Liberty: France, Land of the Free

BY JULIAN GYLL-MURRAY

I recently found myself rambling about a film (Jean- Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire) to someone. The conversation went thus: “it’s about a bunch of cavemen who set out to find fire, and they a meet more sophisticated tribe who teach them progress, and that ends up with them experimenting with different sexual positions and it’s all very…”- and at this point my friend interjected, completing my sentence- “French.”

We all have a set of mental images for our neighbours across the channel, generally involving baguettes, moustaches, berets and outrageous accents. The idea of the sexually liberated French, however, is a stereotype that somehow seems to stick the most. After all, you only have to compare the Lewinski-Clinton outrage to the complete lack of scandal caused by (French president) Sarkozy’s whole string of affairs, divorces and marriages. As if to drive the point home, Parisian actress Julie Delpy also happened to point this out while promoting her film 2 Days in Paris, a film which had a neurotic, prudish American have trouble dealing with the complete ease the French have around him while discussing physical intimacy. One would also only need a quick glance at the country’s literature to see that novelists were able to depict sex far before most of the western world. It is startling to see that The Scarlet Letter, whose main theme is adultery, is forced to shy away from scenes that French novelist Stendhal had no trouble describing decades beforehand in The Red and the Black.

Perhaps you wouldn’t even need to look that far for confirmation of the liberal stance of our favourite croissant-munching continentals, however. After all, new Lifeblood production Liberty, a play based on an author whose very name is Anatole France, has a peculiar poster image: the top half of a completely naked woman, painted in the colours of- you guessed it-the French flag.

Perhaps it is fitting, however, that the story focuses on the break down of idealism and generalizations, as main character Gamelin sees the ideals of the French revolution quickly lose themselves as he becomes a magistrate in 1793. Interestingly, many novels, plays and films coming from across the channel explode the stereotype of the liberal French. What better example than Kieslowski’s film trio the Three Colours Trilogy, which took the ideals that the three colours of the flag represent –liberty, equality and fraternity- and explored their limits within society with small, personal stories? Three Colours: Blue, challenging the idea of personal freedom, saw Juliette Binoche’s character constantly trapped, sexually and psychologically, by the boundaries set down by her past. In the same way, Micheal Haneke’s work in many ways upends the myth of French liberality. Not only did Hidden show a man being chased by some unknown stalker who prevents him from escaping the country’s violent past, The Piano Teacher depicts a woman so emotionally wrecked that her sexual encounters quickly turn into disturbing power games.

It would seem that even the most convincing of the French stereotypes is only true to a certain extent: after all, Baise-Moi was banned for being pornographic in 2000 (something almost unheard of in the land of croissants), while it had both a UK and an American release. And, for a country with a reputation for being so liberal, it is still behind Belgium and the Netherlands in terms of gay rights. While it would be foolish to shelve the stereotype completely, along with “they all eat frogs” and “every street in Paris has a perfect view of the Eiffel tower in the background”, it would seem that their liberal views are more problematic than one would think. Perhaps this English version of a French novel, on through most of next week at the Arts Centre, will show that as two neighbouring countries, we are not so different as we believe. Who knows, perhaps here at the Arts Centre there will soon be an English piece about the sex life of cavemen…