilty maybe it wasn't as simple as that maybe you know he wasn't framed

do many people in france think that muriel i should think not i think it's a very marginal niche opinion zemmour also thinks that the vichy regime was marvelous and did its best to save he also wants french jews he wants to annex northern italy doesn't he so he has a raft of controversial opinions he's he's an eccentric foreign policy yeah an eccentric figure yes yes i think you that is sort of lunatic French, I'd say. Okay. So, number seven. Number seven is La Grande Illusion, the Renoir film about the Great War, Grand Elysian, which was made in 1937. So it was made between the two wars, but it is a film that's looking back to Renoir's own experience in the war as a pilot. He was a pilot. And so it's about, it's very,

it's perhaps the most famous of all my choices. It's the great humanist anti-war film about friendship. It's about French prisoners who escaped from German prisons during the First World War. And the thing about it is that they... So at the beginning, we have three characters, an aristocrat called de Bois-le-Dieu and an engineer, a working class man,

who's played by Jean Gadbin, who's called Maréchal, and then a Jewish, rich bourgeois Jewish character called Rosenthal, played by Marcel Dalio. Marcel Dalio always played Jews or foreigners in the cinema of the 30s. That was his stock in trade. And Jean Gabin is perhaps the greatest French film star ever, bigger than Brigitte Bardot, bigger than anyone,

who worked all his life. Reincarnated as a dog in 10%. Exactly. In the series about the talent agency in Paris. Yes. One of the directors has a dog called Jean Gabin and that's very telling. So Gabin is the incarnation of the French working man and the kind of figure of authenticity. He's about real France, France profonde, and also a very glamorous figure in his own right because he, during the war, the Second World War, he did join the Free French in North Africa.

He won the Croix de Guerre. So, you know, he's an interesting, glamorous figure. So in the film, these prisoners who are a sort of ragtag, motley crew of people who have nothing in common will subsume their class differences, the racial differences between them and find, you know, friendship and then manage to escape the Germans by helping each other out. So the aristocratic character sacrifices himself for the other two men so that they can escape. And then they eventually make it into Switzerland. And in the meantime, there's also a love story between Jean Gabin, the French soldier character, and a young German war widow. So that's also an interesting element of the film.

There are a couple of things interesting about the Germansans aren't they so there's his affair i saw this years ago his his his relationship with the widow but there's also your classic i mean something that we in britain specialize in in war films your classic noble no i mean literally noble sort of german flying ace sort of a gallant enemy you know very chivalrous and all that sort of thing um and that's quite striking given that this is what 1937 the clouds of war overhead did you just say the clouds of war overhead i did i'd like a tom you know 200 odd episodes and i think one of the first times i've dipped into i've dipped into my deathless prose to give us credit i think that's the first time we've dipped into my deathless prose. To give us credit, I think that's the first time we've ever used the phrase, the clouds of war.

Sorry, Doblin, go on. I'll start an episode with that. I'll start an episode with that term. We're only 20 years from the Great War itself. Obviously, the experience of the Great War for France, even more, far more seismic than it was for Britain. So was that controversial, would you say, to have sort of, you know, good Germans, as it were? Or by the 1930s, was that not an issue? I don't think it was an issue yet. When the film was re-released in 1946,

then there was a lot of resistance to the idea of the good Germans. But of course, the Germans portrayed in the film are not Nazis yet. They're from the past. So yes, there's an amazing scene where it is about class, where the gallant German officer who is played by a divine Austrian actor called Eric von Stroheim and the French aristocrat. So he's captured these French prisoners. And in front of the other two men, the two aristocrats, the German and the French, start to speak together in English, literally above the heads of the other two men. And they speak about horses and going to Mexims in Paris and, you know, in a way that signals the sort of fraternity of the upper

classes that transcends frontiers and so do you know so so the figure of the good german also appears in um what is it the life and death of is it colonel blimp colonel death colonel yeah do you think you know was that was that an influence was um uh renoir's film an influence on that because that came out actually came out in the war, didn't it? I think that was because Churchill was suspicious of that, of the portrayal of the good German in that. But rather similar character. Rather similar character.

