Yuri Sebastião
March 19, 2009

Nostalgia and the Treatment of Colonialism in French Films of the 1980s

Defined by Phil Powrie as "an escape from reality and the attempt to return to a presupposed golden age", nostalgia was alongside the crisis of masculinity one of the major features and influences of French cinema in the 1980s. A type of film considered by Powrie to be nostalgic is the "colonial" film, which as the title suggests deals with France´s colonial history overseas. According to the writer, colonial films are strongly nostalgic since they focus on the loss of a lifestyle associated with France´s imperial power. Two notable examples of this type of film are Bertrand Tavernier´s Coup de Torchon (1981) and Claire Denis´ Chocolat (1988), both of which explore the theme of French colonialism in Africa. Despite sharing similarities that are in general associated to the fact that their stories take place in colonial times, the two films are in essence very distinct. The most important similarity between the two is the fact that both are filmed on location in former French colonies of West Africa. Tavernier´s Coup de Torchon is a film-noir stylized, and often jocose story of a French police chief in a small Senegalese town where laws and morals are seldom considered. Whereas Denis´ Chocolat is the story of France, a woman who upon her return to Cameroon, reminisces about her childhood days in the northern part of the country, where her father was a French colonial administrator. Although the two films provide a general picture of colonialism that is relatively consensual, they differ in the approach and in the level of emphasis given to the theme. This is partly due to the fact that one is sort of a comedy and the other is a drama with an autobiographical tone. The two films also differ in the level of nostalgia evoked, due to elements that can be associated with the genre of each. This analysis aims to explore the contrasting ways in which