Ten Essential French Movies for the Initiate to International Cinema

International cinema is cool! Watching movies in other languages and cultures is so incredibly rewarding, it opens up a whole world to audiences who may only have experience with their own. It cultivates engagement and empathy, it expands horizons and perspectives. It’s good and healthy and necessary. But to plenty of people and even some movie fans, it is an obstacle or a burden -"the two-inch barrier of subtitles" as Bong Joon-ho put it. A lot of audiences have little to no interest in movies produced beyond the systems that exist in the United States and that is kind of tragic. It narrows the scope of what cinema can mean to people.

To some though this may not so much be about disinterest as it is about breadth. There are so many movies from so many countries considered great and important that to dive in seems incredibly daunting. One may want to be better-versed in international cinema, but there’s just so damn much of it!

So in the spirit of the list I made a few years back on essential silent movies movie fans must see, I thought I’d curate a similar list for a particular culture of movies that seems to be the go-to whenever one thinks about international cinema: the French. 

France has perhaps one of the three richest and most interesting cinematic legacies in the world, alongside the United States and Japan. It was of course arguably the birthplace of cinema, where pioneers like the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès brought life to the form. And ever since it has produced numerous versatile films that have experimented with and changed the art form usually for the better. The French New Wave of the 1960s is still perhaps the most important movement in film history, having created or directly inspired the auteur cinema, New Hollywood, the independent cinema, and the modern “Art Film”. And so it makes sense that this country would be first on the itinerary of those dipping their toes into the waters of world cinema.

Here is a list of what I think are the ten most important French movies to watch for a novice of world cinema. Obviously there’s some bias involved, as there would be for any such considerations. To the dismay of many film buffs I’m sure, this list contains no Robert Bresson, Claude Chabrol, Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Vigo or Max Ophüls –but my choices aren’t comprehensive and don’t represent the vastness and versatility of French cinema. And make no mistake, this is not a list of my personal favourite French movies (my number one French movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc isn’t on here because I’m excluding silent cinema for the purposes of language), however I do at least like to some degree and respect each of the movies chosen. They are diverse and influential, important for an understanding of French cinema both classic and modern, and for the most part I think fairly accessible to English-speaking audiences. There’s no Un Chien Andalou or La Jetee here. If you’re open to them, you should be fine.

These are in alphabetical order, no ranking:

1. The 400 Blows (1959) –directed by François Truffaut

So chances are you may have heard of a few of the movies on this list if you haven’t seen them. The 400 Blows is probably one of the most famous French films ever made. The directorial debut of François Truffaut, it is the coming-of-age story of a troubled, rebellious youth in Paris called Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who gets into petty crimes as he struggles with his parents and teachers -and is heavily based on Truffaut himself. The model for many a story about misunderstood adolescents, it is a viscerally honest expression of Truffaut’s feelings of creative and intellectual repression –few movies better put you in the skin of a directionless child. The movie is something of a social critique too on a French society that doesn’t know how to communicate with children. Léaud gives a terrific performance –one that he would reprise four more times as Truffaut revisited the life of Antoine over the following decades.And there are a few immortal moments, such as the shot of Antoine peering through a barbed fence, and especially the ending on that Normandy beach, one of the most iconic in cinema. It stands up really well in its’ subtleties more than its’ grander designs, a simple film that casts a long shadow.

2. Amelie (2001) –directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

I don’t know that there exists a movie more whimsical than Amelie, arguably the most successful and recognizable French film of the twenty-first century. It’s the beautiful story of a socially awkward but buoyantly upbeat, imaginative young woman played by Audrey Tautou, who makes it her goal to, from her small corner in Montmarte, bring happiness to anyone she can. She plays matchmaker, she befriends a blind man, she seeks out a previous tenant who left mementos in her apartment as a child, and she sends a gnome around the world. Amelie, who enacts these selfless deeds as a mask of her own insecurity and loneliness, is such a delightful, singular character and Amelie such a joyous movie because of it. I feel like she had an incontrovertible effect on the “manic pixie dream girl” archetype yet embodies few of its’ fatal flaws. It is an astonishingly pretty movie too, Jeunet bathing the film in such rich and warm colours that offset its’ quirkier bouts of humour; and it’s got one of the all time best “watching movies” scenes. It seems to be the French comedy to which all other modern French comedies are compared, and I don’t think one has yet to take the mantle.
 

