Cinematic challenge to the French stereotype
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.
The Alliance Francais' cultural affairs manager Francine Lier, who selected the 10 films, says she has tried to pick the newest, most exciting movies currently screening in France for Cinepanorama. She says there is something special happening there at the moment.
'It is a kind of renaissance, so many new directors, so many women directors. And they are making films about real life, allowing the actors to act in a naturalistic way. They aren't interested in stars or rich people.' In the enchanting love story, Marius And Jeannette, director Robert Guediguian has to create a romance out of a story about two very ordinary, homey people: a single mother (Ariane Ascaride) with two children who works in a supermarket, who meets a security guard (Gerard Meylan) at a disused factory where she tries to steal some paint. 'You are a worker too!' she spits at him, disgusted. 'My house is falling down for lack of paint!' He turns up later with the paint and offers to help her redecorate and a prickly, unlikely, convincing love story begins which is aided by the nutty neighbours, Monique and Dede, who fight because he voted for the National Front, Stephanie, a retired communist, and Justin, once a teacher, who spends his time pursuing Stephanie and talking to Jeannette's little son about Allah, Christ and everything in between.
Two years ago L'Haine (Hate) opened at Cinepanorama, the harsh directorial debut of Matthieu Kassovitz. That film showed the dregs of French society, a couple of days in the life of three unemployed friends living on a grubby French housing estate. The screening was a shock to anyone still under the illusion that French society was a homogenous, content unit.
None of the films in this year's festival are as brutal; in fact although some deal with difficult issues, the general mood among French film-makers today seems to be more positive than it was two years ago.
'Directors are more confident in life now, and it is reflected in the films,' Ms Lier says.
The issue of identity in France's multi-cultural society is given an interesting slant in The Other Shore, starring Claude Brasseur as a pied-noir, the nickname given to the white Frenchmen who settled in Algeria. Brasseur plays Georges, who stayed in Algeria even after independence in 1962, when most of the pied-noir were either thrown out or escaped from Algeria after the long bloody war for independence.
He is in France for the first time to have a cataract operation, after spending his whole life in Algeria. He feels a foreigner in what is technically his own country. Meanwhile the doctor who operates on him, Tarak Timzert, was born in France to Algerian parents, and feels completely French.
The current troubles in Algeria provide a backdrop to the story of how Georges and Tarek become friends. But the one truly bloodthirsty moment comes when Tarek operates on Georges while he is still awake, but under local anaesthetic, so he can see everything that is happening to him as clearly as the audience can.
This is director Dominique Cabrera's first feature film; all her previous works have been documentaries which may explain the otherwise incomprehensible decision to include the operation.
Other films not to miss include Love Etc, based on the Julian Barnes novel, Talking It Over, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as the woman who marries one man, while in love with his best friend.
The Demons Of Jesus is a family movie with a difference, a foul-mouthed comedy about the Jacobs, a family of former gypsies now living in the suburbs. Ms Lier says this movie is special because of the strong language used by the main characters.
'Hong Kong people are used to one kind of French comedy,' she says. 'I wanted to give them something different with this film.' The translator who provides English subtitles had his work cut out, she says.
Tickets for French Cinepanorama are available through Urbtix. All screenings take place at City Hall between December 4 and 10