Grosse fatigue
Wonders never cease. When Michel Blanc’s hilarious, vulgar farce Grosse fatigue won the prize for best screenplay at the Cannes film festival last year, the American press generally agreed that its chances of stateside distribution were just about nil. A nasty, abrasively funny insider’s look at contemporary French cinema, it was felt to be far too obscure in its references and far too politically incorrect, with its sexist and homophobic gags about rape, to find much favor among art-house patrons on this side of the Atlantic.
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Paradoxically, these American-made pictures argue that any system that supports people like these treacherous producer-villains has to be wrong, yet somehow they fail to broach the possibility that we in the audience could have anything to do with such a system ourselves. (Who, us? How could we be suckers when we can see through the phoniness of these executives right away?) The venal yuppies in Grosse fatigue, most of them real live movie professionals playing themselves, aren’t just producers; they’re also actors, directors, writers, agents, and promoters. In fact, the group includes just about all the movers and shakers in this particular movie world, including such people as Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes film festival–and we’re never allowed to forget that jerks like us who regard them as movers and shakers and treat them like stars are what keep these people in business. Thus Blanc’s decision to make most of his high rollers (himself included) every bit as unpleasant as the producer-villains of The Player and Swimming With Sharks creates a two-edged sword (or shall we say a Swimming With Sharks with teeth). The reason these creeps can get away with murder is that we pay them to do so. What Blanc is satirizing is not just the movie business but the culture of celebrity and stardom that keeps it going.
The pounding we hear during the opening credits–the first indication of the movie’s nonstop aggressiveness–proves to be the police at the door of the Paris flat of Michel Blanc, a famous movie star currently writing a script for Carole Bouquet. (Blanc is perhaps best known here for his lead parts in Bertrand Blier’s Menage and Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire and for smaller roles in Prospero’s Books and Ready to Wear. But in France he’s also known for his stage acting and his work with such film directors as Claude Miller, Roman Polanski, and Bertrand Tavernier; he also directed another feature, the 1984 Marche a l’ombre, which I haven’t seen.)
In the world of celebrity Grosse fatigue proposes, a crippled man can walk again (“I’m walking! I have a hard-on!”) because a movie star, Carole Bouquet, agrees to be in his presence. This same movie star is capable of playing a part with Blanc, saying to him, “Fuck me like a secretary!” when she wants him to put down his shotgun in the jewelry store. It’s a world where pretense and presence are ultimately the same, and where everyone–including the audience–must claim some of the responsibility for keeping both in place.
