French Kiss
With Meg Ryan, Kevin Kline, Timothy Hutton, Jean Reno, Francois Cluzet, Susan Anbeh, and Renee Humphrey.
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The same principle applies to the way we commonly perceive other national traits. Ask an average American to name something typically Chinese and there’s a fair chance you’ll be told fortune cookies, an American invention smiled at in Asia. The French term for “French kiss” is baise anglaise, which means “English kiss.” In other words, countries sometimes like to credit other countries with their own inventions in order to define them.
Sitting next to Kate on the plane is Luc (Kline), your typical obnoxious French male–a petty criminal, we soon discover, who chats her up on the plane, sneaks an illegal plant and a stolen necklace into her purse as they’re going through customs, and then follows her to the George V Hotel. By the time he arrives she’s found out that Charlie has set his room phone on “do not disturb,” as well as been rebuffed by your typical obnoxious hotel concierge and had all her things stolen by another typical obnoxious French male thief who just happens to be a friend of Luc. (As we quickly discover in this movie, every French criminal knows every other French criminal and every cop knows every criminal.) Stealing a car, Luc helps her recover some of her stolen belongings and then, trailed by a cop, accompanies her on the train to Cannes, where Charlie is now headed with his French cutie (Susan Anbeh) to meet her parents. On the way Luc and Kate stop off in Luc’s hometown, where she learns he’s a former landowner from good peasant stock (making him suitable as a hero–earthy and aristocratic) who gambled away his share of the family vineyards; all simple Luc really wants to do now is settle down in the area and grow his own grapes. Then they proceed to Cannes, where everyone, including the Paris cop, is converging, and exactly what you’d expect to happen eventually happens.
In the 90s alone you can chart this change by looking at articles about movies and the French in the New York Times Sunday magazine and Arts & Leisure section–always a reliable index of some of the more egregious received ideas of this country’s middle class. There one can read such guff as the notions that the average French moviegoer regards Mickey Rourke as a hero worthy of Greek tragedy and that American spectators are missing today’s greatest French films because we aren’t seeing the original Francis Veber farces Hollywood is remaking. When the Times wanted an article about Cahiers du Cinema to promote a 1992 film series, it commissioned a piece from someone who wrote that the magazine “is no longer fascinated by Hollywood”–a conclusion possible only for someone who hadn’t read or even looked at the covers of the magazine for almost 15 years. Now that Cahiers is about as unfascinated by Hollywood as Premiere and seems uninterested in making discoveries that haven’t already been validated elsewhere, this may be a moot point. But obviously a sense of ease is restored whenever the Times can assure its readers that they aren’t missing out on anything.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Still.
