Talk to the Snail

by Stephen Clarke

  And their excuse is: OK, it may be merde, but at least it’s French merde. This too is in the dictionary. It’s called l’exception française. Culture has to be good except if it’s French. Zola, Matisse and co. must be turning in their graves. Voltaire would just giggle.

  Popping the Bubble

  The French think too much to be any good at making music. Music comes from the soul (or, where rock is concerned, from somewhere between the guts and the genitals), and the French rely too much on their brains.

  I’ve played bass with lots of semi-professional bar bands, murdering everything from pub rock to salsa, and I’ve noticed one fundamental difference between French and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ musicians. If you want to start off a rehearsal with a jam to get to know each other, a Brit or American will say something like, ‘OK, blues in E, one, two, three, four,’ and you’re away. The French will argue for ten minutes about who’s going to come in first, what speed to play it, and what order to solo in.

  This is why the French love to play and listen to jazz. It’s thought music. I can busk along with pretty well any tune if you give me a minute to learn it, but I went for double-bass lessons with a French jazz bassist, and after every lesson I was playing worse. Instead of helping me busk along (which I thought was the point of jazz), he explained Greek scales and Ultrabionic harmonies or whatever, and I had to think so hard that I didn’t dare touch the strings any more.

  It’s the same with kids’ music lessons. At French schools, any child with a burning desire to learn the piano, the guitar or the drums will be forced to do a year’s solfège (reading music) before they’re allowed to get their hands on the instrument. This ensures that all the really passionate, impatient wannabe musicians (the ones likely to turn into a Hendrix or a Cobain) will give up and do volleyball instead.

  Consequently, French pop music is, apart from a very few exceptions, excruciatingly painful. Short of finding a dead swan in my bathwater, there are few things that would make me jump out of a steaming tub in the middle of winter and dash across a freezing cold bathroom. But if I’m listening to the radio and a bad French pop song comes on, hypothermia seems a small price to pay for the relief of changing to a less offensive station.

  And if you complain that a tune is rubbish or nonexistent, you’ll be told, ah oui, but the words are wonderful. Which is like saying that a bowl of soup tastes like dog’s breath but looks sublime.

  To give you an idea, here are a few recipes for French dog’s breath soup – I mean, hit songs:

  • Take a boring tune. Get a producer to dub grungy guitars over it to make it sound rocky. Write a list of twenty unrelated but similar-sounding words. Find a singer to mumble them throatily. Sell to French radio station.

  • Take a cute ethnic-minority girl. Imitate the backing track to a recent American R&B hit. Get a rich Parisian to write some lyrics about how hard it is to survive in the poor suburbs. Sell to French radio station.

  • Take an ageing star. Get him or her to sing any old nonsense. Call it a glorious comeback. Sell to French radio station.

  • Take a below-averagely talented busker. Proclaim him as a poetic genius. Sell to French radio station.

  The recipes can’t fail because there is a legal quota system that obliges radio stations to play French music (as up to 40 per cent of their output, depending on what type of station it is), with an emphasis on ‘new French production’. The message is clear – you slap any old merde on to a CD, and the radio will play it. You don’t even need anyone to actually like your record, let alone buy it, because radio play generates plenty of income.

  This is the driving force behind French pop music today.

  It’s not surprising that the musicians themselves have an image problem. They don’t know what they’re doing. One famous French singer thinks he’s Radiohead, dresses like Jim Morrison, and writes songs like Andrew Lloyd Webber. Another dresses like a punk clown on stage and looks like a nerdy webmaster off it – hasn’t he heard about living your music? At least old Serge Gainsbourg always looked like a human cigarette butt and sang almost exclusively about shagging. He understood image.

  French music hasn’t really known what it’s up to since fake French Teddy Boys started singing translations of American rock’n’ roll songs at the end of the 1950s. These singers, with stage names like Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell and Dick Rivers, didn’t understand the original words or the music. They were basically crooners with a quiff. Since then, you can count the number of decent French pop bands on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to hold your Gauloise.

  This fundamental lack of understanding about pop music is good news for some people, though. The French have so little concept of the changing fashions in music that once an artist has cracked France, he or she will stay popular for ever. Eternal favourites here include Supertramp, the Cure, Jeff Buckley, Midnight Oil, Lenny Kravitz, Texas, Placebo and – most weirdly of all – eighties synth-popsters Cock Robin, who have probably earned enough from French radio plays of ‘When Your Heart Is Weak’ to retire to the Côte d’Azur.

  Film for Film’s Sake

  In a typical French film, so an LA joke goes, Marc is in love with Sophie, Sophie loves François, François has the hots for Charlotte, who is in love with Isabelle, but Isabelle loves Gérard, who has a crush on Florence, who loves Marc. And in the end, they all go out to dinner.

  Yes, modern French cinema can be a soupçon predictable.

  Even so, the French are right to be proud of their film industry. Not necessarily of their films, but of the industry that makes them. They have a massive stock of experienced directors, writers, cameramen and technicians ready to leap into action, which they do with almost as much regularity as the movie production line in Bollywood.

