France's female new wave

The French insistence on regarding cinema as art has helped produced formidable women directors. But is the next generation the most wide-ranging yet?

Agnès Poirier guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 March 2011 23.00 GMT larger | smaller Article history
Photo: No quirky adolescent tale … Love Like Poison.

There's a feeling out there that France may be on the verge of another new wave: not of the politically radical 1950s kind, but one in which young, driven, women film-makers will be at the fore. Names being mentioned are Mia Hansen-Løve, Rebecca Zlotowski and Katell Quillévéré; their films have already electrified France and are beginning to spread elsewhere.

Of course, on one level, there is nothing unusual about French women film directors. From Agnès Varda to Claire Denis, Coline Serreau to Agnès Jaoui, women have been able to make their presence felt in French cinema. NT Binh, film critic for the film magazine Positif, says: "It's not a wave but a deluge, one that has been going on for more than 50 years."

In fact, it all started in 1896. Who remembers Alice Guy? The world's first female film director and producer was French. She directed her first film in 1896, aged 23, and went on to direct Gaumont's first blockbuster, The Life of Christ, in 1906, with 300 extras. After moving to California with her British camera operator husband Herbert Blaché, she directed more than 600 films for Charlie Chaplin's film company and then for Warner Brothers.

Christophe Leparc, currently managing director of Cannes' Directors' Fortnight, started his career at the Festival de Films de Femmes, the only significant inter-national event dedicated to women film directors. Created in Créteil, just outside Paris, in 1979, it screens 130 films each year, attracting an audience of more than 20,000 people. Says Leparc: "I think the French system encourages the emergence of talents, women and men alike, by its generosity and emphasis on culture as art. But in the last 30 years, it has particularly focused on helping women assert themselves within the cinema milieu. There is no inhibition. Cinema is today as much a woman's as a man's medium."

If they embrace a great variety of subjects, there seems to be one genre the new generation of women film-makers particularly dislike: romantic comedy. Perhaps because, in France, cinema is still considered more of an art than a business. The youngest French women directors are often graduates in philosophy or literature – such as 30-year-old Rebecca Zlotowski whose first film, Belle Epine, was selected for the Directors' Fortnight last year, or Katel Quillévéré, whose Love Like Poison is released in the UK in May. Many have been trained at the FEMIS (École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son), France's prestigious national film school. Alix Delaporte – whose first film, Angèle et Tony, was selected for the Venice film festival last September – was a former student, as was Céline Sciamma, who directed the acclaimed Water Lilies and is back this year with her second feature, Tomboy, selected for the Berlin film festival this year.

Have these films de femmes anything in common? There must be something that draws them together, something akin to a common spirit. Could it be sex? Are they portraying it differently? "Take newcomers such as Isild le Besco, Mia Hansen-Løve and Rebecca Zlotowski; they treat sex in a rather raw and caustic way. But more importantly, their films are almost always unexpected," says Laura Gragg, an American production consultant living in Paris, former deputy head of ACE, a network of European producers.

Unexpected might actually be the key word to understand the recent crop of French women film directors. Their topics are wide-ranging and original. Think of 30-year-old Quillévéré's Love Like Poison. Set in deepest Brittany, it focuses on a 14-year-old's battle with her Catholic faith. For veteran film critic Gérard Lefort, "Quillévéré spares us yet another so-called quirky adolescent tale. Her film deals with a teenager who actually believes; this places the director in an unusual place in French cinema." Not surprisingly, Quillévéré cites Rivette, Bresson, Cavalier, Pialat, and Bergman as her favourite directors. Once herself a devout Catholic, she says: "Cinema gave me a healthy distance from religion. Cinema is religion's best rival in that it also negates death and is, by definition, a liberation process."

Lily Sometimes (aka Les Pieds Nus Sur les Limaces), Fabienne Berthaud's second film, recently impressed the French public with its tale of two sisters, played by Ludivine Sagnier and Diane Kruger. The elder looks after her little sister after their mother dies, in the big family house somewhere in an idyllic part of the French countryside. "Difficult to define, this film is not a French comedy," Libération's Didier Péron wrote. "Dealing with rather solemn issues, its characters are however highly whimsical and funny. The film's strength lies in its energy and lightness, in the delicate balance between frivolity and depth. Its ambition is to bear witness to humanity's many eccentricities".

In a totally different genre, in fact, at the extreme end of the auteur spectrum, 30-year-old Géraldine Nakache's first film was another unexpected hit, which attracted more than 1.4 million people in France last year. All That Glitters (Tout Ce Qui Brille) is a clever take on two ambitious girls, one Jewish, the other Muslim, who dream of Paris, buying expensive shoes and going to trendy places. Having been brought up in a quiet suburb of Paris, they suffer from belonging to the grey and banal middle France – neither the elite, nor the "rabble" as Sarkozy calls them, but the France that is never talked about. "It's a film about lukewarm France, the one never mentioned in pop culture, which much prefers to talk about the burning France. Although this is a first film, All that glitters has the intelligence of old wise men," Péron says. "Dialogue is sharp, witty and quick. It's a film that tells us about French youth today: diverse, multifarious, and tormented by life's many tricks and dilemma."

Is their cinema feminine or feminist? "French women film directors hate the word feminist, although they are the most independent and the most driven women I know," Gragg says. "Like most French citizens, they refuse the gender distinction so dear to outsiders. If you ask them, they'll tell you that they are just film directors and that there are no such things as women films, there are just films, bad or good.

"They are right, of course. However, they do offer better and stronger parts to actresses, and their films have contributed to changing the way we consider women, not women as girls but women as individuals."

Love Like Poison is released on 29 April.