Sweet nothings? Imagining the inexpressible in contemporary French romantic comedy

Abstract

The impossibility of expressing the ‘uniqueness’ of romantic love through a language plagued by cliché is a staple of rom-com that has become increasingly explicit in the global genre since the late 1980s. This article considers the responses offered by the French rom-com of the 1990s and 2000s to this tension, in prominent and often commercially successful films by both popular auteurs (Christian Vincent, Pierre Salvadori, Yvan Attal, Tonie Marshall and Agnès Jaoui) and more mainstream directors (including Olivier Baroux, Danièle Thompson, Pascal Chaumeil and Valérie Guignabodet). On the one hand, in a ‘post-screwball’ move that is markedly common in the French genre, romantic desire in several films is displaced into playful sparring, both verbal and physical. On the other, some film-makers reproduce romantic quotations and platitudes with acknowledgement of their status as such, allowing them to be at once appropriated and disavowed in a way that is typical of recent developments in the global genre. Indeed, the article invokes the Hollywood rom-com throughout as a point of comparison and contrast to French practice. In this way, it explores Franco-American differences in the representation of romance, as well as certain potentially more universal traits linked to sexual and romantic desire. Specifically, it suggests that a Gallic predilection can be discerned for acknowledging the socially constructed element of desire itself.

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