A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, First Edition. Edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Major Stars, the Heritage Film, and Patrimonial Values

in Contemporary French CinemaGwénaëlle Le Gras

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Even though the star system in France is markedly less structured in economic and aesthetic terms than is the case in the United States (where it is organized by the big studios), the volume of films produced, in combination with the prestige of French cinema, nevertheless justifies the use of such a term. This French star sys-tem, even though marginal compared with the American model, enjoys a close relationship with several other cultural sectors, such as the theater, the music hall, the world of song, and popular culture. Moreover, the ways in which the images of French stars are constructed follow the same rules as those relating to Hollywood stars, given that we find the same kind of discourse circulating between screen and public images, meaning that the persona of French stars, as with the Hollywood model, is the product of a mixture of their public image, their performances as actors, and their earlier filmic characters – to adopt the definition proposed by Richard Dyer.1 In addition, as in the classical period,

the way production for small-scale French films is dispersed allows stars to have more control over their image. This facilitates the creation of a greater familiarity between the audience and the actors, whose appearance “in real life” is simpler, less fanciful than that of Hollywood stars who have to submit to directives imposed on them by the studio. This “authenticity” associated with French stars imbues them with a “national” dimension in comparison with Hollywood stars, who appear more “universal,” and hence “exportable,” and this tendency is reinforced by the predomi-nance of realistic genres in France.2

However, no movie star in France is truly regarded as such unless he or she shines beyond France itself – specifically, by achieving recognition in Hollywood,

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which is the standard measure of stardom. This international dimension explains why the genuine attributes that define the French star system are more readily discernible among actors of a more experienced older generation, given that an international career takes time to build. Nevertheless, such stars do not need to build their careers in the United States itself in order to acquire international fame. One only has to think of examples from the past, such as Jean Gabin, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, and Catherine Deneuve, whose American films have rarely achieved success, to be convinced of that. Apart from Jean Reno, who favored a spectacular mode, there are hardly any actors who have achieved an international career that depends upon accommodating the generic style of American productions. For most, regular appearances in the handful of French films that get a wide international distribution, a few forays into English-language films, and sometimes an inspiring role for the sake of branding oneself as a qual-ity actor are sufficient to get their career underway and fuel a process leading to international recognition. What unites the great majority of French international stars, however, is their ability over the longer term to develop their stardom from a strong identification with a French national identity – an identification that is forged either out of attributes that make them culturally distinctive, or else from participation in heritage films.

A comprehensive study of national stars who have flourished since 1990 enables one to see how, why, and also within what parameters this nostalgic return to the past has allowed the major stars to resolve contradictions that are inherent in French cinema, a cinema that is regarded as a national cinema just as much in France as in the eyes of the rest of the world.

I shall begin by outlining the contours of this French patrimonial cinema, along with its actors, before analyzing the issues and outcomes of the “heritage solution” that has allowed stars to respond resiliently to four forms of potential threat: the crisis faced by France and the French film industry, the gap between auteur cinema and commercial cinema, the disappearance of the classical star system, and the supremacy of Hollywood.

French Heritage Stars: Trends and Parameters

One way in which heritage value is imparted to actors is, of course, through the adaptation of literary works, of which there are a great number in French heritage cinema. Significant authors whose works have been adapted include: Marcel Aymé (Uranus, Claude Berri, 1990, for Gérard Depardieu and Michel Blanc); Edmond Rostand (Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1990, for Depardieu); Émile Zola (Germinal, Claude Berri, 1993, for Depardieu); Jean Giono (Le Hussard sur le toit / The Horseman on the Roof, Rappeneau, 1995, for Juliette Binoche); Honoré de Balzac (Le Colonel Chabert / Colonel Chabert, Yves Angelo, 1994, for Depardieu, Fanny

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Ardant, and Fabrice Luchini); Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, Claude Chabrol, 1991, for Isabelle Huppert); Alexandre Dumas (La Fille de d’Artagnan / Revenge of the Musketeers, Bertrand Tavernier and Riccardo Freda, 1994, for Sophie Marceau); Paul Févar (Le Bossu / On Guard, Philippe de Broca, 1997, for Daniel Auteuil); Victor Hugo (Quasimodo d’El Paris, by and for Patrick Timsit, 1999); Gaston Leroux (Le Mystère de la chambre jaune / The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Bruno Podalydès, 2003, with Sabine Azéma); Sébastien Japrisot (Un long dimanche de fiançailles / A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, for Audrey Tautou); Maurice Leblanc (Arsène Lupin / The Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Jean-Paul Salomé, 2004, for Romain Duris).

This heritage dimension of popular actors, however, is also expressed in films that fall into three further categories. The first comprises films in which such actors are associated with specific historical events, such as the racial discrimination against soldiers recruited from the Maghreb and the colonial empire of Black Africa in Indigènes / Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006, for Jamel Debbouze and Samy Nacéri). The second category consists of films depicting various facts embedded in legend, such as the Beast of Gévaudan, in Le Pacte des loups / Brotherhood of the Wolf (Christophe Gans, 2001, for Vincent Cassel). The third category involves films that deal with a particular historical epoch, such as: the end of the French colonial empire, in Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1993, for Catherine Deneuve); the arrival of sound in cinema, in The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011, for Jean Dujardin); the habits and customs of the court of Louis XVI, in Ridicule (Patrice Leconte, 1996, for Ardant); the Popular Front in Faubourg 36 / Paris 36 (Christophe Barratier, 2008, for Gérard Jugnot); the Occupation, in Monsieur Batignole (by and for Jugnot, 2002),

Figure 14.1 Catherine Deneuve as Eliane in Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992), an iconic image of Frenchness. Indochine; 1992; Régis Wargnier; Paradis Films, La Générale d’Images, Bac Films, Orly Films, Ciné Cinq, Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) (with the participation of ), Le Club des Investisseurs (with the participation of ), Canal+ (with the participation of ).

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La Rafle / The Round Up (Rose Bosch, 2010, for Gad Elmaleh and Jean Reno), and Un secret / A Secret (Claude Miller, 2007, for Patrick Bruel).