What's his name? Von Kochdorf or something. Theo von Koch something. Wonderful. Played by Anton Wilbrook, another divine Austrian actor. So Colonel Blimp, it's about a kind of stereotypical British officer who becomes friends with this German officer, and it's his story through the war and then after it,

up to the Second World War. But it's an archetype that runs through the way that the British, in particular, I think, think about the World Wars. There were always these sort of Klaus von stauffenberg yeah figures you know these noble adversaries with monocles or something um who know you know who who who who might as well have been to a public school and they know how to ride a horse and they yeah and they would scholars tom to pick up a theme that many of our listeners were familiar with, they would absolutely have worn the right shoes.

They absolutely would. Well, I mean, we talked about Robert Harris. That's exactly that character features in the recent one about the Munich conference. Yes. Yes, that's right. So anyway, but we're... He loves a good German.

We're now spiraling off into Britain, for which I apologize. So that is La Grande Illusion. And number eight. Number eight is also a film, well, it's a film that was made under the occupation, like Les Enfants du Paradis, but it's a very different film. So this is called Le Corbeau, The Raven. And it's a film by someone called Clouseau, but not that Clouseau. I know, Dominic's ears pricking up there. I did once write about this Clouseau, the director who spelled Z-O-T

for the Times Literary Supplement. And I spelled his name as in the Inspector Clouseau. And there was a letter Oh no! pulling me up which I should really frame and put on my wall to remind me of not making such silly mistakes. So Henri-Georges Henri-Georges Clouseau

Z-O-T is a wonderful French filmmaker of the 30s, 40s, 50s and Le Corbeau is a film that was made within a German studio called, I think, Universal or something like that during the war in 1943. And it is about, it's a contemporary story.

So it's set in a contemporary setting, although it is careful to say in the opening title, a small town here or elsewhere. So it's not too specific about being set in France even. But the setup is a small town, a big village, where soon after the arrival of a new doctor called Dr. Germain, who is played by the same actor as the aristocrat in La Grande Illusion, Pierre Freinet, people in the town begin to receive horrible poison pen letters. So corbeau in French means raven, but it's also a word for blackmailer. And these letters threaten to reveal deep held secrets like

illegitimacy, abortion, adultery, you know, all kinds of terrible things that people don't want others to know about. But Corbeau disseminates these letters everywhere. And this starts a kind of collective hysteria, really. It's based on a real case, on a real life case, which didn't happen at that time, but about 20 years previously in Tulle, I think in France, there was an epidemic of poison pen letters. So that's what inspired Clouseau. So in aulle, I think in France, there was an epidemic of poison pen letters. So that's what inspired Clouseau. So in a way, it's a kind of Miss Marple set up to begin with, because it's a small town. The moving finger. The moving finger. So there's, you know, there's the postmaster, there's the headmaster of the school, there's the nurse who works at the hospital, all these characters are there. And there's the presence of evil, the very real presence of evil,

of this unseen, deranged personality who is poisoning the minds of the town. But Muriel, presumably, I mean, lurking at the back of this is the fact that there are informers. Yeah, it must be an occupation film. I mean, it's so obvious, isn't it? So how did it get past the census? Because presumably this is about people being denounced for being Jewish or…? It is. So the word we're looking for here is délation, which is a word that is almost exclusively associated with the occupation in France. And that means informing

on people because that was really the national sport during the occupation, encouraged both by the Germans and by the Vichy regime to encourage people to inform on their neighbors. Is there a communist hiding somewhere? Are there people harboring Jews? And people used to write anonymous letters

denouncing their neighbors, sometimes with a view to appropriating their shops or their house or their business or whatever. So it's a thoroughly unpleasant form of collaboration. And the film is a sort of metaphor of that. It doesn't describe that behavior directly because there's no political context. There's no gestapo. There's no sign of an occupying force. But that's because all that unpleasantness has been internalized.

