Jacques Audiard – twenty-first century auteur

Abstract

Jacques Audiard is one of the best-known French filmmakers working today, his presence well established in film festival headlines, the mainstream film press and critics’ choice (including an appearance at number 85 with Un prophète/A Prophet [2009] in the recent BBC critics’ poll of the twenty-first century’s 100 greatest films [BBC 2016]).1 His national status as son of the seminal scriptwriter Michel Audiard has long been replaced by his own international profile as director, yet scholarly engagement with his hugely confident and engaging œuvre continues to lag behind his international commercial profile. The aims of this special issue are therefore twofold: to render existing engagement with his work more visible, and to bring together a set of diverse critical approaches in the hope of triggering further exploration of these films. Audiard’s credentials as exemplary twenty-first century auteur are seemingly uncontestable. Ciné-fils of France’s treasured screenwriter Michel Audiard and cinéphile who name-checks emphatically international influences, his films exhibit signature elements of mise en scène and recurring thematic obsessions, turn relatively unknown actors into bankable stars (Romain Duris, Tahar Rahim, Matthias Schoenaerts) and win an impressive array of international awards. The latter run to 54 wins and 56 nominations (source IMDB.com) including the Grand Jury prize at Cannes and wins in almost all major categories at the Césars for Un prophète in 2009. Although De rouille et d’os/Rust and Bone (2012) was, surprisingly, overlooked in the Grand Jury selection at Cannes, he went on to win the Palme d’or in 2015 with Dheepan. Further evidence of his broad cultural capital can be found in the recent inclusion of De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté/The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) on the French baccalauréat syllabus and the confirmation in interviews (and accompanying photo shoots) of his cultural branding (in reception at least) as dandy, hat-wearing, combination of contemporary European sensibility and classic American auteur – the ‘French Scorsese’ indeed (Aftab 2010). The reasons for the mismatch between commercial and media profile and academic attention are undoubtedly multiple; yet one of the primary contexts may be his lack of fit with perceived tendencies and models of contemporary French film-making. He does not fit easily into new canons or broader tendencies (such as ‘extreme cinema’, politically engaged realism or indeed popular cinema) and is not the identifiable product of a high-profile film school. Crucially, his age excluded him from being labelled as a member of the generation of filmmakers ‘le jeune cinéma’, delineated in critical work of the 1990s–2000s (see Hardwick 2008) that was important to the construction of models of French auteur film in that period (see Dobson 2012). The contribution to auteur status of Audiard’s extensive and continuing profile as screenwriter – he contributed to the writing of 20 films between 1974 and 1994 – is foregrounded in Isabelle Vanderschelden’s critical examination of Audiard’s status as screenwriter. Focusing on this critically neglected function, she reveals Audiard’s development of a writing practice that extends across the filming and editing stages of his filmmaking process. The distinctive, collaborative nature evidenced here serves, perhaps paradoxically, as a further element of his signature style as auteur. A further characteristic of Audiard’s œuvre – and one which may not fit the profile of the auteur – is the complex refashioning of existing texts, including novels. Whilst he rejects the term ‘remake’, he often chooses to work with, on and through the skeleton of an existing narrative