The biopic also features prominently with Audrey Tautou in Coco avant Chanel / Coco before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, 2009); Marion Cotillard playing La Môme / La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007); Vincent Cassel in the guise of L’Ennemi public no 1 / Mesrine: Part 2 – Public Enemy # 1 ( Jean-François Richet, 2008); Les Lyonnais / A Gang Story (Olivier Marchal, 2011, for Gérard Lanvin); Molière (Laurent Tirard, 2007, for Duris and Luchini); Luchini impersonating Beaumarchais l’insolent / Beaumarchais the Scoundrel (Edouard Molinaro, 1996); Binoche as George Sand in Les Enfants du siècle / The Children of the Century (Diane Kurys, 1999), and as the protagonist in Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont, 2013); Depardieu assuming by turns the identity of Marin Marais in Tous les matins du monde / All the Mornings of the World (Alain Corneau, 1991) and then François-Eugène Vidocq in Vidocq / Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq (Pitof, 2001); Isabelle Adjani in Reine Margot / Queen Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994); Auteuil as the King of Navarre in the same film, and subsequently as the resistance fighter Raymond Aubrac in Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri, 1997); and Isabelle Huppert as Marie Curie in Les Palmes de M. Schutz / Pierre and Marie (Claude Pinoteau, 1997), and then as Madame de Maintenon in Saint-Cyr / The King’s Daughters (Patricia Mazuy, 2000).

More generally, and beyond the bounds of the patrimonial genre (the equivalent in France of the British “heritage film”), actors have also explored the depiction of the cultural legacy in comic strips, with the series of films comprising Astérix et Obélix contre César / Astérix and Obélix vs. Caesar (Claude Zidi, 1999), Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre / Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (Alain Chabat, 2002), Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques / Astérix at the Olympic Games (Frédéric Forestier and Thomas Langmann, 2008), Astérix et Obélix: Au service de Sa Majesté / Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia (Laurent Tirard, 2012), which are vehicles for Depardieu and, for the first two films in this series, Christian Clavier. Further examples are Lucky Luke ( James Huth, 2009) for Dujardin; Sur la piste du Marsupilami / Houba! On the Trail of the Marsupilami (by and for Chabat, 2012) with Debbouze; and, in the same register, Le Petit Nicolas / Little Nicholas (Tirard, 2009), for Lemercier.

Earlier French cinema itself is made the object of a “recovery of the patrimony,”3 as is manifest in remakes (varying in the extent of their fidelity to the source film) of La Cage aux rossignols ( Jean Dréville, 1945) as Les Choristes / The Chorus (Christophe Barratier, 2004), with Jugnot; of OSS 117 (a series of spy novels created in 1949 by Jean Bruce that were made into film adaptations several times between 1950 and 1960) as OSS 117: Le Caire nid d’espions / OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (Hazanavicius, 2006) and OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus / OSS 117: Lost in Rio (Hazanavicius, 2009), for Dujardin. Other remakes include Le Deuxième Souffle / The Second Wind ( Jean-Pierre Melville, 1966, and Alain Corneau, 2007) with Auteuil and Blanc; La Loi c’est la loi / The Law is the Law (Christian-Jaque, 1958), which becomes Rien à déclarer / Nothing to Declare (Dany Boon, 2010), with Poelvoorde; Boudu sauvé des eaux / Boudu Saved from Drowning ( Jean Renoir, 1932), which

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becomes Boudu ( Jugnot, 2005), with Depardieu and Jugnot; La Poison / Poison (Sacha Guitry, 1951), which becomes Un crime au paradis / A Crime in Paradise ( Jean Becker, 2001), with Balasko; La Fille du puisatier / The Well-Digger’s Daughter (Marcel Pagnol, 1940), which was remade by Daniel Auteuil in 2011 (with Auteuil and Azéma). A final example of films in this category consists of remakes, made more than 20 years after their first appearance, of films written by the team from the café-theater Le Splendid: Les Bronzés / French Fried Vacation (Leconte, 1978) and Les Bronzés font du ski / French Fried Vacation 2 (Leconte, 1979), refashioned as Les Bronzés 3: Amis pour la vie / Friends Forever (Patrice Leconte, 2006).

Another iconic film should be noted, one in which both the aesthetic and the heroine translate and embody a fantasized vision of the French cultural legacy: Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain / Amélie ( Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001), with Tautou.

Finally, the heritage tendency in contemporary French cinema encompasses comedies and boulevard farces that play on the elevation of French stars into iconic status within French culture: Deneuve, Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart in 8 femmes / 8 Women (François Ozon, 2002); Deneuve and Depardieu in Potiche (Ozon, 2010); and Deneuve again in Palais Royal! (Lemercier, 2005).

This survey has only taken into account films that have starred the most popular actors and actresses; a multitude of other films that function according to the same principles, only less successfully so, have been left in the shadows. Apart from actors who have an exclusively national visibility, such as Mathilde Seigner, Franck Dubosc, Bernard Campan, and François Cluzet, the number of actors who have not been caught up in this heritage dimension is very small, as can be seen when one looks at the panorama of French actors between 1990 and 2000.

Among the actors and actresses who have become cultural icons, one can iden-tify three kinds of stars in the landscape that comprises contemporary French act-ing; these groups, however, vary greatly in size relative to one another. The members of an aging generation are overrepresented, including certain pillars of French cinema. Such stars ensure a degree of continuity with the preceding period, and function as gilt-edged securities, given that they have come to define Frenchness, and are viewed as embodying the greatness of the French cultural heritage. To a certain degree, French cinema has been able to capitalize on its main actors (Adjani, Auteuil, Deneuve, Depardieu, Luchini, Huppert). The comic actors and defectors from the comic stage who swelled and renewed the ranks of the team from Le Splendid, a café-theater troupe founded in the 1970s,4 are, on the other hand, far less well represented, despite comedy being the most popular genre at the national box office, and the fact that actors who star in comedies are among the best paid in French cinema. Such actors include Dany Boon, Kad Merad, Alain Chabat, Gad Elmaleh, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jamel Debbouze, and Valérie Lemercier. They find it difficult, however, to achieve any impact beyond the borders of France, given that national comedies, which present a world that is heavily marked by topi-cal references, are difficult to export. The heritage value of these stars is expressed mainly in remakes of comedies that have become part of the cultural legacy; only rarely, however, do they extend their palette into the register of serious heritage

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drama (as in the case of Dujardin, Poelvoorde, Balasko, Blanc, and Jugnot). Finally, in the third category, although a certain number of new faces from the Young French Cinema (Emanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuel Salinger, Denis Podalydès, Melvil Poupaud, Jeanne Balibar, Marianne Denicourt, Chiara Mastroianni) have sometimes taken on heritage fictions that are intimist in manner, none has gained the status of a star, partly because films capable of reconciling artistic ambition with general audience approval, while at the same time achieving success in the international export market, have been very rare.

