In 1958, the American columnist Dick Williams wrote an article headlined Should We Ban Brigitte Bardot? He was, he explained, “sick, sick, sick” of the Gallic sexpot. “Every time I pick up a newspaper or go by a theatre marquee there she is, blasted all over the place with her stringy, unkempt hair, her plunging necklines, her bare feet, her vapid eyes and her half-opened mouth. She looks like she never takes a bath or irons her clothes. Her casual attitude towards marriage is both shocking and immoral.”

That’s telling her. Californian film prof Vanessa B Schwartz, however, fails to tell us whether Williams did, in the end, decide if Bardot ought to be outlawed. Still, the general tone of the man’s piece does little to back up her central thesis – that Americans lapped up postwar French cinema as eagerly as the locals flogged it.

In that way it’s perfectly representative of the rest of the book. It’s So French! is one of those verbose cultural studies that spends hours waffling on about what it will be arguing without ever really getting round to doing so. In four chapters so pseudy and repetitive that reading them is like being stuck in a washing machine with Bonnie Greer, Schwartz argues that “social, economic and political institutions are shaped by the visual culture they produce . . . films have agency in shaping and reshaping the nation, the imagination, and the transnational space of film culture”. Her ideas, then, carry little currency unless you swallow the notion that films affect the outside world as much as the other way round.

We kick off with an examination of what she calls “Frenchness” films – touristy romps such as An American in Paris and Gigi that acted as armchair alternatives for aspirational travel. France, or rather, Paris, equalled éclairs, Old Masters and just a hint of erotica. “You’re going to have a marvel-lous time! On a Lavish, Love-Happy Paris Holiday!” promised the intertitles in the opening scene of Funny Face.

Then comes a joyless Cannes chapter, which spends 50 pages finding new ways to say that the festival courted American stars, who, in turn, enjoyed the association with classy art. Schwartz rightly claims that the similar climate and geography of the French Riviera and West Coast America made US celebs feel at home – although to write off Venice (whose festival flagged as Cannes thrived) as a “decrepit lagoon city” seems a bit strong.

Schwartz writes about the emergence of the starlet at Cannes without ever spelling out why rising from obscurity to unparalleled fame might especially chime with Americans. She then devotes an entire chapter to Bardot, whose celebrity, we’re told, was “of an intermedial and transnational nature”. Which means that, because sex doesn’t require subtitles, Bardot could be easily packaged for international export.

Schwartz wraps things up with a look at “cosmopolitan” movies such as Charade: lavish location-shot pap, the last word in film-making by committee. As in previous chapters, she sets out early what she will be examining (in this case “the internationalist rhetoric in relation to the changing nature of film production itself and in the emergence of the ‘hybrid’ films made as a result of this practice that themselves self-consciously thematised the idea of a united, transnational ‘world’ ”) before trotting out a lot of info that seems at odds with her argument. Around the World in 80 Days, we’re reminded, opens with some snapshots: the changing of the guard in London, the Tuiler-ies in Paris, a spot of flamenco in Spain and a parade involving dragons in Hong Kong. Through this, Schwartz tells us, human experience is universalised: “Everyone has music, dances, parades, only the themes and colours change.”

If that’s the summation of the Franco-American cinematic outreach programme, it’s hard to know why they bothered.

It's so French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of the Cosmopolitan Film Culture by Vanessa B Schwartz
Chicago UP £13 pp259

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