France profonde

The French don't make biopics. The blend of fact and fiction confuses them and—as a new film about Mitterrand reveals—they are too in awe of power
April 16, 2005

French cinema has never been strong on biopics, which are generally considered an Anglo-Saxon hybrid. Some 300 biopics came out of Hollywood between 1930 and 1960, both JFK and Nixon were brought to the screen in the 1990s and this year we have had representations of Howard Hughes, Ray Charles and, from Germany, Adolf Hitler. The French are more reticent, demanding a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction, which is why a film about the late François Mitterrand is causing such deep debate. Does one have the right to portray a real person, particularly a French president, in a work of fiction?

The concern can be sensed in the nuance of words chosen by the actor Michel Bouquet, cast as Mitterrand in Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars: "One cannot act or play (jouer) Mitterrand. It wouldn't mean anything. It would be grotesque. So in this incongruous situation I tried to do what was acceptable: to represent (representer) Mitterrand." Ignoring all else, the critics have been mesmerised by seeing an actor inhabiting such a well-known skin: "are we watching Mitterrand or Bouquet?" they all ask, totally missing the point. "Has Bouquet become Mitterrand? No," they all conclude weightily, "rather Mitterrand has become Bouquet." Bogged down in metaphysics, they question Mitterrand's widow, daughter, associates: do you recognise your husband/father/ friend in M Bouquet? Yes, the hands are good, but what about his laugh?

Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars is taken from a book, Le Dernier Mitterrand, by Georges-Marc Benamou. Hurt by allegations about his Vichy past, knowing he had not long to live, the French president invited the young journalist to record the "official" version of his war. Thus for the last years of Mitterrand's life, Benamou found himself a frequent guest at the president's table. Having published these Mémoires interrompus, Benamou then brought out Le Dernier Mitterrand, a first-person journal. It was loudly condemned by the guardians of the temple as a breach of omertà.

"It's the first time in France," said Le Monde when the film came out, "that a contemporary statesman has been openly put into a fiction film." The newspaper interviewed a wide range of directors and politicians: Costa Gavras, who has tried for three years to get a film of Mitterrand off the ground, told them the French have a unique attitude towards power: "It's something sacred, still incarnated by the king." This consecration of both the function and the person raises complex questions, says the paper, particularly about the choice of actor. French leaders are seen to have an aura which defies screen adaptation, as Claude Chabrol wryly notes: "Who could play De Gaulle? It's unthinkable." One does not, Le Monde adds, represent God. This goes even for documentaries: a film made by Raymond Depardon following the presidential campaign of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974 was banned for 25 years—by the successful candidate. "France has difficulty with history," admits François Hollande, first secretary of the Socialist party. More cynically, the lack of serious cinematic studies of politicians may have something to do with the grants most French films receive from the government: "You don't bite the hand that feeds you," says producer Jacques Bidou. Indeed, the makers of Le Promeneur had enormous problems raising finance, and this unfortunately shows. The actor Michel Bouquet has to recreate the hustle and bustle of the French court more or less single-handedly, the audience being invited to suspend disbelief as power is despatched from an empty office. "It is," he says, "an allegory." Accompanying this lack of power's trappings is self-censorship on the part of the writers: "In the first draft we put in a scene with Mme Mitterrand," says one of the scriptwriters, "and then we said no, it's all too close." Any scene with a family member, politician or even anonymous adviser was deemed impossible. Unlike its Anglo-Saxon counterparts, this biopic is not about politics, skulduggery or sex; it is, rather, about memory: how it is moulded, and what part of it is selected for transmission. As anyone who observes French life knows, la mémoire is crucial. In the case of Mitterrand, which aspects of his distant youth does the dying statesman want succeeding generations to remember? This man sees himself, quite simply, as "the last of the great French presidents"—that is, the last of the truly powerful monarch-presidents. But what was his relationship with his compatriots and colleagues who ordered the rounding up of French Jews for extermination? Far from being ancient history, the film makes clear, the stories he decides to tell the young journalist will have a strong bearing on "that certain idea of France" which has shaped the ways French see themselves today.

While this fictional biopic plays to packed houses, one of the real dramas of the Mitterrand years unfolds in the law courts: the trial, 20 years after the event, of those allegedly ordered by the paranoid president to tap the telephones of anyone who might be conspiring to publish evidence harmful to la mémoire he was so anxious to control.