All these heritage films, owing to their nationalistic and spectacular dimensions, allow the big stars to confront the challenges of a context that is extremely com-petitive and destabilizing (because of the domination of American blockbusters, the digitization of cinemas, and the poor state of health of the French economy). Advantaged by the “cultural exception” protectionist clause for audiovisual pro-ductions enshrined in the GATT agreements of 1994, these fictions construct and reinforce via their stars a collective identity designed to “procure the illusion of permanence by fixing the past in a present that conserves it for the future.”5 Heritage cinema, which is nostalgic, thus allows stars to put in place several strate-gies of reaction to the contemporary situation that are specific to French cinema.

Responding to the Contemporary Sense of Crisis

In this register, certain stars, such as Gérard Jugnot, seek to reflect a France that exists outside of the contemporary global crisis, through the adoption of a con-servative, nostalgic mode. With his ordinary physique, which is that of an average Frenchman, he embodies a reaction against modernization and globalization, both of which have caused a loss of values and identities among those who inhabit working-class areas that have turned into the “France of the invisible ones.” Because of their detour through the past, films such as Monsieur Batignole and Les Choristes, like Faubourg 36, have made Jugnot the embodiment of a suppressed kind of person – a phantom representing working-class identity as it existed prior to the crisis. The function of the heritage dimension, therefore, is not so much to illuminate the present, as to enable a flight from it: the pessimism pervading the present is replaced by the staging of a fictive past characterized by the hope of triumphing over unhappiness and threats by adhering to values of solidarity that no longer have currency in the present. In these films, Jugnot incarnates a kind of mass collective memory, reflecting a nostalgic consensus regarding French iden-tity, which depends upon the reactivation of his image as the average type of Frenchman. This image is inherited by turns from Louis De Funès and Bourvil, who represent the blusterer who grumbles against all the others, on one hand, and the unobtrusive hero with a big heart, on the other, as found in La Grande Vadrouille / Don’t Look Now: We’re Being Shot At (Gérard Oury, 1966). With him, the popular audience goes back in time – to the time of a film, of a fantasy, in

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order to embellish and retrieve it through identification, along with the lost dignity of a community united in solidarity. In these three films, Jugnot, the new “calm father” of French cinema, conveys a sense of national identity that is anchored both in the past and the present. The past regenerates values that have become eroded in the present, such as “assisting one another,” which is an idea that is equally central to Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, being at the heart of the persona of Audrey Tautou. In an era when political utopias have broken down, Jugnot surrounds himself with nostalgia, with a social connectedness that has henceforth become degraded. He takes on a social function designed to rein-force a sense of identity by restoring a face to the lower middle class, and even more so to a working class that has become invisible, on account of its being poorly defined on the current political map. At the same time, this detour through the past, by eliminating immigrants from the field, and by glorifying certain indi-vidual prospects at the expense of belonging to a community, unconsciously reveals a reactionary vision of the present. In Les Choristes, for example, Jugnot, who plays a monitor and the head of the choir in a boarding school for boys, sup-ports a deterministic vision of social inequalities through his role. He brings to heel children from the middle class through the choir he creates, and teaches them to respect social hierarchy. The innately gifted elite is represented by his protégé Morhange, a young virtuoso with the head of an angel who wins favor in the eyes of the countess, while the boy who is not able to perform well is reduced to serving the others as a human music stand.

Actors in heritage fictions, however, can also mount a form of resistance to con-temporary gloominess by inviting the country to rediscover a strongly grounded sense of identity in its past, its former glories, and its literary institutions. By com-bining the old (idealized images, French symbols and values) with the new (aes-thetics, technical effects, and a star persona), in productions like Le Pacte des loups, Vidocq, and Astérix et Obélix: Au service de Sa Majesté, a star can give life to this alli-ance of temporalities through the power of his or her iconic status. We should add, however, that just as Vidocq and Obélix have had their myth dusted off, as François-Xavier Molia has demonstrated,6 the same is true for Depardieu, who has benefited from the use of a modern style in these films, given that they have updated his image for a younger audience.

The concern of films that invest stars with a heritage or nostalgic dimension is also to strengthen a feeling in the spectators of belonging to a distinctive culture. A star, by presenting himself or herself as identified with a slice of national history, fosters a sense in the members of the audience of sharing in a national or  regional identity. The star often becomes the means whereby an “identity-imparting strategy” is relayed to the audience – a strategy that is not always devoid of ideological content capable of having political repercussions.7 Although the actors in Indigènes ended up being spokespersons for a critical commemoration that resulted in a political mea culpa and a revision of history, stars, in contrast, often participate in the construction of a retreat into an originary identity,

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fantasizing the culture as an essence that is incapable of being diluted, and therefore does not “change” with the passage of time through interactions with the modern environment.