  And the reason is money. If they want to make a French movie, they can get cash to make it from the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie), a state-run institution that creams off a percentage of the box-office takings from the country’s cinemas and dishes the money out to fund new films. A brilliant idea that enables small productions to get off the ground when they’d be doomed to failure in most other countries.

  The trouble is that the system has also created a ‘film for film’s sake’ mindset in France – let’s make a film just to use up the grant money. The film doesn’t have to earn much at the box office. With its grants and subsidies, and a probable TV showing or two, the very fact of making it is a pretty safe bet as long as the director doesn’t blow millions on special effects. But then, who needs special effects when you can shoot a bunch of love scenes and marital arguments in a Paris apartment?

  What’s more, making the film is doubly profitable for everyone involved. French film-industry workers qualify as intermittents du spectacle, or occasional show-business workers. Once they have done their minimum number of hours’ work for the year (507 in the previous twelvemonth period), they qualify for unemployment money. And not just a token sum but their hourly salary, paid for all the time between jobs. So a film director who makes one feature film a year can get paid full-time at the hourly rate he charged while he was making the film. The same goes for everyone else involved, from the actors to the guys who screw together the camera tripods. Spend, say, three months making one bad film and you can live like a movie star for the rest of the year.

  Not exactly a motivation to make good movies.

  France has, of course, made some truly great movies. And most of them are great precisely because they are so French. Directors like Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Blier could not have come from anywhere else on the planet. And France still manages to turn out the odd quirkily French art-house gem like Delicatessen, and the occasional unpretentious comedy like Les Visiteurs. So this system of keeping everyone in the movie industry on the national payroll has clearly paid off.

  But these days, the industry seems to have lost its sense of experimentation and fun and decided to stick to filming its own navel. Here is a summa
ry of a recent French film that shall remain nameless: ‘Xavier decides to become a novelist, but in the meantime he has to take on a variety of jobs – journalist, scriptwriter, ghostwriter.’ Yeah, right, very varied. In the sequel poor old Xavier will probably be forced (horreur!) to write short stories.

  Directors who want to make something different go abroad. Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) are Hollywood operators now. And when Besson makes something French but different, like the incredibly popular car-chase movie Taxi, he is looked down upon by the art establishment as a purveyor of crude, Hollywood-style non-art that he cynically aims at the American market.

  This is, of course, total hypocrisy. If you gave truth serum to the snootiest French film director, the head of the ‘I make French films and merde to everyone else’ campaign, he or she would eventually break down and start sobbing, ‘Why doesn’t Hollywood want to adapt any of my films?’

  Art for Fart’s Sake

  French artists can’t get it out of their heads that this is the country of Renoir, Monet, Manet and Cézanne, and the place where foreigners like Picasso, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Giacometti and so many others came to develop their art. Instead of inspiring today’s artists to follow their dream, though, this national heritage only encourages them to act like Picasso instead of painting like him.

  Paris regularly holds studio open days, when whole quartiers of the city become artistic treasure hunts. You get a little map and follow directions to all the different artists’ studios in the neighbourhood. And in almost every case, you’ll find a place that looks like a real artist’s studio (splodges of paint, ink, plaster or other materials you don’t want to enquire about), and sounds like a real artist’s studio (the drone of a voice explaining the art on show – although the best art doesn’t need any explaining at all), but feels like a waste of time. The art on show will probably be either sub-Impressionist, supposedly ‘shocking’ or ‘inspired’ by a visit to some exotic corner of the world where the art is easily copyable.

  I’m not saying that Damien Hirst sawing cows in half is the be-all and end-all of art, but at least it’s different.

  In any case, these days the most inventive French artists are much more interested in comic books, or BD (‘bay-day’, an abbreviation of bande dessinée), than straight art. But these should never be called ‘comic books’. They are the neuvième art, and must be taken very seriously. And it is definitely not polite to say that the best BD artists are Belgian.

  They’ve Got le Look

  The French are convinced that they are the sexiest people on earth, apart perhaps from the odd Hollywood hunk or Brazilian beach babe. As proof, they will say that their haute couture is the most stylish in the world. Though this is rather like saying that the Koreans are the best drivers on earth because that’s where so many cars are made. The truth is that the French mostly dress like frumps.

  There are, of course, some incredibly sexy people walking the streets (and especially the beaches) of France. But this has more to do with their relative lack of obesity and an ability to resist the temptation to ruin their skin and hair with gallons of make-up and blond dye. When people write books about French women, they go on about style, taste and class. What they seem to mean is arch-conservatism. If you look at film divas like Sophie Marceau, Juliette Binoche or Carole Bouquet, you hardly notice their clothes. It’s what is inside that counts. The clothes are usually as classic (a polite word for unadventurous) as you can get.

