French murder mystery caper to enjoy, but it’s still a worthy one
Since 1895, when the Lumière brothers first screened the motion pictures they had produced with their new invention, the cinématographe, France has been uniquely positioned in the global film industry. The French language is embedded in the terminology of the movies: from film noir to cinéma vérité, and mise-en-scène to Palme d’Or.
French directors and actors labour in the tradition of Jean Renoir and Jean-Luc Godard, of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve.
It can be a burdensome reputation; there is also plenty of stigma attached to French films. Do they always have to be worthy, moody, quirky, pensive, obscure? Is there no place for the lighthearted caper, the action-packed but easily digestible thriller?
To ask such questions betrays a narrow understanding of French cinema one that the MyFrenchFilmFestival seeks to rectify.
The 14th edition of this online festival takes place this year with 26 films available to viewers around the world for free, still until February 19. There are feature-length and short films, ranging from documentaries to animation, cutting across or merging genres, including new and recent films along with a couple of “cult classics”.
For my first foray into the 2024 programme, I watched Nicolas Pariser’s Le Parfum Vert (The Green Perfume). The film follows the hapless but endearing and, equally important, enduring duo of Martin (Vincent Lacoste) and Claire (Sandrine Kiberlaine) as they travel from Paris to Brussels to Budapest, on the run by turns from the police and an international right-wing criminal syndicate.
Martin is an actor with the Comédie-Française, the French state theatre company. When a member of the ensemble dies onstage in his arms, Martin is drawn into a web of conspiracy. He is saved by a chance encounter with Claire, a bande dessinée (comics) artist and author who abandons her failed book-signing event to help Martin solve a murder mystery with geopolitical ramifications. Lacoste and Kiberlaine are excellent as this clumsy but courageous pair.
The comedy in Le Parfum Vert is mixed with a sense of menace; Claire and Martin survive, but there are gruesome deaths along the way, and the threat that permeates the film is an all-too-familiar one. The bad guys here are driven by ideological fervour, hinted at by the arch-villain Hartz (Rüdiger Vogler) early in the film: the young people of the new Europe have been sold a lie, he suggests, and his organisation seeks to reclaim the glory of the old “nation states”.
This is a version of the antiEU populism being peddled across Europe, usually accompanied by unhealthy doses of racism and xenophobia.
There is an allegorical key here, which is first presented when we learn that Martin and Claire are both Ashkenazi Jews. Later, while they are hiding out in a safe house, Claire tells Martin she with a bullet hole in her leg, he making pasta about how she moved to Israel and lived there for many years before returning to France. There is a complex political statement compressed into her narrative.
At first, Israel was “European” (the modern state of Israel, some would say, is a European or Western imposition). But then, while “Europe at least as understood in the 21st century EU increasingly stood for democracy, neighbourly co-operation and human rights, Israel seemed to stand for the opposite. Thus, European states’ current support for Israel, while undergirded by their recognition of having perpetrated or having been complicit in the Holocaust, is paradoxically at odds with their professed values.
Claire and Martin’s comic adventure across Europe, managing to escape and (almost) outwit the goons and the masterminds of a would-be fascist enterprise, is shadowed by grim history. For Martin, train travel inevitably invokes the cultural memory of the Nazi death camps. But the story of European anti-Semitism is much older than that.
Since the days of Roman antiquity, Jewish people have been pawns and scapegoats in the manoeuvrings of European empires, monarchs and states; in Le Parfum Vert, this is updated to the age of technological warfare and campaigns of misinformation. The good guys win this round but this is a French film, after all, so there is no neat happy ending. We’re warned to stay alert.