From France With Love

Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy

Mary Harrod

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784533588
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857739902
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Love stories have always been at the heart of French cinema, but romantic comedies have, until recently, been absent from it. In 2001, the global success of Amelie catalysed a major development in the Western world's second-largest film industry: the appropriation of the 'Hollywood' romantic comedy genre (or Rom-Com a l'Americaine). In From France with Love, Mary Harrod explores this contemporary phenomenon, examining both local hits and films with international status. Using socio-cultural data, box-office figures and analysis of critical reception, she reveals the ways in which these films mirror shifting attitudes towards gender roles within French society, as well as the increasingly important interrelation between French national cinema and transnational filmmaking paradigms.

1
Romantic Comedy – and its Discontents

This chapter is concerned with definitions of romantic comedy and the specificity and status of its French variant. As we shall see, however, the chapter’s central theme is the deprecation of rom-com as an object worthy of study and its consequent scholarly neglect, globally and in France particularly.

Romantic Comedy in a Global Context

There are reasons to believe that romantic comedy as a genre may be especially well equipped to negotiate external cultural developments. As Roberta Garrett has recently observed in a discussion of the contemporary global genre, over the years key rom-com studies have offered ‘a degree of critical consensus [ … ] concerning the historical specificity of and formal distinctions between cycles such as the early comedy of remarriage (1920s–1930s), the screwball comedy (1930s–1940s), the sex-comedy (1950s–1960s) and the nervous romance (1970s)’ (2007: 96). In other words, throughout its theorisations rom-com has typically been seen as by definition a genre dealing with the shifts in gender roles and relations that have occurred during different periods. To understand why, we must look beyond the cinema to literary and cultural studies scholarship on comedy and romance.

Literary and Cultural Studies Approaches

The comic component of the rom-com’s identity is important in understanding the genre’s social relevance. A running theme of the many and diverse literary theories of comedy put forward since the Classical period is the latter’s essentially social status and import. This relevance is perhaps most obvious when it comes to satire. In France, critiques of contemporary regimes, philosophies and mores by writers like Voltaire and Diderot are exemplary. But even the most seemingly trivial jokes frequently rely on immediate context for their import. Freud himself, often accused of an ahistorical bent, cannot avoid tying his discussion of the varying conditions in which innuendo might occur to social class, historical era and especially gender, when he designates certain jokes a way of oppressing women (Freud 2002: 96–7).

If context is all-important when it comes to comedy, comedy can be profoundly revealing about the social world in which it is produced. Not only does ‘comic insulation’ (Palmer 1987: 45) – the protective layer afforded by comedy’s apparent frivolousness – allow it to broach topics that might be taboo in more ‘serious’ registers; comedy in fact tends to accumulate around such sites of difficulty or anxiety, as jokes exploit the tension generated by these. This makes comic texts potent mediators of a society’s norms and values, both official and internalised.

As for romance, this term presents a dualistic profile, as both cultural and fictional narrative. The ubiquity with which the notion of romantic love appears in recent Western fiction is certainly a measure of its enduringly irresistible allure. As observed in a study of literary romance in twentieth-century France, despite the cultural shift away from marriage towards ‘more sequential and complex family structures’, an investment in love as a mutual commitment based on passionate desire and affinity is a major feature of contemporary culture (Holmes 2006: 115). So much so that, as global rom-com scholar Deleyto puts it, ‘we have forgotten that [romance] is [ … ] an “invention” of a group of Provençal poets at the end of the eleventh century’ (Deleyto 2003: 167). His discussions here and elsewhere (2009a; Evans and Deleyto 1998) focus on this discourse’s capacity for adapting to circumstance, as is apparent in various other interventions on the subject (see for example Foucault 1981; Giddens 1992; Pearce and Stacey 1995: 12). Michel Foucault’s work as a whole has emphasised the way in which even the most apparently ‘unreal’ (one meaning of romantic in common parlance) stories feed into dominant attitudes, while sociologist of romance Anthony Giddens (1992: 45) – moving away from Foucault’s stress on the overpowering and totalitarian nature of the ideas and models circulated by discourse – has suggested that it is narrative’s very fictional status that may allow its consumer to use it consciously as a hypothetical model. Certainly it is often within the field of romance that apposite examples of the influence of ostentatiously contrived fiction upon the social world present themselves. To cite one, historians generally agree that novels were the principal means by which a romantic conception of marriage became widespread in nineteenth-century North America (May 1980: 75–6) – the same tendency satirised contemporaneously in France by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2002 [1856]). In contemporary French cinema, the realisation that ‘romanticism and realism can co-exist at different levels of our subjectivities’ (Jackson 1995: 56) is already a hallmark of many auteur films and is particularly highly visible in the contemporary tendency towards imaginative ‘autofiction’ in films by female directors from Maïwenn to Mia Hansen-Løve, as well as in many rom-coms.¹

