11

INTERRUPTED NOTES ON THE FRENCH COMEDY FILM

– I –

The French comedy film: a staple, for internal use only, which, during its first period, featured an unvarying urban sociology. The concierge, the café owner, the tramp, the domineering grandma, the lousy husband, the parish priest, the former sergeant, the prostitute, the street peddler, the hairdresser’s assistant, the heckled schoolteacher, the snobbish woman from the 16^th Arrondissement. Stereotypes that were invariably played by the same bunch of second-tier actors: Noël Roquevert, Pauline Carton, Raymond Bussières, et al. A pre-industrial-age France of convivial neighborhoods, a bit on the lascivious side, addicted to red wine, far-removed from any general idea, full of cheating spouses, colonialist, and unproductive. Boulevard theater-type screenplays, less slapstick in nature (slapstick is not a French phenomenon) than “Heavens-it’s-my-husband!”¹ Labiche² transplanted and trivialized among the “little people” of rear-courtyard-dwelling mavericks. A sort of corny, old-fashioned eternity. The humorous intrigues of your good, decent folks.

– II –

Some well-defined sub-genres nevertheless. The military comedy, which is still going strong today (cf. all the bidasse³ films), having begun, like everything else, in the nineteenth century, in the theater or in the novel, with Les Gaîtés de l’escadron (The High Spirits of the Squadron) (after Labiche everything derives from Courteline).⁴ A very subtle difference: military comedy is not to be confused with gendarme comedy (which is just as bulletproof, as witness De Funès’ gendarme franchise, and springs from the same roots: Le gendarme est sans pitié [The Pitiless Policeman], a Courteline play). The Southern/Marseille-type comedy, perfected in the cinema by Pagnol but originally descended from Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin de Tarascon. Pimp-whore comedy, whose template is “La Maison Tellier,” a short story by Maupassant. Teacher-pupil comedy, whose source is the novel La Guerre des Boutons⁵ (War of the Buttons) and the refined form of which is Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows). And still other sub-genres.

– III –

There are no “diagonal” characters in this cinema, no roles combining the popular generic element with the network of situations. No Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or even Laurel and Hardy. Tati’s Mr. Hulot will already be an exception for this reason alone (and on account of so many other things!). Social types are combined and connected in relationships that nothing can ever undermine. Instead of diagonal characters there are the stars of French comedy, who represent unchanging performances, faces, and trademark gimmicks rather than organic functions or formal principles in the work. There are Fernandel (“there lies whitening now the jawbone of an ass”),⁶ Rellys, the indestructible sergeant or crude peasant, and Bourvil and De Funès. The film is theirs; we look forward to seeing them play their typical roles, and the rest is just filmic rubbish.

– IV –

Today, let’s face it, there’s no one. What about Belmondo, it could be objected. But that’s something else again. The line of descent in his case is from Arsène Lupin,⁷ the typical overgrown Parisian street kid, the brawny little French stud, a fun-loving wiseguy, ladies’ man, and high wire acrobat who, with only his somersault, saves France from mortal danger. Arsène Lupin was duly anti-Kraut and played the traditional English enemy for a fool (cf. Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès). Belmondo, as befits a more decadent age, is more restrained, but ultimately, in L’As des as (Ace of Aces), he protects the widow and the orphan from the Nazis. The typical Belmondo film aims less at comedy than pure entertainment. Historical fantasy has taken over from the sociology of concierges, who have incidentally all become Portuguese in the meantime, something that creates big problems in terms of preserving the old nationalistic connections between the crudeness of the comedy and Parisian realism.

– V –

Just as every parliamentary politician has to have the church steeple of his native village, from which he can declare his deep love for his country – Pinay from Saint-Chamond, Giscard from Chamalières, Mitterrand from Château-Chinon and Latché, Chirac from the Corrèze, and so on – the stars of French comedy for a long time had to put their provincial roots on display: Fernandel was from Marseille, Bourvil from Normandy.

– VI –

The comedic situations of this cinema are extremely limited in number. This is a crucial point: the art (if you can call it that!) of French comedy cinema is in no way an art of the gag. This is because novelty and urgency are the soul of the gag, whereas in the French comedy film, the more obvious and ordinary something is, the slower and more predictable it is, the better. It is always about fulfilling expectations. The aim of the French comedy is fulfillment (and to that extent it may unwittingly induce anxiety). So the cuckolded French husband comes in the door while the lover climbs out the window. The old battle-axe hits the policeman with her umbrella. The wino rants on his park bench. The retired sergeant brags about his war exploits. The soldier sneaks out of the barracks for a roll in the hay with the girls. The concierge yaks away. The postman rings several times. The corporal gets into trouble with his superior. The plumber walks in on the bourgeois woman in her bath. And so on and so forth.