A star, therefore, becomes a retrospective story-teller, as well as the symbol of a glorious nation that draws from its wellsprings in order to construct itself in a dis-tant past, peopled with national heroes, comprising emblematic landscapes, mon-uments, traditions, and a specific language.8 Ranging across cultural and historical monuments, both real and factitious, the star cements the present in a founda-tional history and restructures the actual community that is under threat into an “imagined community” by drawing its members together around his or her iconic image.9 By allowing herself to be used as an effigy in Indochine, Deneuve suc-ceeded, owing to her role as a universal Franco-Indochinese mother, in lifting the veil from the dark reality of a colonial system that had been concealed for too long. But she also, through her fictional relationship with her Indochinese grandson in the film, put flesh on a fantasy of integration involving all the later generations of immigrants, thus prolonging in present time France’s “civilizing, universalist” colonial vision. It is perhaps for this reason that the filmmakers chose not to age the actress in the epilogue, which is imagined as taking place 20 years after the rest of the story, at the moment when the Geneva accords were signed, ending the war in Indochina between France and the Viet Minh (“League for the Independence of Vietnam”) in 1954. By remaining forever young, Deneuve imposes an image that is designed to enhance colonial splendor – a splendor that ultimately, even when top-pled, remains upright, having lost none of its dignity, nor, perhaps, its legitimacy.

Figure 14.2 Marion Cotillard playing Édith Piaf moves into the spotlight in La Môme (Olivier Dahan, 2007). La Vie en Rose / La Môme (original title); 2007; Olivier Dahan; Légende Films, TF1 International (co-production with), TF1 Films Production (co-produc-tion with), Okko Productions (co-production with), Songbird Pictures (co-production with), Canal+ (with the participation of ), TPS Star (with the participation of ), Scotts Atlantic (with the participation of ), Sofica Valor 7 (in association with).

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Very often, then, stars are charged with holding the line against wind and tide for the sake of transmitting, as well as shaping, a particular heritage. Their function is also to protect this heritage by reviving a sense of national identity, even while masking the crisis it is undergoing, through means that include the use of a reflex-ive mode.

Stars thus convey a fantasy in which the present is synchronized with the past, using their presence to blur the actual boundaries that separate these two tempo-ralities – an essential condition for forging a vision of national identity, given that it masks the fabricated dimension of the vision itself. Anne-Marie Thiesse shows that the term “national identity” only appeared at the beginning of the 1980s, about the same time as the first wave of modern heritage films (Le Dernier Métro / The Last Metro [François Truffaut, 1980]; Jean de Florette [Berri, 1986]; etc.), and that its emergence can be explained by the loss of leadership in France and its replace-ment by the ideal, soon eroded, of a liberating communism that made it more vulnerable. Indeed, a sense of vulnerability is at the heart of every attempt to assert identity. The recent episode involving the stillborn project of the Maison de l’Histoire de France, which planned to create a “gallery of historical periods” with the aim of “strengthening the identity that is ours, cultural identity,” in the words of Nicolas Sarkozy,10 exemplifies this desire to envisage a future by projecting it onto the past. In this context, stars provide a reassuring combination of a common heritage and a shared hope for the future.

Bridging the Gap between Auteur Cinema and Commercial Cinema

The heritage dimension also offers actors the chance of overcoming the bipolariza-tion of French film production into auteur cinema and commercial cinema, by allowing them to attempt to recreate the golden age of a cinema that appeals to a mass audience, while simultaneously maintaining French “quality.” Certain actors, such as Gérard Jugnot, have explicitly declared their allegiance to the spirit of pre-New Wave cinema:

There was a great popular tradition in France that this generation of filmmakers [the New Wave] somewhat skipped over. But we are going back to it. Furthermore, I am convinced that the films that remain in film libraries are those with mass appeal. The avant-garde always becomes outmoded. Who remembers Abel Gance today?11

Indeed, given the virulence directed by certain critics toward films that attract large crowds – such as Les Triplettes de Belleville / The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003) and Amélie, two nostalgic films accused of being populist and ideologically retrograde – and with regard to initiatives like those of the Club

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des 13, whose members claim the right for a “cinema of the middle” to exist,12 it appears that French cinema is more than ever suffering from an ideological frac-ture that has been aggravated by the systems of financial support and modes of production in France. Certain actors, however, being mindful of both intimist dramas made by auteurs for a happy few, and also large-scale comedies with a massive budget financed by television, have built their careers by moving from one to the other, achieving a link between them in French cinema by acting in heritage fictions that reconcile artistic achievement with commercial success. Since the New Wave, the construction of the image of a French star has often depended upon the actor’s ability to insert himself or herself alternately into mass culture and elite culture. While fairly well-known actors such as Cécile de France, François Cluzet, Charles Berling, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Vincent Lindon, Catherine Frot, Karine Viard, Nathalie Baye, and André Dussollier have suc-ceeded in circulating between these different types of cinema, the major stars of French cinema are those who have gone to great lengths to pursue double careers by alternating “auteur films,” which can open the doors to them of the interna-tional professional showcases provided by film festivals (without any real con-cern for box office success), with super-productions that give them media exposure and economic clout. The main difficulty, however, is the achievement of such fluidity, given that such alternation requires a real acting talent capable of tackling everything, or nearly everything, and of maintaining a large degree of coherence despite the disparate types of roles the actor undertakes. In other words, the actor has to diffract his or her image in order to reassemble it to even greater effect, which is something that only the greatest stars can accomplish – an ability we hardly find at all among actors from the younger generation. During the period from the 1990s to the present, the actors and actresses in this category who have most successfully mastered the range required for this career-defining pendulum movement include: Audrey Tautou, Marion Cotillard, Jean Dujardin, Benoît Poelvoorde, Michel Blanc, Vincent Cassel, Emmanuelle Béart, and Juliette Binoche, even though they have not always succeeded in maintaining coherence in the course of this alternation. In addition, a number of older actors continue to engage in such alternation, even though it has markedly lessened since the mid-1990s: Daniel Auteuil, Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and Gérard Depardieu (whose involvement in this alternation has markedly lessened since the mid-1990s).

Such a reduction in the split between the two types of cinema is precisely what heritage fictions that are auteur films as much as popular films allow: films such as Amélie, A Very Long Engagement, Coco avant Chanel, La Vie en Rose, Bon Voyage (Rappeneau, 2003), Queen Margot, The Horseman on the Roof, La Veuve de Saint-Pierre / The Widow of Saint-Pierre (Leconte, 2000), Les Enfants du siècle, and Cyrano de Bergerac. In this register, then, stars transmit a conception of cinema as popular art, making it permanent because of their often crucial role in attaining funding for a filmmaking project.

