In the late 1980s, the Guardian-reading English middle-class fell in love with French movies like Jean de Florette and its sequel Manon des Sources – a story based in rural Provence about two unscrupulous local farmers trying to trick a newcomer out of his property. Though many of those who went to see these movies – including myself – would never have admitted it, we were buying into the same kind of lush, sentimental, period drama being served up by Merchant Ivory in the UK. That was the production outfit behind the wildly popular movie A Room with a View set in Edwardian England with lashings of unrequited love and chintz.
Jean de Florette became such an unlikely smash in the UK that Stella Artois even released a TV advert parodying it. The movie starred seasoned French actors: Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and Yves Montand. The struggles of Depardieu to make his new farm work, while being undermined by his erstwhile friends Auteuil and Montand, made for painful viewing. It really was a bleak study in treachery.
Following the success of Jean de Florette came more French flicks such as Betty Blue, and Cyrano. To watch these offerings from France, we often traipsed down to the Swiss Centre cinema, just off Leicester Square. This was part of the Swiss Centre, which stood at the corner of Wardour Street. It was demolished in 2008 and the only clue that it ever existed is a large Swiss Glockenspiel that still stands in the road. Today it’s the W Hotel.
Other venues regularly showing French movies in London were the Curzon Mayfair and Curzon Phoenix, the Lumière on St Martin’s Lane, the Renoir, the Gate in Notting Hill, the Camden Plaza, the Chelsea Cinema, and the Institut Français’s Ciné Lumière. I liked the Lumière on St Martin’s Lane because it only sold silent snacks, ie not popcorn. Ceaseless crunching during films is one of my bugbears. Sadly, that picture house closed down, later becoming a Gym Box.
The early 1990s saw an interesting shift from chocolate box drama to edgy surrealism with the output of directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Jeunet is better known to global audiences today for directing the four movie in the Aliens franchise: Alien Resurrection. As well as being behind the 2001 romantic comedy, Amélie. But to my mind, when he teamed up with Caro to create Delicatessen – the result was pure genius. Now largely forgotten, it was an acclaimed piece of absurdity at the time.
Delicatessen is a very dark comedy set in a dystopian and poverty-stricken future where the landlord of a rickety tenement block is killing his tenants to provide meat for his ground floor butcher’s shop. Hard to imagine – but it’s a fun watch. The directing duo made another movie together, The City of Lost Children, about kids being kidnapped and their dreams stolen, but it didn’t capture the imagination of British audiences to the same extent as Delicatessen.
Of course, French movies were popular before this surge in the late 80s/early 90s and plenty of great series – like Lupin for example – pop up on Netflix and other streamers. But there was something distinctive about this intense interest in all things French at that time. Any views on this out there?
