The Beauty of French Cinema. Something that I always notice when looking at French movies is the terrible despair of the average French cititizen and how he feels terribily alone even in the biggest crowds. Even comedy movies in France have a sad edge, sometimes it is in the dialog that shows a deep desire for uniqueness in the characters but more often in a beautifully calculated cinematography that with little shots shows us how alone our characters are, how small they are compared to the large numbers.
I am not French but I live in Luxembourg and have many French friends from many social and cultural backgrounds and when I told them about this feeling I always have when watching French cinema they all agreed. A friend of mine from the banlieu told me of how little you felt when police passed around the streets and you thought about which of your brothers was going to be blamed for a crime he did not committ.
A friend of mine from relatively high Parisian society told how you feel small when confronted with the expectations of an extremely repetitive family history and how he sometimes could not tell his parents apart from their friends because of how similarly they had been educated and how they had grown up. A friend of mine from Orleans told me of much you feel small and distant from the rest of France even if you are in the literal center of it and how you feel like you need to live up to the perfect stereotipe of the model French person.
They all told me how in France the fight for individuality is not a small thing you do in high school calling yourself different from other students, it is a fight against ideas so deeply tucked in everybody’s brains that they are not even ideologies but a universal law.
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