Film trivia time. What do Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and the film critic David Stratton have in common? The answer: all three have been made Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government – the country’s highest cultural honour.
So it’s fitting that Stratton (alongside his longtime At the Movies co-host, Margaret Pomeranz) should be patron of Australia’s 2015 French film festival. His love affair with French cinema stretches back to his teens, and he describes seeing the new-wave films of the 50s and 60s as transformative. “I was already in love with film but that took me in a different direction, the freedom and the looseness of the way those guys approached cinema,” he says.
A filmgoer since childhood, the adolescent Stratton was overwhelmed by the works of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Demy. “I still vividly remember seeing Truffaut’s first feature 400 Blows for the first time and walking out of the cinema feeling I’d seen something extraordinary.”
As former director of the Sydney film festival, Stratton says the Australian film industry could learn a thing or two from the French. He points to the small but significant tax applied to all French cinema tickets (both local and international productions) that goes towards developing and promoting French films.
A similar system would be impossible to implement in Australia, he adds, but he’d like to see more funding for promoting smaller films like The Babadook. “It had a small distributor, and they couldn’t spend a fortune on advertising, so it’s a loss. Something has to be done about it, that problem has to be solved,” Stratton says. You can’t have movies “as good as The Babadook” winning best Australian film at the Aactas if people didn’t know it was on at the time of release, Stratton says. Ideally funding bodies like Screen Australia should step in because “what is the point in making movies that nobody goes to see?”
He remains a fan of French film-makers today, particularly the prodigious director Bertrand Tavernier, but won’t single out a particular rising star. “The great thing about French cinema is that there are new faces and new names coming through all the time. Every year when I’ve gone to Cannes, there’s always been new French films directed by people I’ve never heard of and some of them are very, very exciting.”
Of the 2015 French film festival program, Stratton picks Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy, Stefan Liberski’s Tokyo Fiancée and Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion as highlights. But his top tip is The Blue Room, directed by and starring Mathieu Amalric. The story of an illicit relationship that leads to murder was shot in 4:3 television ratio (not widescreen), which gives it a strikingly different look. “I think [it’s] an extraordinarily fine film,” Stratton says.
As for life after At the Movies, Stratton is working on a third book about Australian film. “The last one [The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry] ended in 1990,” he says. “It’s about time we picked up the pieces over the last 25 years and see what’s happened since then.”
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The Alliance Francaise French film festival runs until 22 March in Sydney and Melbourne, 24 March in Adelaide, 25 March in Canberra, then travels to Brisbane, Perth, Byron Bay and Hobart
