French comedies stay home

Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008, France, Dany Boon)

The French box office is perhaps on the verge of crowning a new all-time champion in terms of seats sold (at least since the beginning of collection of reliable statistical data in the mid-1950s), with the comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis inching closer to the number one spot, held by Titanic since 1998. James Cameron's film replaced another locally-produced comic film, La Grande vadrouille, which had spent over thirty years as the undisputed king of the hill. As of mid-June 2008, Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis has sold about 19.2 million tickets, around 500,000 shy of Titanic's final tally, and while the remake rights have apparently been snapped up by Will Smith's production company I suspect that the original film will barely see the light of day in English-language markets.*

La Grande vadrouille (1966, France, Gérard Oury)

I've always been fascinated by the ways in which continental European film industries produce movies for their domestic markets that often prove wildly popular at home, and occasionally in neighbouring countries, but which remain invisible in the English-speaking world. While I'm sure the same phenomenon exists in other parts of the world, too, I'm not as familiar with the film industries of different Asian countries, for instance. Although Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis was an unexpectedly big hit, most of the biggest domestically-produced hits in the French market over the years have been popular comedies. After Bienvenue and La Grande vadrouille other big French hits include Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopatre (2002), Les Visiteurs (1993) and Les Bronzés 3: Amis pour la vie (2006): the first non-comedy local production comes in ninth, and that film, Le Grand bleu (1988), was partly shot in English.

Les Bronzés 3: Amis pour la vie (2006, France, Patrice Leconte)

That's only the top of the pile, too: after that you get dozens of films featuring major domestic stars who remain largely unknown to English-speaking audiences, even those who enjoy arthouse fare (for example, Thierry Lhermitte, Gérard Jugnot, Valérie Lemercier, and Bienvenue's Dany Boon, a comic who made his cinema debut in an entirely different kind of film; when we see these stars in English-speaking countries, it's more often than not for their occasional dramatic work). More familiar actors like Michel Blanc or Daniel Auteuil also got their start in broad comedies that didn't travel well, if at all - Blanc became a huge star with the success of the first two Bronzés films in 1978 and 1979, among other movies, while Daniel Auteuil appeared in films like Les Héros n'ont pas froid aux oreilles (1979) or Les Sous-doués (1980; a high school comedy that spawned a sequel, the title is hard to translate, but essentially it's the "Under-gifted"). As Rémi Fournier Lanzoni wrote, "virtually no critic could have imagined the rest of [Auteuil's] career" from such beginnings. Then there's the entire "first career" of director Patrice Leconte, who was unknown to English-speaking audiences before his ninth feature, Monsieur Hire (1989); Leconte and Michel Blanc had already made six films together with Blanc either as actor or writer before "going serious".

Viens chez moi j'habite chez une copine (1980, France, Patrice Leconte)

It's not like the French are alone, either, in consistently producing locally successful comic fare: the British had their long-lived Carry On series of comedies - which were sometimes calculated to bring American success, an effort that was not rewarded - and Italy is still churning out the seasonal Natale comedies. Smaller European countries have also produced long-lasting series, like the Danish Olsen-banden (Olsen gang) films that began in 1968; they were sometimes simultaneously made in Norwegian, with Sweden later producing its own versions. The Finns, for their part, have Uuno Turhapuro, a dishevelled character with a knack for getting himself in trouble - and talking his way back out. Over a thirty year period, twenty Uuno films appeared - remarkable for a small country with an unusual language that reduced export possibilities (though perhaps the relative novelty of Finnish-language films long before the Kaurismäki brothers entered the business was a factor in the films' domestic success).

Uuno Turhapuro and friends

What's most interesting of all to me is not the success that these films have enjoyed in their domestic markets (many French films did very well in Eastern Europe, too, with viewers from Hungary or Poland having fond memories of stars like Louis de Funès), but rather the almost complete lack of critical attention to these films in the English-speaking world (since the dawn of the video age, it's a lot harder to argue that the films are simply inaccessible). As Dimitris Eleftheriotis has written, "In the discourse of Anglo-US film studies the terms "popular" and "European" seem to be mutually exclusive." I've found that even when academics do take a look at popular European cinema, they tend more often than not to interpret "popular" in the sense of "the popular classes" rather than in the sense of box office popularity. There are plenty of sound aesthetic - and other - reasons that so much has been written about the films of directors like Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, or Jacques Rivette, to name but three directors whose works are probably something of a minority taste in relative terms, but while popular comedies might not bear the same kind of scrutiny it seems odd, at best, that they remain so critically marginalised.

Coluche and Louis de Funès face off (L'Aile ou la cuisse, 1976, France, Claude Zidi)

Most surveys of French cinema, for instance, barely mention the key directors and, equally important, actors who have made their careers in comic films, while the little analysis that does exist tends to be largely negative in assessing the films' content from an artistic or political perspective. I can't help thinking there's a kind of critical blindspot in operation here: while critics seem keen to analyse films that attempt to depict the popular classes or which purport to speak for those classes, they're less keen to examine the films that - good, bad, or indifferent - are demonstrably watched by the population as a whole. In the process, critics miss the opportunity to examine some of the ways in which people see themselves reflected on the screen, and often fail to recognise that even a well-tooled money-making popular comedy may have its own insights to share. Susan Hayward's comment, in her book French National Cinema, that "apart from a couple of comedies" the Occupation period is rarely much more than a picturesque background in 1980s French film, is pretty typical; the "apart from" seems to contain its own commentary, as if there's little point in examining what such films do (one of the films she mentions, the highly successful Papy fait de la résistance (1983), features a group of actors who got their start in the freewheeling café-théâtres of the post-1968 era, itself a phenomenon worthy of greater attention). Another example of undervalued comedy might be Claude Zidi's 1976 L'Aile ou la cuisse, which has a sustained lament for France's changing food culture - and also marks an important generational shift in terms of comic movie acting, bringing together the older star de Funès and the younger Coluche, in the vanguard of a new kind of comic acting.

Papy fait de la résistance (1983, France, Jean-Marie Poiré)

There may not of -- course -- be anything as significant at work in Dany Boon's big hit; from what I've seen, it looks like a competently and at times very funny film. But it's surely worth looking beyond just the box office figures to at least ask what it is about this particular film -- or La Grande vadrouille or Les Visiteurs and many other films, irrespective of their relative artistic merits -- that has prompted so many of the director's compatriots to open their wallets.
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I found all of the following helpful in one way or another (there are no doubt half-remembered insights from other books/articles):

Richard Dyer (ed.), Popular European Cinema (Oxford: Routledge, 1992)
Dimitrios Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas of Europe (New York & London: Continuum, 2001)
Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema from its Beginnings to the Present (New York & London: Continuum, 2002)
Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (Oxford, Routledge, 2005 - 2nd edition)
Georges Sadoul, Le Cinéma français (1890-1962) (Paris: Flammarion, 1962)
Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1992)Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have also written about some of these issues a number of times on their blog.

* 2014 update: Titanic remains the all-time champ in France. Plans for a US remake of Bienvenue chez les ch'tis were abandoned in 2012. In 2011-2012, Les Intouchables also surpassed the box office tally of La Grande vadrouille, selling over 19 million tickets.