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A Reaction to the Disappearance of the Classical Star System

This taste for well-made popular cinema, and for a certain “French quality,” in the good sense of the term, is accompanied by nostalgia for stars from the golden age of French cinema. “Depardieu, Moreau, and Deneuve have become a legacy in the national and international collective imaginaries, as cultural treasures from a glori-ous cinematic past.”13 The most secure and long-lasting stars also have the role, therefore, of exorcizing or interrogating the negative image of an aging nation, through participating in modes that are nostalgic, retro, and reflexive.

The fact that two films such as Podium (Yann Moix, 2004) and Jean-Philippe (Laurent Tuel, 2006) focus on the fans of Claude François, the uncontested star of French pop music during the 1970s, who died in 1978, and Johnny Hallyday, the indestructible French rocker who has lasted since the 1960s, is particularly sympto-matic of the heritage dimension surrounding stars. The basic premise of Jean-Philippe is that life in France would not be the same without Johnny Hallyday, since it depicts on one hand a fan (Luchini) of Johnny Hallyday, and on the other hand a fictional world in which Johnny Hallyday, with his real name Jean-Philippe Smet, would never have become the “teenage idol” that he has been for nearly 50 years in the eyes of the French audience. Hallyday belongs more than any other artist to the collective imaginary, whether one is a fan or not, and Luchini incarnates the heir of this legacy, which he tries to reproduce in a place where it no longer exists. One could see the character that he plays in Jean-Philippe as seeking to construct a community of loss, such as Daniel Thérond defines it:

If, in the moving frame of heritage communities, people, whether individually or collectively, can view themselves as the heirs of a legacy both in the place where they are and in a place where they are not, it is logical to maintain that an object can be an inheritance, both in the place where it is, the place where it is not, and the place where it was but is no longer. This means that absent, displaced, or destroyed objects need to be taken into account. The very absence of an object is something that can be inherited, as soon as it is felt and articulated in what Adrian von Buttlar, an art historian from Berlin, has called a “construction of loss.” Such an object can contrib-ute to the formation of what I call a “community of loss,” which is a sub-category of the community that is defined by its cultural inheritance. It can be formed immedi-ately following the destruction of the object, or later, or a very long time afterwards, and it can unite people who live at a great distance from the object, and one group with another.14

One can see this principle operating in the game of deconstruction / recon-struction surrounding the persona of Deneuve in Place Vendôme (Nicole Garcia, 1998), in which she appears first as an alcoholic borderline personality before recovering all her luster when she regains control over her life. Similarly, Quand j’étais chanteur / The Singer (Xavier Giannoli, 2006), uses the persona of Depardieu,

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who acts the part of an aging cabaret singer whose career has faded, to play on the nostalgic mode, while André Téchiné confronts Deneuve and Depardieu with the aging of their appearance by including photos of them in their youth, particularly in Ma saison préférée / My Favorite Season (Téchiné, 1993), and again in Les Temps qui changent / Changing Times (Téchiné, 2004). Although times have changed, stars continue to exist, giving the illusion of continuity with the period of Gabin, Morgan, and other monstres sacrés. To match stars up with heritage characters that are “bigger than life” is a strategy that allows one to look in the rear-view mirror in order to find a dimension that evokes the glory days of French stars. Furthermore, the longevity of a Depardieu or a Deneuve is reassuring, serving as a safe haven, in one sense, against the anxiety aroused by a temporal disruption, even if their pres-ence in these reflexive, nostalgic films confirms the existence of existential crises. Their impact comes from this ability to convey the ideas of continuity and rupture simultaneously by seeming to be phoenixes being reborn from their ashes in all of these films. Mammuth (Gustave de Kervern, Benoît Delépine, 2010) is unquestion-ably the film that goes farthest in this direction, by presenting in a condensed, poetic form all the worst and best aspects of Depardieu’s persona. Cut adrift, banned from society, he rides around on a motorbike in search of a lost humanity – projecting the idea of a lower-class French identity in trouble as a subtext. Haunted by an obsessive nostalgia embodied by Adjani, his female counterpart, who is another eccentric star living outside the norms, he is destined to rediscover this humanity in the traces of his past (Téchiné’s Barocco [1976] is lurking in the background of this film). Both Depardieu and Adjani are mere chimeras of French cinema in relation to the 1990s, which saw the heyday of the commemorative heritage that they once conveyed. Depardieu appears out of step with, and lost in, a bloodless modern world that refuses to acknowledge his identity (as reflected in his retirement issues). In fact, this national heritage symbol par excellence paradoxi-cally unites a sense of being unable to adapt to the present-day world with an inability to comprehend why,15 a condition that is rendered all the more believable by his grotesque behavior when confronted by the reality of his fiscal exile. Following the media frenzy surrounding this affair, Jacques Mandelbaum described Depardieu, with some justification, as “one of the country’s lost children,” an “offspring and symbol of a France that has become orphaned from itself.”16

Countering the Supremacy of Hollywood

More generally, the pronounced taste in French cinema for heritage fiction allows stars, in the case of a successful film, to inflate their persona with an iconic aura, to nourish their image with a dimension that associates them with national iden-tity in a way that is more visible to foreigners, thus making them more exportable. One needs only to look at the French actors who receive prizes at the Oscars to see

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that the majority of them break through on account of heritage fictions. All the new French stars with an international reputation, like the older ones, have distin-guished themselves in heritage fictions, even Jean Reno – in Les Visiteurs / The Visitors ( Jean-Marie Poiré, 1993) – whose persona mainly depends on his action films. The role of French stars as ambassadors for national identity is more marked than is the case with American stars who, as a result of their hegemonic position, tend to be viewed as embodying the “universal.” This is why the seedbed provided by heritage fiction has become a favored form through which actors seek to coun-ter the supremacy of Hollywood.

