Foreign Films, Shaking off Dust, Are Appealing to Wider Audiences

Eric Rohmer is a cultural guardian of France. The 82-year-old is a founding member of the 1950s New Wave film movement, an auteur director and, like his colleagues, a maker of movies the rest of the world has come to view as quintessentially French: talky, ironic, small in scale and evidently shot on a two-croissant budget.

So imagine the surprise of filmgoers filing into Rohmer’s most recent effort, “The Lady and the Duke,” released earlier this month. They saw his actors moving against lavishly digitized backdrops, reveling in special effects that would compare to those of any Hollywood blockbuster.

Clearly, something has changed.

It would be easy but not altogether correct to say foreign filmmakers are aping Hollywood--that they’ve shelved their self-seriousness and are now producing movies designed to be seen, as opposed to reviewed in alt-weeklies. That last part is true--there has been a marked turn to commercialism in foreign films.

“This is the arrival of a generation who tackles what was once left to Hollywood, and they are doing it very well,” said Catherine Verret-Vimont, executive director of the New York office of Unifrance, the French agency charged with promoting French cinema abroad.

As the annual film festival in Cannes concluded last weekend, U.S. distributors spent the previous week snapping up foreign pics. Fox Searchlight Pictures bought the U.S. distribution rights to France’s “L’Auberge Espagnole” (“The Spanish Apartment”), a hit comedy with Audrey Tautou, star of France’s top earner in the United States last year, “Amelie.”

Filmmakers abroad are not so much trying to make “American” films. Instead they are responding to market forces within their own countries: Foreign filmgoers have seen enough American films poorly dubbed into their languages and want to see movies about themselves in their own tongues.

Hence the blockbuster success in France of this year’s “Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatre,” a live-action adventure based on French comic book characters who are heroes to the Gauls.

Last year Gaulywood enjoyed its best year ever at the box office, largely on the back of popular, home-grown movies. French films took in $87 million in France in 2001; ticket sales were up 10% over 2000. French taxpayers pay twice for their movies: About half the budgets of all French movies come from government-enforced subsidies.

In tone, the sweet-natured “Amelie” would not be considered a stereotypical French film by many American filmgoers whose notion of Gallic films is probably informed by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and his 1960 classic, “Breathless,” a meandering, amoral tale about a small-time French thug who kills for no apparent reason and tries to seduce an aspiring journalist.

And it’s not just Americans who think that way about French films; French film directors do as well.

They are “very sad movies with intellectual Parisians, and a couple fighting in the kitchen--very boring,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed “Amelie,” told the Christian Science Monitor last fall.

The boost in U.S. audience for foreign films comes squarely from the youth market, industry executives say, which is a marked change from art-house audiences of the past.

“I remember seeing balding heads and blue hair in theaters before the lights went out,” said Tom Bernard, co-president of foreign-film distributor Sony Pictures Classics, recalling foreign-film audiences of his youth.

Technology aside, the key to foreign film success in the United States is tone. And if any foreign film is guaranteed to resonate with American audiences, it is the upcoming “Tanguy,” from France: It’s about a couple who can’t get their 28-year-old son to move out of the house.