Romantic fiction’s potential power to infiltrate cultural discourse has not always predisposed it to enthusiastic scholarly or critical appreciation, any more than has comedy’s superficially light-hearted approach to serious subjects. Instead, the rom-com has suffered as a genre from being written off as irrelevant or pernicious, sometimes both at the same time. This is inextricable from the prejudice operating towards most forms of popular diversion as ‘only entertainment’ (Dyer 1992) – especially genres perceived as ‘feminine’, as part of misogynistic currents operating in patriarchal society. In some ways paradoxically, though, second-wave feminism has been pivotal in shaping critical attitudes to the romance genre for several decades in the postwar period, condemning narratives which tend to idealise the heterosexual couple as a tool of patriarchal oppression (see for example Beauvoir, 2004 [1949]; Millet 1969; Firestone 1979 [1971]; Greer 1971). However, works like the literary studies of Tania Modleski (1990 [1982]) and Janice Radway (1991 [1987]), or Ien Ang’s (1985) influential study of the pleasures of viewing the soap opera Dallas, have subsequently rehabilitated romance as a forum for women to explore their identities, emotional lives and life experiences. Such work does not overlook the limitations arguably imposed by the happy ending around coupling constructed by the traditional romance (a point to which I shall return), reasserting the universal law of kinship and a power structure in which woman has always been subordinate; hence Radway concludes that for women romance represents ‘a minimal but nonetheless legitimate form of protest’ (1991: 222).

A similar battle over the progressive or revisionist status of female-oriented romance has been waged in the post-feminist period around the phenomena of ‘chick-lit’, ‘chick television’ and ‘chick-flicks’. Scholars such as Yvonne Tasker and especially Diane Negra (2004; 2008; Tasker and Negra 2007) have suggested that within these genres, whose current manifestations are thought to have proliferated following the success of the British novel Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding 1996; see Ferriss and Young 2006: 5), any positive value for female viewers is severely attenuated, in ways that are bound up with the centrality of romance to chick texts. Other analysts of chick culture have placed more emphasis on the substantial pleasures and specific forms of empowerment such narratives offer to female consumers (Ferriss and Young 2008a: 4). Notably, several commentators on the global blockbuster book, television and film series Sex and the City have foregrounded its celebration of female desire and friendship (Henry 2004; Akass and McCabe 2004; Jermyn 2009). While it is undeniable that rom-coms are structurally predisposed towards endorsing heterosexual coupling, and I agree with the view that many post-feminist fictions promote values that are disempowering for a broad spectrum of women, my own position with regard to the politics of romantic comedy is in some respects closer to these latter studies. I seek in any case to interrogate the variegated and complex stories of the French rom-coms under examination in order to assess fully their textual and contextual specificity and historical inscription.

Rom-Com as a Cinematic Genre

The Sex and the City film franchise provides a prime example of texts around which critical discourse has tended to conflate as more or less synonymous the chick-flick and the rom-com (see Mortimer 2010: 1). While both of these epithets infantilise and trivialise the associative resonances of the films to which they refer through their perky, monosyllabic rhymes, chick-flicks are even more likely to be written off as of limited interest. The film genre designated by these terms brings with it a specific history of cinematic studies.

As suggested, critical denigration and neglect have also pervaded scholarship in this area, perhaps even more than in the case of written romance. This situation is in part a function of the culturally illegitimate status of comedy within staged fiction as a whole, which Moine (2002: 27–8) has in France dated back to Aristotle’s designation of it as a low form. In film studies, though, further double standards apply. Firstly, earlier comedy has been the subject of considerably more literature than more recent texts. This may be partly ascribable to the fact that social relevance becomes easier to pick out with hindsight. Kristina Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (1995: 2) have also pointed out the facility with which comedy, frequently defined by an infantile, ludic quality, becomes a site for nostalgia, perhaps further influencing scholars’ positive attitudes towards comedy of past eras. Additionally, biases in favour of auteurs mean that figures like Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati (who directed as well as starred in their films, a less common tendency in today’s vertically integrated era) receive the most praise and attention from both critics and scholars.

