What's wrong with French movies?

If you're sometime confused when you watch French movies, you're not alone. Often times, situations and characters are so weird that you wonder if these films were not made in some distant planet where actors bore very little resemblance with humans. The recent death of Éric Rohmer, the famous director who was part of the so-called “New Wave” gave me the opportunity to watch one of his trademark movies “Ma nuit chez Maud” from 1969, and finally made me realize what was wrong with most French movies.

In fact it wasn't just viewing that movie that brought me to this stage, but the culmination of disappointments with French films spanning decades, without really grasping what the flaw was. It 's only at this very moment that I put all the pieces of the puzzle together and discovered that the way people talked in these movie had nothing to do with the way normal folks would converse in real life. In other words the script was so unreal that it make the movie look alien. This brings me back to the realization that successful movies must have good stories and realistic scripts that truly mirror society at a certain point in time. Attentive observation of the the surroundings and true realism definitely go a long way into making a great movie!