The Return of Theatricality in French Cinema of the 1990s : A New Imbrication of Comedy and Melodrama
Résumé
Theatre and theatricality were for a long time “bad objects” in French cinema, mostly since the New Wave critics condemned adaptations of popular comedies and melodramas as un-cinematic and conventional. Since the 1990s, French cinema has experienced a theatrical revival, and popular theatre is no longer a “shameful” influence for contemporary directors such as Alain Resnais, François Ozon, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, or Bruno Podalydès.
This new use of an exaggerated theatricality blurs the distinction between auteur cinema and popular culture, and between the traditional genres of comedy and melodrama. Reconciling “retro” and post-modern aesthetics, these films address the audience in two simultaneous and opposite ways, based on tropes of comedy and melodrama: an ironic distance and moments of overflowing emotion. One of the most prominent features of these mises en scène is the performance of ageing stars, whom the directors sometimes endanger.