3. Beauty and the Beast (1946) –directed by Jean Cocteau

Beauty and the Beast is almost my favourite Disney film, but it wouldn’t exist without Jean Cocteau’s formative adaptation of the classic fairy tale, from which several Disney elements originated. A deeply formalist version of the story with several surreal touches, it is the origin of the literal name Belle for the lead character, here played by Josette Day. Her Beast is the emphatically feline Jean Marais, who also plays Avenant (later Gaston), Belle’s human suitor. The film is rife with breathtaking imagery designed to highlight the story’s magical themes, especially in the Beasts’ home where enchanted ornaments are given human character (famously, wall candles held by human arms and faces in the mantelpiece) –it is a bewitching place, but not entirely hostile. The film retains the story’s ardent fairy tale logic, the Beast nightly proposing marriage, magical riches turning worthless in her vain sisters’ hands. The techniques Cocteau uses, very Méliès-like tricks of the camera (appropriate for a magic story) are still impressive to watch –the whole movie is a work of art. And its’ themes on the power of interior vs. external beauty are as salient as ever, if Marlene Dietrich’s reaction to the end of the movie is anything to go by: “where is my beautiful Beast?” Where indeed.

 
4. Breathless (1960) –directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Personally, I prefer My Life to Live, but Godard’s film debut just one year after his friend Truffaut, perhaps the key defining movie of the French New Wave, has had a much greater impact. Godard is known for his experimental cinematic language, he is often accused of being incomprehensible and insufferable-not entirely without reason. And it is true he is probably the most radical filmmaker ever to gain widespread recognition, but with Breathless he started his career from a place of relative convention –convention that is nonetheless groundbreaking. This film’s meandering plot concerns a low-level criminal on the run Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his relationship with an American student Patricia (Jean Seberg). The film is a landmark for its’ cool pacing, its’ striking use of jump cuts, and its’ stringent anti-authoritarian bent encapsulated in Michel, the ultimate scoundrel. He is a charming nihilist obsessed with emulating the screen image of Humphrey Bogart, and completely detached from the wider world outside of his immediate scope of experience and intellect. And he tapped into a keen sense of disillusionment being felt by many young people of his generation. Few films have hit at a better moment in history than Breathless, and yet its’ sentiments still ring true today for the young inspired and reckless.
 

5. The Grand Illusion (1937) –directed by Jean Renoir

I’ve talked about this film in another list, so I won’t dwell on it too much here, but in 1937 Jean Renoir, son of a famed Impressionist painter, made one of the great war movies –one that doesn’t feature a single act of combat. Set during the First World War, it is the story of French prisoners in a German camp. More pertinently though it is the story of the class divide, and the end of the ways of old Europe aristocracy to make way for the modern world. Its’ dual concurrent plots centre respectively on two soldiers from humble backgrounds played by Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio (the latter of whom is explicitly Jewish), and a nobleman flying ace played by Pierre Fresnay, who has more in common with the camp commandant (Erich von Stroheim) than the soldiers he speaks for. For all its’ bleak moments and striking commentaries, The Grand Illusion is an inspirational movie, the forbear of many a prison escape film and the direct inspiration on the classic “La Marseillaise” scene of Casablanca. It translates effectively, albeit with some romance, both the time it is set and the time it was made in –and is a low-key great Christmas movie to boot!
 

6. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) –directed by Alain Resnais

I debated long whether to include this movie, Last Year at Marienbad, or both when it came to Alain Resnais (some would make a decent argument for his seminal Holocaust documentary Night and Fog as well). But ultimately, while I think Last Year at Marienbad is the superior movie, it’s also a highly alienating one. Hiroshima Mon Amour is modestly more palatable, but troubling in its’ own right –famously opening on a series of intimate close-ups of two people making love in sweat and in ash. Resnais is a non-literal, nonlinear filmmaker, but the imagery is still alarming just as much as it is arresting. The film is a love story between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) set in Hiroshima, where they have met an indeterminate number of times as they grapple with their own relationships to the war. Resnais combines documentary realism with structural ambiguity, the time this nameless couple spends together re-ordered and condensed, but their experiences and tenderness towards each other never in doubt. It’s a sweet film of reflection and of moving forward from devastation, both personal and societal. Viewed in the right light, those glimpses of embracing entwined bodies in love –there is nothing more erotic in cinema.
 

