Vive La France: Hollywood’s ongoing romance with all things French

Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’ is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood films about American artists, writers and journalists drawn to France, writes Geoffrey Macnab. But why are US filmmakers such Francophiles, and do their films about France bear any relation to reality?

Lovers on the Seine: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in ‘Before Sunset’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

Ennui-sur-Blasé, the setting for Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch, is actually Paris by another name – but this isn’t the grimy, litter-strewn place that British tourists might encounter when they step off the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord. Instead, it’s another variation on that magical world that Americans always seem to discover when they visit. It’s a city in which romantic opportunity, political turbulence, great art and fine dining go hand in hand.

Anderson’s all-star film, premiering at the Cannes Festival next month, follows the goings-on at the French Dispatch Magazine, a foreign outpost of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun. This publication, about to put out its final issue, bears a strong resemblance to The New Yorker. We meet the magazine’s eccentric expatriate journalists as they report on politics, the arts – “high and low” – and human interest, however that might be defined. Bill Murray is the editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. The staff writers include JKL Berensen (Tilda Swinton), the formidable art critic; Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who specialises in stories about colourful low-lives; Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), who loves to write about food (including police cuisine); and Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who reports on the activities of some radical chic young revolutionaries resembling refugees from a late-1960s Jean-Luc Godard film.

The French Dispatch is the latest in a very long line of American movies that offer a loving, super-stylised Stateside view of the Gallic world. American filmmakers like to treat France as their continental playground: Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson are star-crossed lovers in The Last Time I Saw Paris, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris touches on Ernest Hemingway’s youthful experiences in the city as does Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy drink coffee by the Seine in Before Sunset. And there’s more besides, from Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris to Pixar’s Ratatouille via James Ivory’s Le Divorce. The trend reached its nadir in the recent, much derided Netflix series Emily in Paris in which Lily Collins plays a young American marketing executive adrift in a strange new world of cafes, croissants, haute couture, long lunches and afternoon affairs. 

Wes Anderson has previous form when it comes to turning Paris into cinematic Never Never Land. His 2007 short Hotel Chevalier, starring Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman, is entirely set in a suite in an upmarket Paris hotel, where estranged lovers meet. Anderson himself lived in Paris when he wrote the screenplay. The short, made just before the director embarked on his next feature The Darjeeling Unlimited (to which it is linked) has a mystery and romanticism that simply wouldn’t have been there if he had filmed the same story in, say, a seedy motel in Nevada or a bed and breakfast in Bridlington. The Paris hotel room, with its ornate and heavy yellow furnishings, possesses an old world charm. It’s not the kind of place where you leave your sneakers on the floor.

Anderson sets the tone through his choice of music. British pop star Peter Sarstedt’s absurd, gooey 1969 hit, “Where Do You Go (My Lovely?)”, is heard throughout. The song plays like a bad pastiche of a Serge Gainsbourg ballad. The lyrics address an unhappy but very glamorous woman with “a firm and inviting body” who lives in “a fancy apartment off the Boulevard St Michel”. She’s part of the jet set, rich and pampered. The Aga Khan sent her a horse for Christmas. She drinks Napoleon brandy and goes skiing in St Moritz. She seems to be friends with Sacha Distel. It’s not really clear what Sarstedt is getting at beyond the fact that her sybaritic lifestyle has left her very unhappy.

As so often in Wes Anderson’s work, audiences aren’t quite sure whether the director is sincere in his admiration for Sarstedt’s supremely cheesy song or whether he is being ironic at its expense. Whatever the case, only an American would portray France like this.

“Forgive me if the Paris you see is not exactly the Paris the way you all see it,” US director Philip Kaufman recently told a French audience after a screening of his erotic literary biopic, Henry & June (1990). The film, set in the early 1930s in Left Bank Paris, is about the love triangle between the sensitive, fragile writer Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros), the macho novelist Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and Miller’s tall and gorgeous wife, June (Uma Thurman). As Kaufman admitted, he had been inspired by reading Miller’s novels when he was still a teenager growing up in Chicago. Their heady mix of philosophy, bohemianism and sexual frankness were equally appealing for many other young American would-be writers and filmmakers who dreamed of escaping to Europe.

Love triangle: Maria De Medeiros, Fred Ward and Uma Thurman in ‘Henry & June’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

The French don’t generally approve of outsiders portraying their country but they’ve bought into the Hollywood view of Paris as much as anyone else. After all, these films are generally underpinned by immense affection. They may pedal cliches and stereotypes but they do so with humour and inventiveness.

Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007) even managed to make the city’s rodents appealing. This is the story of a young rat whose ambition is to become a top French chef. He may be verminous but that doesn’t stop him getting fancy with the spices.

Meanwhile, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004) posits the idea of Paris as a city of romance, book shops and restaurants. It’s a place where the two lovers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), who haven’t seen each other for almost a decade, can instantly reignite their love affair by wandering alongside the Seine, making small talk and simply breathing in the Paris air. (The Paris suburbs shown a few years before in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, with their racism, under-privilege and youth violence, don’t get a look in here.)

Vincente Minnelli’s musical An American in Paris (1951) recreated the French capital in intricate detail, complete with plenty of baguettes and berets, on a studio backlot in faraway Los Angeles. Its star Gene Kelly’s biographer Tony Thomas writes about Kelly’s immense trepidation when he screened the film for the great French artist Raoul Dufy, whose paintings partly inspired the look of the film’s celebrated ballet sequence. “He [Dufy] was then a sick, very stout old gentleman in a wheelchair. When the lights went up, we looked at him, afraid of what he might say, but he was sitting there with a smile on his face, tears in his eyes,” Kelly told Thomas. The moment the artist asked to see the ballet sequence again, Kelly realised “we would have no trouble in France”. There was a sense that Kelly and Minnelli were showing France in the way the locals would have liked to depict it themselves if they had thought there was any chance they would get away with it.

Bill Murray plays a magazine editor in Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’ (Searchlight Pictures)

Just as Dufy rhapsodised over Gene Kelly, the French film establishment has shown a similar enthusiasm for Anderson’s The French Dispatch. When Cannes Festival director Thierry Fremaux first saw the film, he immediately selected it for the 2020 edition, due to be held last May. Now, a year later, he has confirmed that it will be in official selection in the rearranged July edition. A decade ago, when Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) was chosen as the festival’s opening film, it was treated with far greater veneration by French critics and audiences than it was by anyone else.

“We’ll always have Paris,” Humphrey Bogart famously tells Ingrid Bergman when he says goodbye to her for the final time on the airport tarmac late on in Casablanca. It’s one of the great movie endings but the words apply as much to Hollywood itself as to Bogart and Bergman. When US filmmakers want an infusion of art, culture and escapism, whether they’re dreaming of sex or bouillabaisse, their thoughts immediately turn to France.

‘The French Dispatch’ is due to premiere at the Cannes Festival, 6-17 July