Female characters in French films are always prone to controversy.
Stills from Adele's Extraordinary Adventures
In "Adele's Extraordinary Adventure", Adele is deeply guilty of making her sister a vegetative person because of an accident, so she comes up with a plan to steal the mummy of the Egyptian pharaoh and then resurrect it by scientists, relying on the rich witch doctor treatment methods of the imperial doctor to save her sister. But when the key to the plan— the scientist— was seriously injured, her first instinct was to take him home, not to the hospital, and to hold on and hold on until he got home.
In addition, there are the policemen who are hit by the pterosaurs she controls, and the nuclear physicist mummy who has been really helped her countless times by her hard-fought... If you think about it, her actions are already dangerous in themselves, what if she steals not this good mummy, but Ekhnatun or Tutankhamun?
Stills from The Marvelous Felicity
The recently released "The Marvelous Felicia" is the same. Felicity has a dream of dancing, she started from the orphanage, went through all kinds of hardships to come to the dream capital of Paris, stole other people's dance school offers, and successfully opened Goldfinger with the help of the screenwriter, realizing her dream.
Wait, a Disney-style movie, dreams, dances, need to rely on imposters to achieve? And a child with a dream of dancing, the split fork is not good, do not rely on goldfinger to modify the experience value of 128 times, even the side of the dream can not be touched, this does not mention the night before the game to talk about love, the game is late, fall down and so on.
The whole world loves them anyway, at least the director and screenwriter think so. But there are always a few moments that make the audience, who was originally immersed in the flow of images, suddenly play.
Stills from "Adele's Life"
The same female characters can find a lot, such as Adele in "Adele's Life" who has to die and then ask for forgiveness over and over again, Elena who constantly stimulates her fat sister in "Sister Erotics"... On the contrary, there are many "impossible" heroines. For example, the angel in Angel A, a desperate little, why is it so popular with angels, not only directly declaring I am yours, but also trying to sell himself to pay off debts; Ae in Falling into the Psychedelic of Love, in front of the idle bachelor Robert, said, If you want, I can fall in love with you, I can choose you, make you feel chased, make you feel different. I can make you understand what love is. ”
Stills from Angel A
Why is that? I thought about it for a moment.
First of all, it is probably because of the French author's film tradition and the consistent focus on the temperament of small people and citizens in the core of their thinking. The French philosopher Cioran said in On France: "There are more people of the middle class in France than anywhere, more than the English, the Germans and the Italians, and every Frenchman can express himself and will have a hand, and in this respect the greatness of France is composed of mediocres." Let mediocrity become exquisite, let trivial matters become elegant, and let daily life be full of wisdom and spirituality. France cannot do without mediocrity, and without it it will be unbalanced. ”
French filmmakers are keen to create illusions in the daily mediocrity, and this dream born of mediocrity, triviality, and daily life is of course inseparable from contingency, coincidence and subjective perspective, and sometimes it is inevitable to be blunt and untenable. When the subjective perspective is partial to men, it is as if it is a gorgeous obscenity; when it is partial to women, it becomes a collection of thousands of pets.
Second, the French were so keen on language as the only tool for the transmission of ideas that they focused more on form than content. "France is a country that pursues narrow perfection and does not reach the heights of superculturalism: the sublime, the tragic, the vast aesthetic. That's why it didn't produce Shakespeare, Bach, and Michelangelo. The French are better at detail, they can't provide a big picture, they can only teach form, expression. ”
This brings two creative tendencies:
One is that experimentality and conceptuality precede rationality. Immersed in Adele's avant-garde image relative to the prevailing social realities of 1912, Luc Besson was obsessed with portraying an aberration-proof French goddess who smoked, sweared, and rode a motorcycle. For him, the figure existed in 1912, when French women were not yet suffraged, and its own symbolism was enough, and everything else had to serve this intention. The Marvelous Felicity is clearly the same problem.
Stills from "Sister Eroticism"
Another tendency is that the entire film becomes an "image of thought", a video paper on the author's concept collection, exploring women's choice under the structure of lust and patriarchy. So there's Elena and Anna Foss, who behave very differently in Sister Erotics. And the secular version of this tendency is that the whole movie seems to be trying to confirm a certain proverb or saying.