The same rule applies to the stars as well. We expect Fernandel to bare his horse-like teeth, Bourvil to utter some hilarious Freudian slips, De Funès to throw a fit, Belmondo to jump from a plane onto a delivery bike “without a stunt double.” French national sentiment of this period can be summed up in the slogan: “Nothing new!” A cinema of the eternity of the social order.

– VII –

The First World War is a taboo subject in comedy: too many deaths, too much nationalistic consensus. The Second World War, on the other hand, is one of its favorite subjects. What a riot it was, actually, this cinema suggests: just think, the defeat, the drubbing, the cowardice, the black market! It’s all so good. Especially the black market: the resourceful person was the high-wire artist of daily life. The German occupiers were perfect targets for farce because of their having dodged combat. Three dates stand out in this account, which should be interpreted as nostalgia for an era when the general historical irresponsibility empowered singular individuals. France in these films appears as what some bewildered resourceful guy makes of it. Hence, La traversée de Paris (Four Bags Full, 1956), La Grande Vadrouille (Don’t Look Now: We’re Being Shot At, 1966), and Papy fait de la résistance (Gramps Is in the Resistance, 1983).

– VIII –

Papy is a synthetic symptom.

• For the (prevailing) idea that everyone was more or less a Pétainist and a collaborator during the war, Papy substitutes the notion that everyone – except Jugnot,⁸ who is consigned to being the bad guy – was a Resistance fighter. This is the fashionable Socialist Party line of the moment. The effect, however, is exactly the same: unreality and total meltdown.
• Papy brings together the boulevard theater generation (Jacqueline Maillan in the role of the nice grandma) and the post-’68 generation of the Café de la Gare and Le Spendid.⁹ Thus, the film shows how ’68 is dead and buried and there is, was, and will be only one French comedy cinema. The effect is reinforced by the fleeting presence in the film of all those actors who are as French as they come. Papy reconciles the nation.
• Papy incorporates the Arsène Lupin-Belmondo-type film, with the half-“poetic,” half-pathetic character of “Super-Resistance Fighter,” who, in top hat and black cape, singlehandedly plunges his little tricolor dart into the German general’s forehead.
• Papy juxtaposes historical violence (the Resistance fighter Carmet’s car blowing up, all the people rounded up to be shot) and broad cabaret humor (Villeret in his role as a Nazi officer singing a Julio Iglesias song) in a truly vulgar mishmash that completes the transmutation of national sentiment into a mere backdrop. Papy is (unwittingly) contemporary with a time when, the old models of French national sentiment all being foreclosed, suturing them to comedy no longer makes any sense. Papy is a rag-film as a result of wanting to be a flag-film.
• Papy is truly, inconceivably atrocious. It stipulates that “national reconciliation” within the orbit of comedy can and must take place from below. It is a useful index of current conditions.

– IX –

Let’s take a look at the following list of recent film titles:

• Je sais rien, mais je dirai tout (I Don’t Know Anything But I’ll Tell All, 1973), by Pierre Richard.
• Comment réussir quand on est con et pleurnichard (How to Make Good When One Is a Jerk and a Crybaby, 1974), by Michel Audiard.
• Plus ça va, moins ça va (The More It Goes, The Less It Goes, 1977), by Michel Vianey.
• Arrête ton char … bidasse! (Gimme a Break, Rookie!, 1977), by Michel Gérard.
• C’est pas moi, c’est lui (It’s Not Me, It’s Him, 1980), by Pierre Richard and Alain Godard.
• Courage fuyons (Courage–Let’s Run, 1979), by Yves Robert.
• Les Sous-doués (The Under-Gifted, 1980), by Claude Zidi.
• En cas de guerre mondiale, je file à l’étranger (If There’s a World War, I’m Going Abroad, 1982), by Jacques Ardouin.

Doesn’t this list say it all? Wouldn’t it make Bazaine and Trochu (past participle of the verb trop choir [to fall too much], as Hugo said), Weygand and Pétain¹⁰ laugh their heads off? Comedy would appear to have no respect for anything. No kidding! In any case, this is a cinema of the under-gifted, which you hardly need any courage to run away from and about which, whatever image you may personally have of French identity, you’re happy to be able to say that if that’s me, it’s not that.

– X –

I had intended to cover seven other phenomenological points regarding these products, because, contrary to what the classical philosophers maintained, nothingness is far from having no properties.

I know all but I won’t tell anything.

L’Imparnassien, Fall 1983