So the surveillance is happening within the community and the atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion. The very fallen world that he describes is the world of the occupation, but it's not said directly. That's how he did it. I was about to say, there's a twist, though, isn't there? Because when you sent us the list and Le Corbeau was on it and I looked it up. I thought how amazing that this film came out in 1943. But so, so it's obviously about the informers and so on, but how closely it anticipates what happens after the liberation when people,

when women are having their heads forcibly shorn and people are informing on them for help for collaborating. So, so then there's another, yeah, exactly. Oh, you, you gave that German, you know German lunch, you slept with that German guy.

And then the sort of, again, it's the same story, but from a completely opposite angle. Exactly right. So it flips. The thing about women, just a quick word about women in the film that is so fascinating, is that there's a bad girl character, classic bad girl, femme fatale, amazing, played by an actress called Ginette Leclerc, who's sort of sex on legs,

really. And she is portrayed sympathetically, whereas there's another female character who is a sort of walking poster girl for the Vichy regime, you know, the ideal of Vichy womanhood, who turns out to be a complete psychopath. So that's quite daring. And Vichy did not like that. And then, as Dominique mentioned, then later on, after the liberation, the disapproval against the film was of a different hue. It was no longer the Vichy authorities thinking that it was an immoral film that attacked family values, that catholicism all of that it was uh the resistance forces the the free french thinking that it was a demoralizing film and in itself

an act of collaboration because it portrayed france in a terrible um that is endless endless okay okay so we've got two to go um this is so i've now got eight films i'm very keen to watch this evening um two more so this one this one you were about to announce i watched last night ah it's fun isn't it it's it's tremendous it was not at all what I was expecting good good good um what were you expecting uh I I was expecting well so so it's La Grande Vendée which I think means the kind of the big stroll the big kind of perambulation um and I just read a very cursory account on the uh I brought it up on Amazon and they said three british pilots get shot down uh and it's about trying to get them back to england and so i was expecting a war film which it is a

war film but it's a war film in the way that well uh you know asterix is about the roman occupation of gaul yeah in that respect to cluso is about crime in the mean streets of Paris. Nobody dies, and there is absolutely no threat that anyone's going to die in it. And people in Britain may well have watched or heard of Alo Elo, which is, again, set against the occupation. Again, it deals massively in national stereotypes. And although you have the backdrop of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo kind of lurking, you know, even they are kind of lovable clowns. So this was made, what, 1960s, wasn't it? I mean, it's a very 1960s. And all I will say for British is that the chief British pilot

is played by Terry Thomas, which tells you everything you need to know about how the British are portrayed. So the director of this film, which was made in 1966, Gerard Houry, absolutely wanted Terry Thomas. I say, what a shower! All that kind of stuff. You're very good. You make a very good Terry Thomas. He wanted him for that, for his voice, but also for his moust for that for his voice but also for his mustache and for his guppy teeth well because the start he he gets he drops into the zoo doesn't he kind of drops into the penguin enclosure and his mustache is very bedraggled and the zookeeper rescues him and kind of signals go go and shave your mustache off immediately because you could not look more British, couldn't look more like an RAF pilot. So the story is broadly that these English parachutists land in various parts of Paris because their plane is shot down by the Germans. And they are rescued by this very unlikely pairing of complete no-hope Frenchmen played by two of the greatest comic actors in France,

Bourville, and this is in the days where people had a one-name stage name, and Louis de Funès, who's perhaps the greatest comic actor France has ever known and is still utterly revered. So they play completely diametrically opposite types. One is a very easygoing painter, decorator, naive sort of childlike man, incredibly kind. And the de Funès character is a very choleric, as is always the case with his characters, conductor.