"Unfaithful women sometimes feel guilty, loyal women are always guilty", "The more I know about men, the more I love women", "It is wrong to think that women can keep secrets, she is not keeping one secret, but many secrets", "Women would rather follow us to be unhappy than let us leave them happy"... Films that confirm these sayings include "Two Lovers of Mary Joe", "My Man", "Laughter and Punishment" and so on.
Another aspect of this creative tendency is the passion for character interaction and dialogue. "The ills and exploits of France are now all now social, as if man exists only to meet and talk, the need to talk is characteristic of this strange world, and the French are born to speak, to live for argument."
Sophia Phillips, the director of "Falling in love with Psychedelics," obviously doesn't care at all about how the story begins, he cares about the conversation, the interaction, in other words, the relationship.
Luc Besson did the same in Angel A, where the male and female protagonists spoke for more than an hour. "The Last Tango in Paris" is not like this, the encounter is only a moment, what matters is what happens between the two people later.
Stills from "Two Little Guesses"
"Two Little Guesses" is directly placed in the spotlight of the front desk by Yu Lian and Sophie, and everything else and everything else is just the background.
The French are incomparably romantic in the film, with the help of a wise observation of the banal, trivial everyday, through conversation and interaction, dissecting the hidden places of emotion between people and people. As for why we met and why we fell in love, it is a mystery.
And I think the more important reason is the French fascination with revolution. The spirit of "freedom, equality, fraternity" came directly from the French Revolution, and the relevant propaganda of the French Revolution greatly promoted the development of journalism and instilled in every Frenchman the ideal of the liberation of individuality. The immediate consequence of this revolution was the foundation of France's indestructible secularist values.
Sociologists Bartilemy and Michela have investigated and analyzed the Views and Attitudes of the French on Secularism, and they have found that in the French perception of the history of secularism, there are several concepts that are very important: at the top of the list is the idea of the republic and the citizen, followed by the secular state independent of religion, the Constitution, public education, the ideal of "freedom, equality, fraternity", human and civil rights, equality before the law, the integration of all people into the state, and the protection of minority voices.
On the one hand, this means a high degree of enthusiasm for political participation, and on the other hand, it means that what Bella calls "public religion" is less religious in France. Perhaps that's why French filmmakers can use their imaginations when creating characters, especially female characters, without worrying about self-censorship like their American counterparts across the ocean, lest they draw fierce criticism from religious groups and ethnic minorities.
Corresponding to the assimilationist policies of human and civil rights, minority assimilationist policies, and high recognition of core values is an aversion to moral standards that succumb to external pressures. An article published by A. Girard and Jean Stozel in the first issue of the French Journal of Sociology in 1985 shows that this has gradually formed the basis of French values since at least 1980. The emancipation of individuality, the secularist public religion and the antipathy to external pressure-driven moral standards together safeguarded the freedom of French cinematography.
Of course, there is also the most important factor, which is the strong feminist film tradition and more egalitarian gender relations. According to the World Economic Forum's 2016 Global Gender Gap Report, France ranks 17th in terms of gender equality levels, while the United States ranks 45th, down 17 places from 2015, with the main gap between the two countries being the gender difference in projected income.
We must also not forget that the first female film director was the Frenchman Alice Guy, the pioneer of the New Wave cinema was Agnes Varda, in addition to Duras, Jeanne Morrow, Jacqueline Audrey... In the United States of the same era, female characters were still just embellishments on the screen.
Compared with the more obvious and pleasing "American girls" whose routines are more obvious and pleasing, I suddenly feel that these girls on the French screen who can always cause controversy are more real and cute. Of course, people can be selfish, arrogant, rude, vain, incomprehensible, whimsical, and such people are of course the protagonists of life, and can deduce the illusions of scene after scene on the ruins of daily life.
They don't need to fight like Black Widow and still be just a soy sauce character, they don't have to be ridiculed by their teammates as, they don't need to be as tough as Sarah Connor, but they're only tough, it's just a side, not a full person.
Apparently, it was the French, not the Americans, who really put women in the center of the stage.