Within rom-com studies specifically (and probably talking comedy as a whole), it is certainly rom-coms of the classical ‘screwball’ era that have received the greatest attention in film studies. This cycle of films has been the subject of studies by Stanley Cavell (1981), Wes Gehring (1986), Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans (1989), Tina Olsin Lent (1995), Kathrina Glitre (2001), David R. Shumway (2003b) and others, with some generic inventories privileging only this version of romantic comedy (see for example Schatz 1981: 150–85). These analyses bring out the rom-com genre’s heterogeneity, since within merely one cycle an umbrella term has brought together films as diverse as didactic social comedy Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, USA 1941) and domestic farce Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, USA 1949), through features ranging from a utopian dissolution of class divisions (ibid) to the promotion of play as an expression of intimacy, reflecting new, post-Victorian ideals of companionate love (Lent 1995; Ruiz Pardos 2000) and a concomitant loosening of restrictions on female freedom, both within texts and through the rise of a slew of actresses to billing on an equal footing with men (Gehring 1986: 5; Rowe 1995: 146; Sarris 1998: 98).

Scholarship on more recent rom-com is equally varied but sparser. These features speak respectively to the lack of critical consensus over the contemporary genre’s definition, and its typical status as an object worthy of cultural suspicion and scorn. However, some scholars, in attempting to identify the rom-com, accord relative centrality to the possibility of increased equality across the two genders in the genre’s structural focus. In contrast, many scholars writing from feminist and other perspectives about cinematic romance in general (as in literary studies) have focused on the happy ending of the Hollywood romance as more or less forcing conservative ideologies upon its viewers (Fischer 1989: 243; Neale and Krutnik 1990: 145). While this overstatement was most common in the wake of 1970s post-structuralist-influenced theory, it has subsequently been seriously challenged through the expansion of cultural studies in the 1990s and the move to return agency, historical contingency and social identity to the film viewer. The fact that the happy ending is still commonly associated with rom-coms – Classical definitions of comedy, after all, hinge upon this feature – has allowed negative attitudes to persist; for instance, Rollet’s article on the French rom-com sees the global format in terms of a narrative structure based on obstacles to overcoming supposedly inevitable union, to which she attributes an ‘implicitly reactionary ideology’ (2008: 94). Yet not only has work in film studies emulated the move elsewhere to interrogate romance for the pleasures it can offer female audiences (Stacey 1990) (as Rollet acknowledges [2008: 96]), but Rowe (1995: 8) has defended the rom-com in spite of its default ending, drawing on Mulvey’s (1985) essay ‘Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience’, in which (revising earlier statements) she suggests that the importance of narrative’s potential lies not in its final resolution but in the upheaval that precedes this. There is evidence this may be particularly true for comedies, given the fact that these films are frequently sold on their humorous moments, as opposed to story elements (King 2002: 87). Similarly, many comedies acquire a cult status that involves repeated viewing and a focus not so much on the ending as on particular sequences. In any case, as I will illustrate, the centrality of the happy ending to romantic comedy has been exaggerated and it is certainly of limited usefulness for the contemporary French genre.

Returning to the question of how to conceive rom-com beyond ideology, most incisive is Deleyto’s 2009 The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy, in which he argues for a re-envisioning of genre as a whole and rom-com in particular in terms not, as traditionally, of belonging, but of participation. Borrowing from a wide range of sources including George Lakoff ’s cognitive theory of categories, chaos theory and most importantly Jacques Derrida’s theory of genre, Deleyto argues convincingly for an approach to genre that is both more ambiguous and more pervasive than those traditionally taken in film studies. In his model, all texts can be seen to participate in one or several genres, without these generic affiliations providing the limits of their definition (Deleyto 2009a: 1–17).

Deleyto is equally eloquent on the importance of this wide-ranging approach for analysing rom-com. As he notes, of all genres this one is frequently held up as the most trivial and crassly commercial: he cites a recent Sight and Sound review referring to ‘a conviction-free romantic comedy aimed at the teen market’ (ibid: 2), while a definition of romantic comedy as ‘the most vile, insipid, sanity-destroyingly horrible genre in the history of cinema’ thrown up by an internet search on the urbandictionary.com site is equally typical and even more vitriolic. This definition goes on to illustrate the misogynistic association between women and strands of popular culture viewed as execrable, by suggesting that ‘[the rom-com] exists solely for the entertainment of obnoxious, highly sentimental housewives who feel that their gender must consign them to this terrible fate’.² More relevant to Deleyto’s argument, though, is its citation of consistency of formula as one of the negative features of rom-com. This exemplifies his claim that the rom-com is the victim of a circular argument whereby it is seen to be typified only by those highly conventional films including the most conservative perspectives and therefore it is designated the most conventional and conservative genre. Instead, he argues:

The genre of rom-com can [ … ] be seen as the intersection of three, closely interrelated elements: a narrative that articulates historically and culturally specific views of love, desire, sexuality and gender relationships; a space of transformation and fantasy which influences the narrative articulation of those discourses; and humour as the specific perspective from which the fictional characters, their relationships and the spectator’s response to them are constructed as embodiments of those discourses (ibid: 45–6).

