Sensuous women, seductive men, haunting music, a rhythm of life that seems perpetual holiday-French cinema has always known how to charm: as close to reality as a glossy magazine. How odd, then, that recently the cinema queues in France have been for documentary films. Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" is one, but most are French. Each has sparked debate and shown a new generation that where television promotes apathy, cinema can stimulate the brain, not just overwhelm it with special effects.
One documentary stands out: Nicolas Philibert's "?lt;CARON>tre et Avoir" (To Be and to Have), officially selected for last year's Cannes film festival and awarded the Prix Delluc for the Best French Film of 2002. French critics have been unanimous in praise; 1.5m cinema goers have paid to see it.
Showing six months in a rural primary school, it is a film of warmth, humour and humanity. A single class, 13 children aged between four and 11, one teacher. Unobtrusively, the director records delight, anxiety, dawning understanding in the faces of these children as they are guided by the calm wisdom of their serene teacher, Georges Lopez, 18 months away from retirement when the film was shot. Audiences glow as they watch trivial incidents turned into life-learning milestones. When it opens it London and New York, Francophiles will yet again be reassured that in France at least the honest-to-goodness values of yesteryear have been retained.
But they will have been deceived. The real issues facing these schools are never touched upon: the single-class school lovingly portrayed by Philibert is heartily disliked by the ministry of education. My six year old goes to a single-class school not far from the one filmed; we fight a permanent battle for survival. Another real problem in the closed world of la France profonde is the exclusion and bullying of any child whose parents are different. Philibert does not touch on this either, despite the (unexplained) presence of a Chinese girl in his film.
But surely with teachers of that calibre, French education is an inspiration to others? "Having visited about 100 schools in the Massif Central," says Philibert, "I chose this one because the teacher was a good character." One of the 99 rejects might have had less character and been more typical. "I didn't want to make a film about education," Philibert adds. "Filming a child watching a fly is more interesting than filming a teaching situation." But is fly-watching really what documentaries should be about?
Another documentary on the cinema circuit does look at a grittier aspect of French life-the social conditions of the country's beurs, second generation immigrants born in France of north African parents (quantity unknown: the census is forbidden-by the constitution-to ask about ethnic roots). The first half of ?ic Pittard's documentary's title, "Le Bruit, l'odeur et Quelques ?oiles" (The Noise, the Smell and a Few Stars), comes from a speech made by Jacques Chirac in 1991, when he sympathised with those who had to put up with immigrant families next door. In 1998, a 17-year-old unarmed beur in Toulouse, having been stopped in a stolen car, was shot in the back by a policeman as he ran away. The dead boy's friends eloquently tell this story to camera, describing how they felt, what they saw. Since the murder caused almost no comment in the press and the murderer continued to walk the streets freely, they organised a peaceful march through the city to hand the mayor a petition. The march was only allowed on a Saturday, the town hall was closed, the mayor absent ("he was applying the 35-hour week to himself"). When he finally agreed to meet the community, it was at a cocktail party. The three friends said they were treated with less interest than "the peanuts and pistachios we were handing round."
It is fascinating to see this film back-to-back with another documentary about murdered children, "Bowling for Columbine". One is cerebral, the other visceral. Michael Moore, with the rough urgency of anger, using grainy, shaky, emotional images, invokes tears, incredulous laughter and possibly hatred as he relentlessly criticises his own society. Pittard, Philibert's former cameraman, pares away all emotion. Three years have passed since the boy was murdered; his friends tell the story calmly and plainly, with none of the "petit beur, sp?al medias, Taxi 2" affectations of speech often associated with inner-city ghetto youth. There are no representatives of the police, press or town hall for us to boo. There is no rocky library footage of baton-wielding cops; the family of the dead boy is filmed in a silent tableau. The distancing of emotion is accentuated by Brechtian use of music-a local rap group, Zebda, comment on the events in sequences of great, controlled beauty. But it is essentially a film of talking heads. Despite Pittard's obvious commitment and great skill with images, I left the cinema with a, well, Gallic shrug.
British documentaries and nose-in-the-dirt dramas, even on television, have provoked questions in parliament. Ken Loach's 1966 "Cathy Come Home" set a precedent and now the French consider Loach one of the world's great film-makers, his bleak visions of Britain reinforcing their distrust of privatisation, unscrupulous capitalism, the yawning poverty gap in a society which they see as lacking a social conscience. But he has no equivalent in France, even though the social inequalities are no less prevalent. There is no French Mike Leigh-or Michael Moore-although audiences love their films. An exception is Pierre Carles, who has a small but loyal following. His three cinema documentaries are controversial, but cover arcane subjects. Since he attacks the brainwashing media, his films are hard to find.
It is not that France doesn't have its own tradition of documentary films, but there does seem to be a feeling that it is somehow impolite to criticise la Patrie, that to pay to watch such criticism in the cinema is disloyal. Perhaps the recent success of Philibert and others will summon in its wake a spikier and more challenging documentary tradition.
