« Glory days well they’ll pass you by, glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days ! » sings Bruce Springsteen in his 1985 hit. The Glory Days of French cinema sure had passed. Gone the time when American directors like William Friedkin and Francis Ford Coppola professed their admiration for Truffaut and Godard while asserting their ambition to make films like the Europeans. In the new generation of filmmakers, rare are those who will list more recent French cineasts as their idols. This doesn’t mean they are not appreciated over there but they are not the objects of the cult-like adoration of Truffaut and Godard in the 60’s-70’s.

Every three or four years though, a strange phenomenon happens : a French movie becomes the darling of America. I was too young to be able to judge the degree of frenesy over Luc Besson’s Leon when it came out but from the cult-classic status that the first had achieved by now, I can guess that it must had been pretty high. Nevertheless, I remember with perfect clarity the infatuation of the American public and critics for Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, directed by Jean-Pierre Genet in 2001. Audrey Tautou became the symbol of  the French  je ne sais quoi . It occurred again in 2008 with the triumph of Marion Cotillard at the Oscars where she won the best actress award for her role of Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan’s La Môme. Since then, Cotillard has been casted in Nine, Contagion, Christopher Nolan’s Inception and soon to be released The Dark Knight Rises and was nicknamed “the French Angelina Jolie”. Quite a dazzling ascension ! While it used to be American filmmakers who dreamt about making films in the fashion of the Nouvelle Vague, it now seems that making it in Hollywood - the Holy Land -, is what French are dreaming of.