Bourgeois Achievement, Lordly Continuity

On having watched the French film La Tourneuse de Pages, it struck me that French directors indulge their countrymen’s liking for the retreat of the successful bourgeois to his leafy château for weekends and fêtes civiles et nationales. We get the sense that the characters float, sometimes race, between tasteful Louis quinze or designer offices in Paris and the reward for their successes, that rural retreat with its exquisitely appointed drawing rooms and creeper-covered walls. Such background patterns emerge in film after film, and, indeed, very, very pleasingly so for English viewers, too.

The coincidental French view is that the English have a cinematic nostalgia for country houses. There is, though a contrast. Whereas, as I have stated, the French characters inhabit a mansion which probably came into the family as a result of sharp wit, talent or hard work in the current or immediately preceding generations, the English country house represents continuing old blood, inherited fortunes and long-held land transmitted by means of the Norman Yoke, or maybe inherited from a hard-headed guy on the look out and on the make in the sixteenth century. In such films as Women in Love, The Go-Between, Brideshead Revisited, the Remains of the Day, Gosford Park and Atonement, dramas of more or less bitter consequence unfold among the members of aristocratic and gentry milieux and their acquaintances, set largely in rural piles. To stop all gaps, there is even the London house, as in Upstairs Downstairs and Brideshead.

The French prolong and relive the bourgeois victory of their revolution – you are asking which one – the 1798 one, and present us with their French Dream, so very much more subtly understated that its American counterpart – no whiff of un marquis detestable ou Monsieur le Comte degoûtant... . The English, I fear, by contrast, still ‘love a lord’, despite that rash of popular films which took as their anchor, the working-class experience of the coalminers’ strike during the Thatcher era.