Deleyto goes on in the same passage to explain that the breadth of this definition illustrates why so many films use rom-com conventions, without necessarily being primarily identifiable with the genre, and that even the absence of one of these features does not necessarily invalidate the appropriateness of the paradigm.

In stressing generic hybridity, within film studies Deleyto’s approach is comparable to the new genre criticism of writers including Richard Maltby and also – as he recognises (ibid: 5–6) – Neale and especially Rick Altman. Such models complement his own by focusing on the functioning of various genres within one film. At the same time, Deleyto goes beyond these theorists’ work in seeing genre as primarily an analytical tool. Providing a kind of limit case for genre itself, this paradigm might appear to beg the question of the appropriateness of delimiting the corpus examined here in generic terms at all, given the wide sweep of texts I will be referencing. It is true that the choice of films discussed in these pages – along with the wider rom-com filmography of the period provided – while not arbitrary, proceeds from a number of informed choices and cannot claim to be an exhaustive enumeration of French films of the period that use rom-com conventions. The filmography, instead, lists films of the period under analysis in relation to which the rom-com analytical toolbox proves particularly useful.

Romantic Comedy in France

Romantic Comedy in French Film Studies

In France, not only is there no branch of film studies equivalent to the originally Anglo-American category of genre studies, but romantic comedy specifically has been seen as simply nonexistent in national filmmaking until very recently. Yet, given the broad understanding of rom-com offered in this chapter, one could in fact argue for approaching many pre-1990 French films from the perspective of the genre. Salient candidates might include the Belle Époque films of the late 1940s and the 1950s directed by Jacqueline Audry and others, usually considered costume dramas in the tradition de qualité, whose critical neglect has been signalled by Geneviève Sellier (2005) and more recently Hayward (2010); some New Wave films – especially those which are less well-known like Les Jeux de l’amour/The Games of Love (Philippe de Broca, 1960) and Ce soir ou jamais/Tonight or Never (Michel Deville, 1961), also analysed by Sellier (2010) from the classic rom-com perspective of their negotiation of anxiety about female emancipation, but also some films by François Truffaut and even Jean-Luc Godard; and a number of other films from the 1960s to the 1990s by, in addition to de Broca and Deville, such directors as Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Jacques Demy and Eric Rohmer (see Harrod 2014).³

Such scholarly lacunae are inseparable from the snobbery around genre in general and comedy in particular that exists in many French cinephilic institutions. This is partly bound up with the ongoing legacy of both realist (see Hayward 2005: 98) and auteurist models there (see for example Prédal 1993: 54). Regarding the former, the status of filmic realism as itself reliant on formal and other conventions is now almost truistic in global film studies (see Hallam and Marshment 2000: 97–121). In any case, stylisation and blatant contrivance have already been shown to be exceptionally poor indicators of fictional texts’ interrelation with and bearing on the external world.

As for the promotion of individual, idiosyncratic auteur styles, originally by the New Wave, it is easy to see how this clashes with the appeal to familiarity on which narrower conceptions of genre rest – despite the centrality of genre filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock in elegiac New Wave writings about Hollywood. Moine (2002: 7) further constellates the rejection of genre with a general Gallic tendency to divorce films from their context. Indeed social relevance, especially gendered, is a facet routinely neglected by aesthetically-oriented work even on relatively popular auteurs like Demy, Truffaut or Rohmer. Romantic comedy is likely to suffer at the hands of critics bent on abstraction, notwithstanding the potentially more ‘universal’ elements of romantic discourse, because of its simultaneous, often comic, appeal to specific cultural knowledge.

Nor is bias against comedy limited to academics in France. For ins...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Romantic Comedy – and its Discontents
• 2 Romance Today
• 3 Gendered Identities in Love
• 4 Family Affairs
• 5 Genre, Style and Transnationalism
• Concluding Remarks: Rom-Com into the 2010s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• French rom-coms 1990–2010 with Box-Office Admissions