The French film industry cannot churn out the sheer numbers of films of Bollywood, or the Hong Kong industry, and cannot hope to compete internationally with the big budgets of Hollywood action movies to win audiences.
But it remains a force to be reckoned with, as demonstrated by the range and quality of films on offer at this year's French Cinepanorama film festival, which runs from December 4 to December 10.
On the surface, the selection contains many familiar genres - costume dramas, a musical, family comedy, love story, buddy movie, and a film about love's eternal triangle - but these movies manage to turn those conventions around.
Marquise, which opens the festival next week, is a case in point. On paper this is a costume drama directed by veteran film-maker Vera Belmont, about the 17th-century actress Marquise de Parc, played by Sophie Marceau, who played roles for the great rival playwrights Moliere and Racine, and performed for the decadent King Louis XIV.
But this is no postcard-pretty romantic version of the past, but a bawdy, sexy, comic tragedy, which starts with a man asking where his women friends can find a toilet, and follows them into a shed where they throw up their skirts, bare their buttocks to the camera and get on with it.
It is shocking and of course it is meant to be. It is not done in order to titillate, but to show things as they were.