City of Lights, City of Angels 2001

By David Geffner
Photos by Robert Hale

SACEM President Bernard Miyet (left) with DGA past president and current Secretary-Treasurer Gilbert Cates.

Veber's fast-paced, sharply plotted new film, The Closet, went a long way toward fulfilling his vision. The Closet served as the opening-night gala for a celebration of French film unlike any other in the industry.

Dating back to a landmark 1996 agreement between France's SACEM (Society of Authors, Composers and Editors of Music) the DGA, the Motion Picture Association of American and the WGA, City of Lights grew out of a Franco-American Cultural Fund created to strengthen the bonds between the two nations' filmmakers. The agreement has helped to allocate monies toward scholarships for French and American film students, master classes with leading American writers and directors for French filmmakers within France, international film conferences, and for festivals like City of Lights, City of Angels, which promotes dozens of French films which may otherwise have gone unnoticed in a crowded American marketplace.

Veber's dream was an oft-repeated one amongst industry stalwarts like Jack Valenti of the MPAA, DGA President Jack Shea, former WGA President Del Reisman, Bernard Miyet, who recently took over the reigns of SACEM from France's cinematic crusader Jean Loup Tournier, and Pascal Rogard, of L'ARP. The latter is a French organization that defends its writers, directors, and producers' moral and economic rights.

A VIP champagne reception in the DGA's atrium preceded Jack Shea's opening-night welcome speech. Industry luminaries like Randal Kleiser, John Frankenheimer and Robert Rosen (UCLA Film and Television Archive), mixed with visiting French filmmakers Anne Villacèque (Petite Cherie) and Robert Guédiguian (The Town Is Quiet) on the atrium's sunlit patio.

Shea told the SRO audience, "We can all be very proud of what SACEM, the DGA, the MPA, and the WGA have accomplished with the help of L'ARP, UCLA, the French Consulate in Los Angeles, and UNIFRANCE."

Shea said that the April festival has evolved into a highly anticipated annual get-together, which provokes other filmmakers and members of the Hollywood community. "This 5th anniversary of City of Lights, City of Angels," Shea continued, "coincides with a very successful first quarter, 2001, for French movies both in France and abroad. I'd like to celebrate this with you and we all hope this continues for many years to come."

Celebrations were certainly in order following Francis Veber's post-screening Q&A session, moderated by Norwegian director Harold Zwart (One Night at McCool's). The session was a lively give-and-take that showcased Veber's wry sense of humor. The Closet is about a shy accountant (Daniel Auteuil), who pretends to be homosexual so as not to be fired from his job in a condom factory. "One of the main differences between working in America versus working in France," Veber laughed, "is that in France the director is usually also the writer and his script is 150 pages. In America, the director along with the screenplay, he is presented with 150 pages of notes from the studio executives."

Wednesday featured a screening of Petite Cherie, a thought-provoking drama about a 30-year-old woman still living at home and how she copes with breaking free from her suffocating parents and her first romance to a freeloading lothario.

Christine Perrin (left), Harold Zwart,
Francis Veber and Michele Laroque.

Villaceque was motivated to make a violent statement about French society, which she feels "could happen anywhere," into a movie. She chose Orleans as the film's location as it exemplified a middle-class suburban neighborhood. The town's grayness added to her satire on the suburban middle class; "Orleans is a town in the middle of France, just like the people and the characters." Ms. Villaceque feels the real violence in the film are the characters inability to express themselves, their bottled up emotions, which for our protagonist eventually leads to her killing her parents. Ironically, Ms. Villaceque looks at the ending as somewhat uplifting as the woman is now finally able to breathe.

Speaking at a DGA filmmakers' reception just prior to Thursday night's screening of Guédiguian's The Town Is Quiet, director John Frankenheimer cites French films as having a "huge influence," dating back to his childhood when his father first sparked his interest. "The recent success of films like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may help to educate the American public that a foreign-language film with subtitles can be every bit as accessible and entertaining as American-language films," Frankenheimer said. "Most of all, I think it's wonderful that all the guilds in this town can come together to make this festival happen. It's a hugely important resource for American audiences and it's my hope that it survives and continues."

Surviving in the face of long odds has, for the most part, been the story for American distributors of French cinema over the last decade. Yet this year's City of Lights festival may hint that things are changing. As Jean Francois Doittin, Minister for Trade and Economic Affairs at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., said before the Friday-night screening of Claude Chabrol's newest film, Nightcap, "this year is the first time since the 1980s that the French industry had a larger market share in France than American films. That's a significant indicator. American films still retain an 85% market share in Europe, of course, so it's not like we're seeing less American films on our screens--just more French ones."

And with good reason. Robert Guédiguian's The Town Is Quiet left DGA audiences stunned with its emotional power. The film tells the heartbreaking story of several Marseilles residents (Guédiguian was born in L'Estaque, a small port just outside Marseilles), the most potent of which features Guédiguian's wife, actress Ariane Ascaride, as a working mother struggling to raise her infant granddaughter whose mother is addicted to heroin. Guédiguian's post-screening Q&A was hosted and translated by City of Lights, City of Angels director Christine Perrin.

"I don't like the word ‘direct' when speaking about my relationship with actors," Perrin translated for Guédiguian, who speaks no English at all. "Unless it is like a traffic control--guiding, not telling them, to go a certain way." Through Perrin, Guédiguian relayed that he had worked with the same group of actors for decades, creating artistic shorthand. "I don't believe directing means to tell the actor the meaning of the scene and that is the only way to do it," Perrin translated. "I allow the actors to come up with their own proposals and then use that as a basis to form the scene."

When quizzed by an audience member if he worked in the "American style" of directing covering a scene with masters, close-ups, and medium shots and then sorting out how it will play in the cutting room--Guédiguian pleaded ignorance. "What you define as an American way of shooting with all sorts of varied angles," Perrin translated, "is totally foreign to me. If I get stuck with an idea and don't know where I'm going, I will cover the hell out of the scene just in case," Guédiguian laughed. "But in each sequence I have an idea of the one key shot I want to get. The way to get to that shot is by working with the actors straight off, and hearing their ideas. Sometimes we get to the shot I had in mind, sometimes it changes into something completely different according to their input."

Friday night's screening was an anchor evening for the festival, showcasing Nightcap, the 52nd film of France's most prominent living member of the famed Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), Claude Chabrol. Although the 80-year-old director did not make the journey over, his spirit was ever-present on-screen through the movie's star, Isabelle Huppert, an actress Chabrol has featured in no less than seven of his films. In Nightcap, Huppert plays the head of a large Swiss chocolate manufacturer, who is willing to murder to preserve her relationship with her pianist husband (Jacques Dutronc).

MPA Chairman/President/CEO Jack Valenti heaped praise on Chabrol's long career in his welcoming speech before the screening. "For almost the last 50 years, Chabrol has sustained a creative effort that is the envy of so many other directors in the world," Valenti remarked.

Left to right: Director Randal Kleiser, DGA Assistant Executive Director Elizabeth Stanley, MPAA President Jack Valenti and Pascal Rogard of L'ARP.

"This movie tonight," observed L'ARP delegate Pascal Rogard, "is a part of French cinema, even though it was shot in English with European and American actors. Even though its French director chose an American beauty like Summer Phoenix to star in the film. Like this entire festival, Esther Kahn is a good reflection of the current French cinema--a cinema with much diversity and points of view. It is this diversity that we want to share with every country in the world."

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