With an extraordinary wig. With an extraordinary wig, which he has to. So again, they need to, they become embroiled with the English. And so they're not really very willing resistance. They are, you know, they're not ideological resistance. They are sort of embroiled in the whole thing. And they end up agreeing to help the British get to the free zone while on the run from the Germans. But as you said, the Germans in the film represent a very mild peril indeed, because although they're shooting

sometimes, they don't appear to hit any target. It's almost as if they're made of cardboard. If you push them over, they fall over and they are hilariously obtuse and stupid and easy to bamboozle. As are the British, to a degree as well. Yes. So here the French are, these are ordinary Frenchmen. The comedy comes from their opposing temperaments. So there's a scene where De Funès, the sort of upper class character, tricks the other man into carrying him on his shoulders, you know, like a horse.

And he says, you give me a ride and I'll give you a ride later because his shoes hurt him, his feet are hurting. So that's the kind of class warfare you experience. But also they end up in all kinds of comedy of errors situations with the Germans. There's a hilarious scene where they walk into an inn. For some reason, they're wearing purloined German uniforms and they don't make very convincing Nazis and then they walk into this dark room at the inn the lights are turned on and there's a huge birthday party given for a Nazi officer so the room is full of Nazis

in full regalia and they have to somehow blend in They all kind of sit down and go jumping around the room on their chairs, don't they? Which is a very famous scene Yes, so it's a relief, that film, after all the darkness of the occupation jumping around the room on their chairs, which is a very famous scene. Yes. So it's a relief, that film, after all the darkness of the occupation.

And it's about healing with humour. Yeah. But I wondered, as a kind of British viewer, what it actually reminded me of was Asterix in Britain. Quite similar, where it's the French and the British kind of teaming up and the Romans are a bit like the Nazis. That's why I kind of alluded to it. But I always thought that there was something in that about the attitude of the French, the kind of mingled respect and resentment of the British that they were in a position to carry on

fighting when France had to surrender. Do you think there's any element of that in this film? Yes, I'm sure there is. And I think there is in the French psyche too, actually, which explains also reactions to Brexit, for example, because this is a very broad brush statement, but it is a very different way to be as a nation to have won the war. The British won the war with the Americans, but nevertheless, they won the war. The French kind of won the war, but actually were first invaded, had years of a fascist-style regime where people collaborated actively with the enemy, and have to feel some gratitude to the American and the British,

gratitude that is sort of never-ending. And gratitude is not always a very easy emotion. It really makes you hate the people that you feel grateful for. Well, de Gaulle is the classier sample of this, right? I mean, de Gaulle is the living embodiment of that sort of... He clearly at some level does feel gratitude, but also he feels an enormous sense of annoyance and resentment that he thinks through no fault of its own france was put in i think i think you know having watched that film yesterday i think there

would be scope for a brilliant comedy about to go um i mean he's not normally thought of as a but it would be could you not argue tom that at some level the inspector cluso forms are precisely that well i mean because cluso's sense of dignity right yeah i mean i know this is ludicrous to be mentioning cluso but his sense of dignity he really believes in france by the way inspector cluso and he believes in his job at the sure day and he believes in all that and there is a sort of stereotype in anglo-saxon culture of the, I'm going to say Anglo-Saxon, obviously I mean Anglo-American,

of the Frenchman who believes himself to be the soul of dignity, but to British eyes looks faintly ridiculous. But that's the brilliant thing about this, with the maestro who is constantly insisting on his dignity and his wig is constantly flying off and he's constantly having to wear the wrong shoes. It's wonderfully great. Very much a theme of this podcast. I cannot recommend Louis de Funès' movies highly enough because there's something so paroxysmic about all his performances. And I remember recently watching another film with him in it and thinking, I wonder how he died and he died of a heart attack. And I remember recently watching another film with him in it and thinking,

I wonder how he died and he died of a heart attack. And actually that's no surprise because I think he was always performing absolutely at full capacity. Yes. It's extraordinary. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's,

I love that film and I don't think I would ever have watched it if it hadn't been on this list. So I can't thank you enough. It was, it was fantastic. Okay. So our final, our final film

uh it's not such a barrel of laughs by jean-luc godard meeting up with dostoevsky and well it's not a comic it's not a comedy is it so this was made very soon after la grande vedouille it released a year later in 67, crucially. So the year before the Soissons-Ritard do their stuff. But many people say there's something prophetic about this film. So this film by Jean-Luc Godard, who, yes, is a very serious experimental filmmaker.

