A Rucksack Full of Cheese: Nonsense and Insensibility: Women in French Film

I'm taking another cinema class this semester, covering the 1930s - 60s. It's with my favorite professor, who always has a cheerful, bustling sort of energy, as though she just got off the phone joking with her best friend. This despite the fact that the films we're discussing are -- just...perplexingly depressing.

We started with "Hotel du Nord," which, granted, is a realist depiction of life during the Depression. The film opens with a young couple in a working class neighborhood, renting a room for the night to follow through with their suicide pact. Luckily, the guy's a terrible shot and just grazes his fiancé, and then chickens out of killing himself. While he spends a year(?!) in prison, she's hired at the hotel, befriends the colorful characters there, and is pursued by a grouchy pimp/murderer. My favorite character is the pimp's girlfriend, a salty broad who talks back to police and remains immune to the rampant escapism that intoxicates the other main characters. However, she remains attached to her abusive, cold boyfriend, even after he runs away with the delusional fiancé-now-maid.

Next is "Le Corbeau" (The Raven), now considered the first film noir, as it is saturated with mal-intent. In a small village, anonymous letters are sent, first to a doctor and his mistress, then to an increasingly wide circle of influential community members, threatening exposure of their sins and secrets. The town is gripped by increasingly feverish speculation, suspicion, and denunciation. The film came out in 1943 and was suppressed for several years, as no one was in the mood to reflect on the fact that all of us do and are capable of doing dishonorable things. Though this film devoted plenty of time to exploring various men's foibles and disgraceful acts, we are ultimately presented two -- perhaps three -- guilty, cruel women as the tormentors/shit-stirrers of the rumor-mongered doctor and village.

Shifting to an ostensibly more fun tone, though still rather upsetting, we jump ahead to the mid-50s with Brigitte Bardot's first big hit, "Et Dieu...créa la femme" (And God Created Woman). If you're looking for an embodiment of the most stereotypically sexist, infantile, and objectified idea of womanhood, your search is over. The "savage" and explosively unruly Juliette is a walking pair of boobs who oscillates between the attentions of a wealthy industrialist three times her age, and two unfortunately entranced brothers, the dorkier of whom she marries, the other whom she baldly continues to pursue. Is this a reflection of unbridled post-war capitalism? French society contaminated by the vulgarity of big expensive American cars and hedonism? Can we substitute a sexy lady erratically dancing for any character development whatsoever?

-We're not quite done with women who have crazy romantic entanglements with awful men! "A bout de souffle" (A Breath of Fresh Air) brings us to Godard, Truffaut, and the nouvelle vague. The film centers on a couple who interact with all the flair and sophistication of newly acquainted twelve year olds. Michel is a run-of-the-mill, low-grade-mobster bad boy, demanding and disparaging (while craving to impress) Patricia, a pragmatically faux-naive, second-wave-ish American. They while away several days talking about nothing, having sex, arguing about whether she'll join him on the run, until she's so bored of him she rats him out to the police. The End.