  The average French person totally ignores the existence of French haute couture. Partly because haute couture is not really meant to be worn at all, of course – the catwalk designs are simply there to get photos into magazines. Partly also because even the prêt à porter stuff by Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent et al costs a fortune. But mainly because most French people prefer to dress like their mums and dads did, and fit into the traditional bourgeois mould.

  French teenagers come in three basic models – the denim classic, the seventies hippy/fake Rasta and the sporty Bronx rapper/ho. When they cross over into adult life, though, they dispense with any daring elements and start dressing like their parents. As soon as male office workers hit their mid-twenties, they begin wearing ties that seem to have died of boredom. Meanwhile, their female colleagues will often dress as if looking for sympathy. Individual style is almost non-existent – it’s as if no one wants to stand out from the crowd. Go to a party in Paris thrown by anyone over twenty-five and the likelihood is that most people in the room will be in jeans or dressed in black. The worst thing anyone in Paris can do is appear uncool, and wearing jeans or black is totally safe. If the clothes in question have a discreet French designer label, all the better, but the important thing is not to stand out in the crowd.

  Yes, sorry, France. Apart from a few chic exceptions, you may dress to kill, but to kill with classicism.

  And if the French are so stylish, how come the top French fashion houses employ British designers like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, or Germans like Karl Lagerfeld?

  Prozac of the People

  In July 2004, the head of France’s biggest commercial television channel, TF1, said that his programmes existed to sell Coca-Cola. Patrick Le Lay gave an interview declaring that TF1’s programmes ‘had a vocation to entertain the viewers and relax them between two commercial breaks’. And the astonishing thing is that despite this cynicism, his channel remained the most popular in the country, which says a lot about the discernment of the average French téléspectateur.

  This flagrant desire to sell advertising space means that prime-time television in France is as exciting and varied as a nuns’ shoe shop.

  At eight o’clock in the evening, the two main channels, TF1 and France 2, have their evening news. At around eighty forty p.m., the news finishes and an endless series of ads, broken up by weather, lottery results and the like, begins. Meanwhile, the other main channels, which air their news at different times so as not to compete, will have caught up and will be ready to begin the big prime-time show. At ten to nine or so, this main attraction begins, and won’t end until ten or ten thirty. If the viewers are lucky, it will be a movie, telefilm or documentary. More frequently, it will be either a reality TV show or some kind of panel game on which ageing stars and witless presenters will be given enormous microphones and told to laugh at each other’s anecdotes or old TV clips.

  In France, the big handheld microphone is much more than a phallic symbol – it is a badge that tells the viewer, ‘I’m on TV and you’re not, peasant.’ The French do have lapel mics, but these are considered too small to be effective on the prime-time chat shows. Only if you are brandishing a silver cucumber will the viewer understand that you are a TV star and therefore by definition intelligent, witty and beautiful.

  The French make good documentaries (which are, of course, on-screen opportunities to prove how right you are about something) and reasonable telefilms, especially detective stories that give them a chance to perpetuate the myth that their police are good at solving crimes. On the other hand, French TV producers do not understand the sitcom. They do make them, but they are more sit than com. This is mainly because they think TV is not a noble medium, but just a pale imitation of a cinema screen, a bit like a postcard of the Mona Lisa. Why ‘waste’ good writers and actors on something so short and frivolous?

  But this attitude is just like France’s relationship with the hamburger – it’s not noble cuisine, but the French secretly binge on it whenever they can. At the time of writing there are three TV channels showing constant reruns of Friends, sometimes two or three episodes back to back, to fill the yawning gap left by the lack of decent French programmes.

  You Can Judge a Livre by

  Its Couverture

  French literary books have the most boring covers since Moses carved the commandments on to bare stone. Even then, Moses probably chose a nice shade of grey rock for his tablets.

  To be taken se
riously, a littéraire novel must have a plain white cover with no decoration except for the title and the author’s name in tiny lettering. Pale yellow is just about permissible, so long as it is a joyless hue, the dull shade of the wallpaper in a run-down old people’s home. Anything more flamboyant would devalue the words inside, which are of such profound import that it is almost sacrilege to print them on such a lowly, opaque substance as paper. They should be etched on glass so that the reader can see them in all their blinding clarity.

  That, at least, is the theory. In practice, a lot of this grande littérature is pure merde. Either it’s by a grand auteur who wrote one good book forty years ago and has been churning out the same old tripe ever since, or it’s new, daring and experimental, i.e. totally unreadable. There will be large doses of ‘oh mon dieu, it’s tough to be a writer’ angst, microscopic examinations of human relationships that seem to be designed to put you off falling in love ever again, and attempts at innovative style that make the act of reading as pleasurable as pulling a truck through drying cement. With your eyelids. It’s like France’s worst films, but without the pictures.

  This criticism may sound extreme, but if you’ve ever heard a snooty French literary novelist saying with mind-searing hypocrisy that (s)he doesn’t care whether anyone actually buys his/her novel at all because the important thing is that (s)he has enriched the world with his/her art, then you would understand where I’m coming from.