Accordingly, Adjani, Depardieu, and Deneuve have been nominated by turns at the Oscars in the category of best actor, respectively, for Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten, 1988) in 1990, for Cyrano de Bergerac in 1991, and for Indochine in 1993, without any of them, in the end, landing the statuette. Nevertheless, even being nominated provides a superb international platform as well as a stature that is rare for a French star unless he or she acts in an American film. Apart from Audrey Tautou, whose international triumph in Amélie had the same legitimating effect as a nomination or prize at the Oscars, only Marion Cotillard (awarded the Oscar for Best Actress for La Vie en Rose), Jean Dujardin (awarded the Oscar for Best Actor for The Artist), and Bérénice Bejo (nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Artist) have enjoyed such a degree of recognition as a result of being in a French film. Juliette Binoche is a separate case, since she won the statuette for a supporting role in an English-language film in 1997, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2001, and for a Golden Globe in 1994, 1997, and 2001 for foreign films, making an exception for Trois couleurs: Bleu / Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993), which was released prior to her period of glory in the United States. Binoche, for the most part, shoots films that are made outside France, and her aura has been stronger overseas than in France since she won her Oscar.

According to Gilles Renouard, the French films that have been exported most successfully in the past few years are, apart from documentaries (La Marche de l’empereur / March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005) and international French co-productions such as certain films by Luc Besson, Roman Polanski, Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008), Taken 2 (Olivier Megaton, 2010), Le Transporteur / The Transporter (Louis Leterrier and Corey Yuen, 2002), The Transporter 2 (Leterrier, 2005), and The Transporter 3 (Megaton, 2008), heritage fictions: La Vie en Rose, Coco avant Chanel, Amélie, Un secret, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Artist, Queen Margot and comedies: Astérix, Intouchables / The Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011), Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998), Taxi 2 (Gérard Krawczyk, 2000), Taxi 3 (Gérard Krawczyk, 2003), Taxi 4 (Gérard Krawczyk, 2007), Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis / Welcome to the Sticks (Boon, 2008), 8 Women, and Gazon maudit / French Twist (Balasko, 1995). The small handful of films representing France to the outside world rests, then, on a pedestal of strongly defined French identity, inflected with an essentially French cultural heritage. They also comprise the leading standard-bearers made under the policy of cultural exception to counter the American model, together with the fear of lack of differentiation that this model inspires on account of globalization.

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Indeed, following their first cinematic success overseas, French stars often amplify this heritage dimension surrounding them by undertaking a role as the muse for luxury French brands. The more the roles of an actor and his or her iden-tity are able to be recognized through their public image, the more readily they are able to attain fame on the Hollywood and international scenes.

Marion Cotillard lends her image to Dior, Tautou to Chanel (to the point where both are marketed more as women with a sandwich-board than as actresses),17 and Binoche to Lancôme. Cassel, married to the Italian Monica Bellucci, bestows the credibility of European luxury on Armani. This practice, however, is nothing new. Depardieu is an exception to the rule, given that he has rarely served as the muse for luxury items, because to do so would hardly be compatible with his trademark image as a working-class Frenchman descended from the lineage of Jean Gabin. In contrast, Deneuve’s impact has always depended upon her distinctive style of French elegance, which constitutes a veritable visiting card that was constructed before her cinematic success overseas. Her collaboration with one of the greatest of contemporary French designers, Yves Saint-Laurent, as well as her advertising campaign for the Chanel brand between 1969 and 1977 in the United States, has enhanced this refined image since her debut, amplifying her status as an icon of national identity. She has also had a formative role in determining the general image that foreigners form of France as a country, and has also contributed signifi-cantly to the production of stereotypes. We should note, furthermore, that Deneuve’s films, both her recent and earlier ones – Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg / The Umbrellas of Cherbourg ( Jacques Demy, 1964), and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort / The Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy, 1967, and screened again at the end of the 1990s) – have been very successful in the United States.

In the 1990s, then, the public images of major stars were frequently nourished by heritage fictions that seem to have been chosen for the sake of consolidating and expanding the reputations that such stars had already established. In the con-temporary period, by way of contrast, some recent stars seem to owe their success to a single defining role that leaves one uncertain as to whether the persona that is born from such a film will be able to transcend the image so formed, or whether it will merely reside in the repetition of this one career-defining role (for example, in the cases of Tautou, Cotillard, and Dujardin). As Gilles Renouard observes:

international careers can be as meteoric and intense as they are brief when they are identified with a single role. Anne Parillaud will always be associated with Nikita / La Femme Nikita (Besson, 1990), Béatrice Dalle will always be the Betty of 37o2 le matin / Betty Blue ( Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986), and Jean-Pierre Léaud has been identified for his whole life with Antoine Doinel.18

All the French films that have created French stars exploit a cultural prestige that ensures that the French film industry remains the most significant after Hollywood. There is no question that it derives much of its social and symbolic

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legitimacy from the New Wave, but it also draws upon a much older tradition of the “film d’art,”19 which is a product of the French cultural legacy more generally. “What is most fascinating in French cinema,” Toscan du Plantier once said, “is a distinctive conception of cinema itself. French cinema? OK, there are other cine-mas … But there is a conception of cinema that is original, the idea that it is an ‘oeuvre.’ A cultural work of art that stands in opposition to the market-driven hegemony of America.”20 French stars who proceed to Hollywood, therefore, find themselves assuming the task of asserting this cultural difference, and of embodying this distinctive conception of cinema. Although such a conception has become watered-down in comparison with the New Wave, it is nevertheless expressed overseas in “films of the middle” – films that are the outcome of a hybridization of the “film d’art” with popular genres. The identity of a French star is constructed, then, out of a relationship uniting him or her as an individual with French cinema collectively, viewed as a national symbol overseas. However, while older stars like Depardieu and Deneuve (both of whom are at the top of the lad-der in the United States, and are as famous as Bardot and Delon in the rest of the world)21 attest to the ongoing impact of French cultural prestige (and of European prestige as far as Binoche is concerned), what about the younger generation? While we can say that Deneuve and Depardieu are simultaneously producers and disseminators of the French cultural legacy, and that they invest the characters they take on with a particular cultural image and a guarantee of quality, can the same be said of Tautou and Cotillard, whose personalities seem to be overtaken by their characters and their performance style (inherited from the Actors Studio in the case of the latter)?

