As far as the theme of work is concerned, fictional films have focused on individual destinies: social classes are the mainspring of success stories. Let’s take a look at the fiction of social climbing in American and French cinema, where it is seen as either a tragedy or a fairytale.

Bolts, angels, predators and mullets

1. Bolts. There are plenty of workers among cinema’s first heroes. In France, there were those from the Lumière Factory, filmed as they left the workplace of their illustrious bosses. In the United States, workers from American slapstick were given a central position in industrial society. Charlot from Modern Times is a cog in the production system, a grain of sand in the machine, a regulating element as well as the threat of complete deregulation. Burlesque man is an insider and an outsider. When he is both a worker and a tramp, he makes society run like a machine, attracts policemen like a magnet, heightens political awareness in the streets and the workshops and provokes riots for which he becomes the spokesman despite himself. In the era of silent movies, no individual voice was really heard. Burlesque man shook up the whole social schema. Perhaps it took the talkies for an individual to make himself heard and push his way through the crowd. Singin’ in the Rain is a memorable illustration of this, when Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) relates the pitiful career of movie stuntman prior to his glory. It is as if his story alone gives dignity to his past; as if no legend is possible without a voice.

2. Angels. There is an increase in great tales of social climbing with the arrival of the talkies. Two voices can be heard in American cinema. The first is Frank Capra, who, from the 1930s, along with his scriptwriter Robert Riskin, systematized the genre of the social fable that was personified by two great actors, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Meet John Doe. It could be an edifying tale or more simply a magic trick: in Lady for a Day (1933), an apple seller who lied to her daughter about her miserable living conditions is taken for a sumptuous night out when her daughter comes to visit. Fiction offers an ordinary character the fleeting opportunity to access the highest spheres, even if it is only an illusion: return of wizardry and magic, the chance for the viewer to imagine being transformed into Cinderella. This conversion is reversed two decades later in It’s a Wonderful Life, where in one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema’s history, an heir thinking of suicide is shown by his gardian angel the hell his hometown would have become without him. All Capra’s heroes (he is still wrongfully criticized for it) are helped by passing angels, unless they become angels themselves. Even when heaven sends its blessings, James Stewart/Mr. Smith or Gary Cooper/John Doe seek the common good rather than personal profit.

3. Predators. One year before Lady for a Day, Scarface by Howard Hawks defined another type of fiction: social climbing described as a murder instinct. Even when the psychological portrait tempers his thirst for profit, Tony Camonte is described as a predator. Social condition and family concerns are such burdens that only murder allows enrichment. Murder is necessary. It drives the hero while at the same time signaling his end: this tragic movement is perfectly embodied in White Heat by Raoul Walsh, when James Cagney exultantly says to his mother, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” While the Capra vein did not spread through American cinema without taking on a more complex and less fiercely utopian appearance, the Scarface vein has not really changed. There are simply more murders and psychological portraits are less sketchy. An Oedipus complex is no longer enough to explain the temperament of Tony Soprano in the series created by David Chase, of Tony Montana in De Palma’s Scarface, or to take the most recent example, of Frank Lucas the drug barron in American Gangster (Ridley Scott), whose ambition was to create an African-American counterweight to Mafia networks.

4. Mullets. France has welcomed and showcased these two types of fiction, but without ever forgeting that they were part of the American Dream, i.e. inaccessible or false. Some people still vehemently regret French cinema’s inability to access this fairytale. But the response is often unconvincing, complacent, American-style cinema. There are a thousand possible reasons for this incapacity: a certain documentary tradition that leaves workers at the mercy of a point of view instead of giving them the opportunity to become legends; a realistic and literary current that condemns characters to pay the price of their ambition sooner or later. Etc. After L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance), Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain), is a rare example of a cross betweeen the temptation of Hollywood and a French model. The title identifies the ingredients of couscous as well as two charcters whose destinies come together in the final scene. On one hand is an old unemployed worker who has the daring, impossible idea of opening a floating restaurant with the help of only his family. On the other is his mistress’ daughter, who helps him with the project and makes the customers wait while a cargo of missing couscous is replaced. A Capra-style tale with a touch of Zola, but whose vitality takes it beyond a tragic dead-end. France does not have a magic wand but it has found the formula: sweat and impurity.

Bastien Hader