7. Playtime (1967) –directed by Jacques Tati

Monsieur Hulot was for many years France’s favourite mime, and directly inspired Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean across the channel. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday might be slightly more famous, but it’s Jacques Tati’s extraordinarily ambitious final outing as the character in 1967’s Playtime that is the real film to see. It’s something of a sci-fi movie in fact, set in a Paris of the future, an apathetic consumerist dystopia characterized by an eerily rigid cubic aesthetic in everything from homes to buildings to endless office cubicles the drones are entrapped in (the sets were famously elaborate and expensive). All avenues of society are hyper-efficient and conforming, bright colours purposefully drained from the environment. And yet in this dim reality, there is a playfulness as implied by the title –Monsieur Hulot and Tati’s sense of subtle humour existing to mock and upset it. Hulot of course never talks, but the way Tati uses sound to drive the comedy is quite creative and clever, and there are brilliant sight gags scattered throughout. Playtime isn’t so much a story as a series of episodes, linked by the appearance of Hulot and a gaggle of American tourists –the other great target of Tati’s sharp satire. The jokes at their expense, much like the rest of the movie, are timeless.
 

8. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) –directed by Céline Sciamma

Many would say I’m stretching to include this movie, barely three years old, on a list of essential French films, but honestly modern French cinema deserves a representative, and perhaps the best film to come out of that industry in the last decade is this period lesbian romance that I’m confident will have real lasting power and influence. I’ve written about Portrait of a Lady on Fire a few times now, the story of a depressed and isolated noblewoman (Adèle Haenel) who forms a deep sensual, intellectual relationship with the woman hired to paint her portrait (Noémie Merlant) as they are left alone on an island free of inhibition and patriarchy. It’s a gorgeous movie, crafted like a painting itself, and with a minimalism that gives way to rebellious serenity. A bold feminist love story steeped in the beauty and freedom of self-actualization, it is stirring but never too sentimental, passionate without being gratuitous. The chemistry between the two leads is as strong as any of the great movie romances, it is vibrant and poetic and tender. And what an intense and poignant ending as well! I really believe Sciamma has made a film that is not only a superb entry-point for French cinema, but can stand among the giants of that class.
 

9. The Three Colours Trilogy (1993, 1994) –directed by Krzysztof Kieślowksi

Well here’s a funny thing: not one movie but three, and not even directed by a French filmmaker. Yet that final trilogy by the Polish Kieślowksi, Blue (1993), White (1994), and Red (1994) are perhaps among the most French movies ever made –they’re named for the colours on the French flag for god’s sake! Each are meant to represent one of the three core values of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity -although the respective films’ connections to these themes can be tenuous. They’re still great though and star some of the top talent of early 90s French cinema. In Blue, Juliette Binoche plays a woman trying to move on from a tragedy. In White, Zbigniew Zamachowski plays a destitute Polish immigrant seeking revenge on his ex-wife (Julie Delpy). And in Red, Irene Jacob plays a woman who develops a curious relationship with a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who seems in every way her ideological opposite. Each film is its’ own story but there are little connective threads and large thematic overlaps. They are shot with beautiful attention to their respective hue, with Blue and Red especially being visually riveting (White is kind of the lesser middle child of the three). In some respects, these movies could be dense in their subject matter, their meditative pace and the weighty ideas that they reckon with and ask the audience to interrogate. But they are so gorgeously composed, strikingly soulful, and wonderfully acted that notions of pretension are diminished. And if you let them, they are exactly the kind of movies that will make you think in a wholly positive, stimulating way.
 

10. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) –directed by Jacques Demy

France’s answer to the classic Hollywood musical, at the very time when that format was taking off. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has many of the trappings of its’ U.S. counterparts but is very distinctly subversive, very distinctly French. It is entirely sung-through, even the most innocuous lines of dialogue, its’ chief motif being the lovely “Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi” -better known by its’ English version “I Will Wait For You”. That’s not a literal translation but it might well be: the story is about two young lovers who are separated by war, longing to reunite. Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo play this pair, she an employee at her mothers’ umbrella boutique, he a mechanic. The movie plays a lot of the notes of a classic romance, it’s cute and sentimental. But then it brushes off the veneer of idealism, it plays honestly with circumstance, emotional growth, and in its’ last act it is most interesting -a bittersweet tragedy of life getting in the way of dreams. Demy’s colours are gorgeous, his photography beautiful; Michel Legrand’s music is exceptional, the production feels so immersive in its’ clear artificiality, and the cast is astounding. If one wants to see the starkest difference between French and American cinema, they should look no further than The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

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