Mixed Couples in Contemporary French Cinema: Exploring New Representations of Diversity and Difference on the Big Screen

Summary

In Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France, Carrie Tarr observed that ‘the trope of inter-racial romance, potentially a sign of successful integration, is […] a significant absence. […] In 2003, inter-racial relationships can be found in films by white and Maghrebi filmmakers, and in the occasional beur film […] but they rarely lead to the establishment of a mixed-race couple’ (2005: 212). Similarly, Jon Cowans later observed that ‘Although interracial couples appear in minor roles in many films in French cinema, those specifically about interracial couples are still relatively rare’ (2010: 49). There have been three significant developments relating to the representations of mixed couples in French cinema since the completion of Tarr's and Cowans's studies. First, since 2010, over ten feature films have placed successful (if at times conflicting) mixed couples at the centre of their narratives, and many of these were (co)directed or written by people of minority-ethnic descent. Second, there is a greater degree of diversity relative to the couples depicted in earlier films, in which the vast majority involved one majority-ethnic (i.e., white) and one Maghrebi-French character. While this remains the most common makeup of mixed couples in French cinema – as well as the most problematic, according to Mijailovic (2016: 68) – several recent films go beyond this dynamic. Examples include Samba (Nakache and Toledano, 2014) and Prêt à tout [Anything for Alice] (Cuche, 2014), which pair a majority-ethnic protagonist with one who is black, as well as the astonishingly successful comedy Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu? [Serial (Bad) Weddings] (de Chauveron, 2014). This latter centres around relationships between majority-ethnic women (four sisters from a conservative family) and four men who are Jewish, Maghrebi-French, West African, and of Chinese descent. Although it does not fully diverge from the established trend of having a Maghrebi-French person in the couple, it does present a new dynamic and give a nod to the presence of other minority-ethnic groups in France.

The third and most notable development involves a new kind of mixed relationship, in which the couple is composed of two people from different minority-ethnic postcolonial populations and, more specifically, different visible minorities who are not immigrants. In other words, there is no majority-ethnic (white) character in the relationship, and both protagonists are French.