The Younger Generation and the Uncertain Future of the Heritage Solution

In older stars, an interweaving of several French identities can be observed, as with Depardieu in Cyrano, and Deneuve in Indochine (one recalls that Deneuve was formerly a model for Marianne, the national symbol of France).22 The first identity is conveyed through their own personal manner of speaking, and their persona; another identity is conveyed through their character; and a third identity involves the function as a national representative that they acquire as a result of being in a social space that is other than French. In contrast, one suspects the distinctiveness of present-day stars resides simply in the expression of a particular role, which raises the question about the viability of this distinctiveness. While there is no doubt that their image, in an international context, manifests specific national traits in opposition to the Hollywood Other, one fears that it might merely consist of echo-chamber reverberations of the qualities of their heroines, who were veri-table repositories of national characteristics: La Vie en Rose and Amélie were not

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written with Cotillard and Tautou in mind, but, respectively, for Tautou and Emily Watson. Given that their image is still in the process of formation, only time will tell whether it will remain formed from the sedimentation of the imaginary herit-age stratum in their future roles and their own persona, but we can already see that, in the case of Audrey Tautou (someone who is familiar with heritage fictions as the source of her successes), her roles – until Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller, 2012) – have been lessening in intensity like the waves of a ricochet that weaken before they disappear.

Tautou and Cotillard have benefited, however, at least as far as their interna-tional impact is concerned, from the marked preference for female French stars as compared to male stars. The clichés associated with France have always been strongly inflected with feminine values: luxury, beauty, charm, sexiness. That explains why the only male stars to cross the Atlantic successfully have achieved fame in feminine or refined registers, such as musicals (Maurice Chevalier) and melodramas (Charles Boyer). But at the present time, although Dujardin has charmed his audience through a particular film, only Vincent Cassel has mastered the image of elegance and sophistication associated with the Continent of former years. One is justified in asking whether Dujardin will be able to conjure up the spell in the long run, because even though the comic register may protect it a little longer, he did not fail to shock the Americans upon receiving his Oscar, by swear-ing. Media commentators were already expressing concern about the impact of the posters for Les Infidèles / The Players (Emmanuelle Bercot, Fred Cavayé, Alexandre Courtès, Jean Dujardin, Michel Hazanavicius, Jan Kounen, Eric Lartigau, Gilles Lellouche, 2012), showing him in dubious sexual positions, that were unveiled just before the ceremony. In comparison, it seems beyond question that a female French identity, enhanced by the heritage register, is more in keeping with the tastes of the American audience.

At this level, Tautou and Cotillard embody two very different types of French femininity in the eyes of the Americans. Cotillard, through La Vie en Rose, reinvig-orates the fantasy of the French female entertainer with a liberated sexuality. Deneuve had already been acclaimed in this register as an actress and manager of the theater in The Last Metro, and the character she plays in Indochine rejects mar-riage while at the same time seducing a young French marine lieutenant. The other French feminine type is that of the woman who suffers from a tormented inner life, as already played with distinction by Adjani, nominated for Oscars for her acting in L’Histoire d’Adèle H. / The Story of Adele H. (Truffaut, 1975) and Camille Claudel, who highlighted the plight of a heroine gripped by love to the point of obsession and mental breakdown. In contrast to her predecessors, Cotillard, how-ever, projects these stereotypes in a popular social register, even though since La Vie en Rose she has been contributing, more conventionally, the exotic “French touch” in American films. This so-called “French touch,” which emphasizes French elegance, has been particularly successful in the James Bond series, fondly regarded by French brunettes (Claudine Auger, Denise Perrier, Corinne Cléry, Carole

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Bouquet, Sophie Marceau, Eva Green, Olga Kurylenko, and Bérénice Marlohe), whereas the two blondes, Bardot and Deneuve, refused to participate in them.

The reason why the producers of La Vie en Rose wanted Tautou as their first choice is because, since Amélie, she has been regarded as the embodiment of the popular, cheeky young Parisienne – a bit fragile (like Binoche), but androgynous and childlike. Tautou offers an incarnation of French femininity that is relatively new, one that she refreshes by lightening it with her erotic power and glamour. She is a French patrimonial version of the girl next door, who functions, in France, and to a still greater degree overseas, as Proust’s madeleine in evoking a fantasized Frenchness of French culture during the last century, as the inclusion of “Poulain” in the title, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, suggests.23 Moreover, Amélie serves to convey a Judeo-Christian message about the need for selflessness by devoting her life to promoting the happiness of others, a dimension that one finds amplified in her role as one of Christ’s descendants in The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006). A modern ingénue conforming to Tony Anatrella’s definition of an adolescent,24 and constantly described as “gamine” by the US press, which looks at all her roles through the prism of Amélie,25 as well as the monochromatic figurehead of a French stereotype, she presents an unthreatening image of romantic femininity, capable of uniting an audience comprising all ages and social milieus.

Thus, by bringing prestige, performance, international visibility, and critical and commercial recognition together in a single role, stars who win fame in patrimo-nial fictions are better able than any other actors to resist the potentially negative impact of certain aspects of contemporary French cinema: the gap between auteur cinema and commercial cinema, the disappearance of the classical star system, and the crisis caused by the supremacy of Hollywood (intensified by the negative image of an aging nation). Morever, the process of patrimonialization in which stars participate provides an original way of generating continuity in a society that privileges ruptures and innovation. Such stars, then, allow society to be bound together by resolving the temporal contradictions in the image that they offer to it of itself, and also to the rest of the world. Indeed, stars who achieve success in French heritage fictions designed for export are subsequently often invited to the United States on the basis of them, in order to respond to the needs of a more or less tacit patrimonial contract implicit in American films that assimilate their image – Diabolique ( Jeremiah Chechik, 1996), The Musketeer (Peter Hyams, 2001), 1492, Conquest of Paradise (Ridley Scott, 1992), The Da Vinci Code, Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010), Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011), and so on.

