Perfect Pitches

The blitz and glitz of commercials français

MOVIES

The hush in the Paris theater is breathless, even respectful, but it's not like the hush you hear in American movie houses before a Bergman or Kurosawa picture—it's not solemn. The audience has come to giggle at familiar jokes, to croak along with melodies they know by heart, and to ogle pretty girls. If this sounds like an evening at the Lido or Moulin Rouge, well, perhaps it's the Film Generation's substitute. In Paris, you see, moviegoers arrive a half-hour early, for the seance—fifteento thirty-second yips and yaps from panty-hose-makers, beer brewers, and manufacturers of bonbons and beauty creams. Yes, commercials.

French commercials are smart, funny, and full of ooh-la-la. And directing one is no disgrace—even Jean-Luc Godard has made a clothing pub. Imitating American music, movies, and even graffiti art, the French are forever feckless, but only our very best Federal Express and Pepsi commercials can match, for instance, the pub in which a gangsterish Italian cad, plainly down on his luck, finds a sheaf of Zig-Zag rolling papers that conjure up a dusky beauty in a see-through gown and a luminescent white limousine with an engine of gleaming brass saxophones—all amid camerawork sinuous enough to make Diva look stodgy. There are other delights. An iron zips over opulent fabrics, leaving a wake of bare-breasted Polynesian girls and galumphing walruses. In another ad, a sleeping homeowner hears a noise, grabs a weapon from his night table, and slips downstairs in time to spot the prowler's wing tips sticking out from behind a curtain. Our hero waves his weapon—which turns out to be a staple gun—and rivets the curtain to the wall, trapping the thug in a prison of pleated linen. It's a good joke, but that isn't what makes you want to see it again. The gliding camera and the ghastly lighting give the gag a disturbing, Magritte-like air, and at the end the crook's splayed anguish, outlined beneath the curtain, adds an eerily sadistic tingle: it's Leon Golub Meets True Value Hardware.

If French commercials are far freer than our own, that's partly because they can resort to subtler means. They can seduce, intrigue, or mystify—they don't always have to be so relentlessly "up." Peekaboo nudity abounds, and even when it doesn't, the suggestiveness is enough to set American Bible Belters thumping. An Yves Saint Laurent pub shows a peach-fuzzy airport security guard frisking a tawny blonde with a metal detector that looks as turned on as he is. And a Heineken commercial invites us to a party replete with homosexual flirtations and cat-and-mouse games played around a waitress's humid cleavage.

French pubs cram a lot of narrative into a very small space. And it's just such cramming that has squeezed the life out of American movies, commercials, and (especially) videos. In the United States, narrative motifs—a man with a gun, for instance, or a cool blonde in a sports car—are flattened, ripped from the context that might give them complexity, and brandished before us like flash cards. In America, man plus gun equals Danger, and woman plus car equals Sex. But, paradoxically, the pubs rescue these drained narrative motifs, plunging them into quirky new contexts that refill and revitalize them. What we're watching isn't just a man with a gun, it's an ingenious weirdo with a stapler, and perhaps a cruel streak as well. Meaning is restored to the meaningless—which is why even the darkest, moodiest pubs leave one exhilarated.

But the messages behind French commercials aren't always as simple as they sound—they aren't just "Drink this and you won't sleep alone tonight." Most of them, in fact, say something rather more alarming, something like "This product is so good that it will make you feel American." A Renault will whisk you to the highways of Arizona. Pitterson cocktails will plop you into the world of Carmen Miranda, Russ Meyer movies, and American football. French commercials are almost always reveries, and the most common dream landscape is Monument Valley.

The Parisians' Yank Envy is unsettling, especially when the seance ends and the American blockbuster the audience has really come to see unreels— it's usually something like Rambo or Missing in Action 2. There's a malaise at the heart of France's attitude toward its own artistry, and that may be why the pop dazzle of the seance is so rarely translated to the rest of Gallic culture. The French can create marvels, but they prefer to go slumming. As Rambo begins, the hush in the theater holds, but with a different tone now—less alert, more swizzled and loose. Call it nostalgic de la boue.

Stephen Schiff