He is technically Swiss, but I think I can claim him because he works in France mostly and this film was made in paris for the french cast so we're not going to quibble about the swiss and the french here um it's a sort of um premonition of may 68 and and it's rooted in reality in the sense that so it's about it's about les grandes vacances it's summer and a group of French students, bourgeois students for the main part, hold up in a very bourgeois apartment in Paris, and they form a Maoist commune there.

D'accord. Such 1960s French behavior. The 60s in France was the red decade. It was the decade of le gauchisme, where the sort of fringe left, extreme left began to sort of fragment away from the Parti Communiste, you know, as a completely different way of being on the left, more internationalist. in brackets what's happened in between is in between the second world war and this time i mean is the algerian war which is very little treated subject in french cinema except for except for the the classic um about the battle of algiers yes but that's not french is it or is it french is that it's i hate that, the director of that was Italian, I think, wasn't he? Pontecorvo? I think so.

Ah, so that doesn't, that wouldn't count. Okay. Well, there's very, there's a lot of resistance still to telling that story. So that's the whole other, you know,

the whole colonial story of France is a whole other podcast. And what was the film? Was it Hanukkah? About? Yes, Caché. Caché, yes. About the kind of the missing

boy. Anyway, we're sorry. But again, told obliquely. So this is a time in the French left, on the French left, where the Communist Party has not been supportive of the Algerian insurrection during the Algerian war. And so

younger people on the left are very disapproving of that and think that they are revisionists. So the whole film is about, essentially readings from the Little Red Book. You know, they're Maoists. So Mao's Little Red Book is everywhere in the apartment.

And the whole thing is styled in a wonderful pop 60s way. You know, Godard loved primary colours. They focus the mind. So the interior of the apartment is painted red and there's blue and yellow and some kind of decibel effect of slogans painted on the walls. There's one that says we must replace confused ideas with clear images for example

so to what degree is this a serious film is difficult to fathom because in a way Godard

is trying really hard not to be a reactionary he's trying so hard I was asking you about that so this is modelled on Dostoevsky's great novel The Devils The Possessed

whatever and Dostoevsky I mean he was the reactionary, The Possessed, whatever. And Dostoevsky, I mean, he was the reactionary. He was very hostile to all this stuff. One of the most, arguably, you could claim, one of the greatest reactionary books ever written. And not just that, Tom. Margaret Thatcher, 10 years after Goddard makes this film, Margaret Thatcher is reading The Possessed,

or The Devils, call it what you will, and hugely approving of it and saying this is a tremendous warning against the dangers of socialism and stuff. So how is it that, yeah, I mean, I know what you're going to ask. Actually, Tom, you ask a question. Well, I was going to say, why is Godard, who's the man of the left, adapting this unbelievably reactionary novel? It's profounder than that mean it is i it is one of the great novels it's one of and it has this this very very prophetic vision of where leninism and stalinism will go but it's it's it's not a it's not a a novel that a man of the left i i would imagine

would feel comfortable adapting? Tricky. I think the film, especially with the distance time has passed, is a great example of a kind of double think, to use an Orwellian term, on the part of Godard, is that he is all at once being supportive

of what these young people are trying to do. And among other things, they plan a political assassination, as is the case in the Dostoevsky. And also critical of their endeavour. So, for example, one of the characters, she's called Veronique, who is played by Anne Wierzymski, who was Godard's love interest in real life and was herself a student at Nanterre,

