In a hidden backdrop to Gérard Depardieu's high-profile tax spat with the French government is a cinema industry subsidised by the public and which loses money through exorbitant fees paid to its stars, reports The Independent.
The last two years have been amongst the most triumphant in the history of the French cinema, yet they have also amongst the most disastrous.
The silent movie The Artist swept the board at the Oscars last February, and Les Intouchables – a joyous, comic movie about physical disability – broke all French box-office records in 2011. French cinema ticket sales may have dropped 6 per cent last year from a 2011 peak, but they remained historically high. And above all, France is one of the few countries in the world which still boasts a broad, domestic movie industry making thrillers and comedies, epics and cartoons.
And yet, even the most successful French films fail; all but one of the 10 highest-grossing French films lost money last year.
Top French actors – some scarcely known outside their own country – exploit the oddities of a state-protected and publicly subsidised movie industry to claim gargantuan, Hollywood-size fees (€2m or more). As a result, French movie stars have become rich but French movies are often poor.
These are not the sour observations of a Francophobic Hollywood film executive. They are the iconoclastic arguments of one of France’s most successful film producers, Vincent Maraval of the Wild Bunch company.
Mr Maraval’s comments in an article in Le Monde and an interview with GQ magazine have created an epic row in France this week. The French movie industry is one of the “untouchables” of French life: the crown jewel of French exceptionalism; a living proof that state interference and creativity can go hand in hand.
Mr Maraval’s article was intended partly as a defence of Gérard Depardieu, who has been lambasted by the government for seeking tax exile in Belgium. “The real scandal is elsewhere,” he wrote. “French actors are rich on public money and a system which is supposed to protect our cultural differences… How is it that a well-known French actor can earn up to €2m for a French movie but, if they act in an American film, they get €200,000?”
Mr Maraval’s comments have generated howls of protest. He has been accused, inter alia, of being a “bad loser” after betting his company’s money on a series of films which failed to break even in 2012 (including Asterix On Her Majesty’s Service). He has been accused of trying to distract attention from the “affaire Depardieu” because “le grand Gérard” has agreed to play Dominique Strauss-Kahn for a cut-price fee in a movie that Wild Bunch is trying to finance about the scandal which erupted around the former head of the International Monetary Fund when he was accused of sexually assaulting a New York hotel employee last year.
On the other hand, Mr Maraval’s article has been welcomed by other movie executives, directors and critics as an overdue assault on the cumbersome and perverse system of public support for French cinema. A large part of the support comes from TV companies, which are obliged by law to invest in films. In recompense, the films can premier on the small screens 10 months after the big screen.
French TV companies, obsessed by competition from the internet. will now only sponsor films which feature the “bankable names” which supposedly ensure high audience figures.
As a result, French TV has created a kind of movie “star system” reminiscent of the worst excesses of Hollywood in the 1930s. There are about 30 “bankable” acting names in France.
Read more of this report from The Independent.