Lost in translation... Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil in Hidden.
So "France has fallen out of love with the auteur''and the art house movies he (it is usually he) makes. Hurrah! We philistines may save the noble French film industry yet.
Let me explain. When I arrived in London from Cornwall at 17 I was ashamed to discover that some of my new friends in the history department at UCL had not only heard of all the great contemporary French and Italian filmmakers, they had actually seen their work.
UCL being next door to the Slade School of Fine Art, I plunged into the free movies which the latter's film department had to offer. My idea of a good day's history was not one great movie from the 50s or the 20s (Soviet films of the period were terrific), not two, but three. I could never manage four.
It took me 25 years to wonder whether my prelapsarian Cornish indifference to the fashionable Antonioni and his lovely star, Monica Vitti, had, with hindsight, been quite discriminating. But I loyally jogged along to high-minded French, German or Italian films whenever time allowed. I remember Wot-Was-It-Called, a brain-dead one in which Johnny Halliday plays a bank robber, which was daft. But I enjoyed it. Some of these precious art house films are still wonderful.
Until Hidden. Yes, I realise that Michael Haneke, its writer/director, is an Austrian, that Hidden stars the lovely Juliette Binoche, won lots of prizes and drew big audiences. But it's also a French movie about very French types. Mrs White and I hated it. So did most of our friends over 30.
As you may know, the main characters are a successful Parisian couple.Anne (Binoche) works in publishing, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a sort of French Melvyn Bragg without Bragg's puckish humour. They have one 12-year-old son, Pierre (Daniel Duval). Everything is fine on the surface until they start receiving anonymous videos, alluding to a secret deep in Melvyn-Georges's past.
It was the opening credits that signaled trouble ahead. A simple, static shot of the couple's house while the pre-credits rolled. The viewer is not to know the shot is important to the plot, we learn nothing. A first flicker of boredom ensues.
Seeking to be more thoughtful than action-crazed, wham-bang American movies European film makers tend to want to make the viewer admire long (did I say pointless?) camera actions down dark, grimy corridors or through front doors-and-off-with-your-coats. They hold a shot longer than they need to, as if to save money. You long for a decent edit as well as someone to repaint the corridor.
This approach can work if the plot is clever, the story makes sense and the characters engage one's imagination. In Hidden, Melvyn-Georges is so emotionally unintelligent at every turn ("Don't do that, stupid") that one rapidly looses first sympathy, then interest in him. You do wonder why Binoche stays with a dope who treats her like a child. The larger issue with which the film seeks to deal is French guilt - or lack of it - towards its former colonial jewel of Algeria. It's a good theme. Britain has spent £200m lawyering the Saville public inquiry into 13 deaths on Bloody Sunday in 1972. As Hidden notes in passing, the Paris police drowned 200 (actually a conservative estimate) Algerian demonstrators in the Seine in 1961 when France was already a pillar of the EU. No Saville inquiry into that one. Like those murders, the plot of Hidden is left largely unresolved. I had been warned there were a few crucial plot frames in the last minute of the film, so I looked out for them - but missed them. No one has satisfactorily explained to me since what exactly they were trying to say. Maybe that was the point. None of the reviews I read make anything much of this, except to say that the director throws these questions back at the viewer. Thanks chaps, but I paid £6.50 for him to do the work. Come to think of it, I paid the newspaper critics slightly less to help out.
No wonder some of the blame for the French movie crisis reported today is placed on critics, in collusion with their director mates, for over-promoting "the same old intellectual musings while snubbing popular hits like Amelie" (I'm afraid I liked Amelie).
Perhaps the over-protection of the French industry from Hollywood contributes to this failure. Most of Hollywood's output is mediocre-to-bad, but a lot of the junk is watchable junk. I know because at least twice a year my guard slips late at night on the sofa or on a plane, I watch a high-gloss but dud American movie and feel cheated. As insulted as with Hidden, but in a different way. Hollywood movies are mostly about making money.
"Never see a film until someone you trust has told you it's OK," is now my rule. In the case of French films it now needs Peter Bradshaw's review plus one other - two if it's Haneke. It generally works, though Hidden was recommended by a nameless young friend. You know who you are, Tania.