the hotbed of where May 68 was going to explode at the time. She says, I can't really connect with the working classes, you know, because after all, my parents are bankers, she says in the film. And there is also a wonderful scene where there's a traveling shot that travels through three or four windows, you know, shot on the balcony, looking into the flat. And so at the left hand side of the room, a Maoist activist, a real life Maoist activist called, what was his name? Omar Diop, I think a Senegalese man, is lecturing the others about essentially the class struggle. He's reading from the Little Red Book. And then the camera travels to the middle of the room

where there's a huge pile of Little Red Books and the others are sitting around it, smoking, listening, taking part in the debate. And then the final window we look through shows a character called Yvonne, who is the proletarian character in the group. So she's not like the others, a pampered sort of bubblegum revolutionary. She's from the countryside.

She finds it very difficult to connect with all the complicated concepts that the others talk about. And what she does in that scene is clean shoes. So she's cleaning shoes while they're listening to the lecture. And throughout the film, she's always working. She's washing up, making tea. She even turns to prostitution to fund the commune. That's a very Godard situation to find yourself in, I think. So Godard is at once, I'd say, really politically obtuse. I mean, throughout his career, I would say he really is. And at the same time, he's not without humour and irony and distance. That's perhaps why he can't really make a didactic movie in the way that he would like to.

Yeah. OK, well, didactic movies, that's everything that we want from France. Well, you clearly don't, Tom, because you liked that film with Terry Thomas in it. Yeah, I loved it. I loved it. of course the other the other great film about uh the Algerian war Day of the Jackal yes Day of the Jackal yeah um so uh just a couple of questions before we before we um wind up uh so Muriel the French film industry I mean my my sense of it is that it's it's it's always felt a bit embattled by Hollywood um Is it still alive and well independently, or is it increasingly threatened by, you know, US streaming services and all those kinds of things?

It is. I mean, everyone's threatened by US streaming services, but the French have quite successfully, are quite successfully making content for their own streaming services. So there are, they they understood you know that perhaps most people now will not be going to the cinema as habitually as they used to that they'll be watching things on television and streaming things so there are lots of dramas there's something like le bureau des légendes for example which

is the one about the Secret Service, the French Secret Service, which is great, really a wonderful production and is set in Paris, but also takes part in Syria, Algeria, other sort of hotbeds of political unrest. I think there's been quite a successful adaptation to that

and to creating French language product that people are going to want to consume, not necessarily as feature films, but as things that you can stream. And the other question I had was, so if our listeners only have time to watch one film, I mean, that's tragic. So just one film, what is the film

they absolutely have to watch otherwise they can be only one yeah i'm going to be um a little stern and i'm going to pick a black and white movie because i think you can never recommend black and white movies enough people must watch more yeah and so for me it is the children of paradise because it is so unusual and so perfect as a vision of Frenchness. That would be my choice. But Muriel, would there not be a case for saying that Les Enfants du Paradis is the best film, but Ridicule is the best film about history. Oh, Tom!

What has ridicule got on you? It's so good. Honestly, it's the best film about history ever made. Whereas Les Enfants du Paradis, as a film about history, is slightly sentimental, perhaps. Yes. Un petit peu, I don't know. Un petit peu sentimentale. No, yes, yes, yes. There's a case to be made.

It's an impossible question. There's a case to be made for ridicule. There's a case to be made for all of these films. That's the idea. I tried to select things. It's a brilliant choice. It all depends on the mood. You know, La Grande Vedrouille equally,

it would be a shame not to have seen that. Yeah. Well, it's a fact. They were brilliant choices. It's a fantastic list. and i think a wonderful format um so thank you so much for suggesting it uh and and for compiling the list and coming on and talking about them so so wonderfully and uh i hope that i hope that everyone's enjoyed it and um you know happy viewing because there are some absolute miles yeah go out and watch some French films. Especially go and watch Ridiculous.

It's also, by some way, I think the shortest. Yeah. Merci beaucoup, Muriel. Merci à vous. Merci à vous, the listeners. And we will see you all next time. Au revoir. Au revoir.

Au revoir. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.