Certain limitations in French cinema, however, become apparent when one studies them. Although film production tends to recycle the cultural heritage more and more widely, through strategies that include the exhumation of faded or retired stars to fortify the stock of biopics with a strong commercial potential for  export – one thinks of projects involving Romy Schneider, Montand, and Bardot – the patrimonializing ability of stars seems to spread out and move around at the same time as the performer toward the character, encouraging and masking

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the volatility of contemporary French stars and the uncertain future of the cul-tural exception of French cinema on the world stage, which is tending more and more to become globalized. In such conditions, will the patrimonial solution be able to provide major stars in the longer term? Or does the massively expanded investment in heritage run the risk of making its heirs the representatives of a world, and of a cinema, that has disappeared, or has been in the process of disap-pearing, even though they were aiming at a continuity between the present and a world that has passed?

Translated by Alistair Fox

Notes

1 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1998).2 Delphine Chedaleux and Gwénaëlle Le Gras, “Introduction: le cinema français en

substance (1930–1960),” in Genres et acteurs du cinéma français 1930–1960, ed. Gwénaëlle Le Gras and Delphine Chedaleux (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 12–13.

3 Michel Marie, “Os ultimos 20 anos do cinema francês (1986–2006),” in Cinema mundial contemporâneo, ed. Mauro Baptista and Fernando Mascarello (Campinas, Brasil: Papirus Editora, 2008), 57–70.

4 By Josiane Balasko, Michel Blanc, Christian Clavier, Gérard Jugnot, and Thierry Lhermitte.

5 Raphaëlle Moine and Pierre Beylot, “Introduction,” in Fictions patrimoniales sur grand et petit écran, ed. Pierre Beylot and Raphaëlle Moine (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2009), 17.

6 François-Xavier Molia, “Dépoussiérer les mythes: désynchronisation et hybridation dans les fictions patrimoniales,” in Beylot and Moine, eds., Fictions patrimoniales sur grand et petit écran, 96.

7 Jean-François Bayard, L’Illusion identitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1996).8 Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).9 For Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread

of  Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), “imagined communities” form the basis of national identity.

10 Nicolas Sarkozy, speech announcing the creation of the Maison de l’Histoire de France (delivered at Nîmes January 13, 2009), http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/097000104.html, accessed May 12, 2014.

11 Emmanuel Cuénod, “Gérard Jugnot, acteur simple type,” Tribune de Genève, September 24, 2008, http://journal.tdg.ch/actu/culture/2008/09/23/gerard-jugnot-acteur-simple-type, accessed May 12, 2014.

12 During the ceremony for the César awards in 2007, Pascale Ferran, given a prize for  Lady Chatterley (2006), a middlebrow film, declared: “By classing films with an artistic vocation as ‘poor’ films and films designed to entertain as ‘rich’ films, by compartmentalizing the two categories, by making it almost impossible for a contemporary filmmaker to move from one category into another, the system today is

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betraying the legacy of the greatest French filmmakers. And their relentless determina-tion never to dissociate cinematic creation from a personal point of view combined with a desire to address the greatest number of spectators.” Libération Next, February 26, 2007, http://next.liberation.fr/cinema/2007/02/26/cesars-le-coup-de-gueule-de-pascale-ferran_12839, accessed May 12, 2014. The “cinema of the middle” refers to films that display both an artistic ambition and also a concern to appeal to a large audience.

13 Gwénaëlle Le Gras, “Le ‘Patrimoine’ Deneuve d’une chaîne télévisée (TF1) à l’autre (Arte),” in Beylot and Moine, eds., Fictions patrimoniales sur grand et petit écran, 140.

14 Daniel Thérond, Le Patrimoine et au-delà (Paris: Conseil de l’Europe, 2010), 79.15 Je n’ai rien oublié (Bruno Chiche, 2010) deals with exactly the same schema, but under

the pretext of Alzheimer’s disease.16 Jacques Mandelbaum, “Depardieu, enfant perdu de la patrie,” Le Monde, December 25,

2012, http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2012/12/25/depardieu-enfant-perdu-de-la-patrie_1810221_3246.html, accessed May 12, 2014.

17 See Mona Chollet, “Le Cinéma sous l’empire de la publicité: actrices ou femmes-sandwiches?,” Les Blogs du Diplot, May 18, 2009, accessed February 28, 2013, http://blog.mondediplo.net/2009-05-18-Actrices-ou-femmes-sandwiches.

18 Gilles Renouard, Le Cinéma français dans le monde (Paris: Klincksieck, 2012), 100.19 A society formed in 1908 by Paul Lafitte, at the request of the Comédie-Française, aim-

ing to broaden the audience for cinema, which had been perceived as a fairground entertainment, at the more cultivated levels of society by producing quality films based on “great subjects” such as historical, mythological, and theatrical reconstitutions.

20 Renouard, Le Cinéma français dans le monde, 187.21 IFOP, Impact du cinéma français à l’étranger (Paris: IFOP-ADEF, 2004), 20–23.22 The Association des Maires de France (AMF) regularly chooses famous French women

as models for statuettes of Marianne. It is customary to display such busts in town halls as a symbol of the republican tradition [translator’s note].

23 Chocolat Poulain is one of the oldest chocolate brands in France, having been pro-duced since 1848 [translator’s note].

24 Tony Anatrella, Interminables adolescences (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988).25 Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 13, 2012, observed ironically when La

Délicatesse / Delicacy (David and Stéphane Foenkinos, 2011) was released in the United States: “Almost the only time you see the word ‘gamine’ these days is in a sentence that also refers to the French actress Audrey Tautou, a market she cornered in the 2001 film ‘Amélie.’ Ms Tautou’s gamineness – gaminality? gaminocity? – is about all her new film, ‘Delicacy,’ has going for it.” http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/movies/delicacy-starring-audrey-tautou.html?_r=0, accessed May 12, 2014. Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, September 29, 2009, makes a similar observation: “The problem for Audrey Tautou is that she is doomed to trail clouds of ‘Amélie’ wherever she goes. Those inky round eyes and that pixie mug insure that hers are the features, poor thing, that social anthropologists will eternally reach for when asked to illustrate the term gamine. Or mignonne.” http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/09/28/090928crci_cinema_lane, accessed May 12, 2014.

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