The Visitors Take Sarasota

By RICHARD CORLISS

JACQUES TOUBON WAS BEAMING. THE French Minister of Culture was informing a gala audience at the 5th Sarasota French Film Festival that the film they were about to see, Jean-Marie Poire's Les Visiteurs, was a hit of monster proportions. "The Visitors is the double of Jurassic Park," touted Toubon. "We are the best." At that moment, Americans in attendance had to be grateful that the U.S. has no government executive whose job it is to flack for Roseanne Arnold or Pearl Jam simply because their TV show and record album are at the top of the American charts. But the Floridians who packed the Sarasota Opera House in this sparkling Gulf Coast resort town would sit through any speech, however fatuous, that signaled the re-emergence of one of the world's most congenial -- and least likely -- film festivals.

It remains one of the divine mysteries of civic entrepreneurism why this retirement community would care to host a five-day showcase for films from a proud but ailing industry 6,500 km away. Yet this year, its first without heavy sponsorship by the state of Florida, la fete Sarasota has progressed from an endangered species to a cheerful inevitability. The French and the Floridians actually seem to be getting along. Most events are sold out, with a packed house of local Sarasotans, French movie stars and U.S. distributors. Zarazodah, as the French call it, is now a beguiling fixture on the cinema landscape.

The French are feeling fine and feisty too; it's amazing how a hit movie can restore the color to one's cheek. Toubon may have fudged the numbers a bit (since Jurassic Park opened in France only in October, whereas The Visitors has been playing since February), but the Poire comedy is a genuine phenomenon, earning a record-smashing $70 million. "We have no dinosaurs," Poire said smilingly on opening night. What The Visitors has is a solid farce premise (a 12th century knight and his servant are magically stranded in today's French suburbs), a toilet-bowl sense of humor and a few tricks swiped from Hollywood: breakneck pace and gaudy visual effects. The time-travel buffoonery of Encino Man meets Ghostbusters' technical sorcery. En France.

When one heard French spoken in Sarasota, the subject was often the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The GATT pact would abolish quotas protecting local products, including movies. The American film industry dominates screens in France (and much of the rest of the world), and its producers tell the French: Make movies your people want to see. But for the French, opposition to GATT is a holy war against America's cultural imperialism -- what used to be called Coca-Colonization -- and in favor of small, distinctly savory vintages from home.

GATT chat is fine around the swimming pool, but at the box office the film's the thing. And in the international market French films, with their acerbic, worldly-wise tone, have been pushed aside not only by Hollywood but also by the sweeping sentimentality of Cinema Paradiso (Italy) and Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico). The few French films that have broken through of late have been, for the most part, period dramas: Tous les Matins du Monde, Cyrano, Claude Berri's two-part Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. So the big news in Sarasota was the North American premiere of Berri's adaptation of the Emile Zola novel Germinal, with an imposing cast headed by Gerard Depardieu, the one French actor with worldwide heft and clout.

The Quality Merchandise label is stamped all over Germinal, an operatic dirge in a minor key. For 160 claustrophobic minutes, Berri locks viewers inside Zola's 19th century coal mines, where death by cave-in seems only marginally more horrible than the 12-hr.-a-day life sentences that are the miner's jobs. In this determinist bleakness, where is the lamplight of hope? Perhaps in the community of workers, united against the bosses? Dream on. The miners' lives are so brutal that they must brutalize other miners. The taste of power makes them as barbaric as the mineowners. The workers have lost the halo of the victim; their hands will be soiled by blood as well as coal dust.

Except for a few scenes of adulterous frivol among the ruling class, Berri is remarkably fair-minded in doling out bad hands to workers and bosses; both groups are trapped in a system they can't control. But because his and Zola's theme is that the Industrial Revolution ground human beings into human beasts, Berri can't mine the very individual perfidy that was at the heart of Jean de Florette; fate is simply a less interesting villain than a man driven crazy by another man's goodness. Germinal, with its climactic mine disaster and bitter lamentations, is finally buried in its fidelity to its source.

In period films, the French pit the upper class against workers or peasants. In films set in modern-day France, the battle is often between the native-born and the immigrant. The influx of North Africans to the Paris area has already been starkly depicted in Bertrand Tavernier's L.627 (about drug dealers) and Bertrand Blier's Un Deux Trois -- Soleil! (squatters in the desolate suburbs). Half a dozen of Sarasota's 20 new feature films sent their characters on collision course with African cultures. The drollest of these was Mathieu Kassovitz's Metisse (Blended). A brown-skinned beauty (Julie Mauduech) has two lovers, one an African aristocrat (Hubert Kounde), the other a scruffy working-class Jew (Kassovitz). She is also pregnant. Her lovers won't know who the father is until the baby is born -- which means nine months of bickering, and 90 movie minutes of canny, slapdash dancing along the razor edge of racial animosity.

After last year's superserious Sarasota festival -- in every movie somebody seemed to have AIDS -- programmer Molly Haskell was pleased to pepper the '93 edition with comedies. Claude Lelouch's Tout Ca . . . Pour Ca!!! (All This . . . for That!!!) is overstocked with plot but has a genial, musical-comedy air and a flock of attractive performers. Patrice Leconte's Tango is an essay in rollicking misogyny, as three bourgeois gentlemen (Philippe Noiret, Thierry Lhermitte, Richard Bohringer) scheme to kill or seduce every beautiful woman in their path. Coline Serreau's La Crise (Crisis) puts her hero through a double whammy -- he loses his wife and his job on the same morning -- then winds the clockwork of comedy plotting so tight it almost explodes. That it doesn't is due to Serreau's gift of always surprising her audience by twisting characters from comic stereotypes into desperate humans, like the woman who explains why she got fed up with her "perfect" marriage, or the sad fellow obsessed with workouts and hair transplants because "When I'm perfect, someone will love me."

Serreau, with Trois Hommes et un Couffin (Three Men and a Cradle) and Romuald et Juliette, is a treasured comedy commodity in France. Sarasota also welcomed a gifted new writer-director, Pierre Salvadori, 29. His short film Menage is a little ironic delight about a fastidious housecleaner and a messy friend with suicide in mind. Salvadori's first feature, Cible Emouvante (Wild Target), makes good on the short film's promise. This deft, subtle, endlessly inventive farce stars Jean Rochefort, the great basset hound of French cinema, as a professional killer who meets his match with two women: his homicidal ! mother (the great chanteuse Patachou) and a glamorous thief (Marie Trintignant). Guillaume Depardieu, Gerard's son, is part of the show -- which is almost stolen by a hilariously wary parrot.

Wild Target is clever enough to be remade, and devalued, in Hollywood, but it deserves better. More deftly and buoyantly than The Visitors, it follows the rules for a French film with potentially universal appeal: Give your audience a little thought, a little social commentary and of course a little sex. But always leave 'em laughing.