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Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France

as well as content. He comments on the ‘active’ cinephilia of films that bristle with intertextual reference and bravura technical feats, and illuminates his title with attention to the dominance of the corporeal in contemporary French cinema, from the consideration of domestic abuse and self-mutilation to comic deflation of romance. Palmer’s corpus of texts is wide-ranging and the book is eager to move beyond the same few films and directors that dominate Anglophone studies of contemporary French cinema (Palmer cites Besson, Kassovitz, Jeunet—to which we might wish to add Denis, Ozon and Haneke) which simply reinforce an ‘auteur complex’ and where the ‘lure of the familiar [ . . . ] narrows the canon’ (20). At times, however, Palmer’s enthusiasm and worthwhile desire to move beyond classical critical paradigms lead to a rather hasty dismissal. Most notable is a complete lack of attention to the continuing importance of directors who emerged during or just after the New Wave. Although Palmer is correct to assert the importance of youth, surely just as interesting is French cinema’s interest in mortality, ageing and the different kind of vigour that comes from an older perspective, epitomised by the presence of Agnès Varda, who released two of the most important films of the 2000s, or the fact that Éric Rohmer was the first ever French director to stage a fully digital film production with 2001’s L’Anglaise et le duc. Also notable in Palmer’s general desire to emphasise post-2000 French cinema’s health and diversity is a lack of attention to its recurrent interest in questions of dispossession and exclusion and its return to a cinema of political engagement, which several critics argue is the defining characteristic of contemporary French cinema. If Palmer disagrees, it would nevertheless be good to have this explicitly addressed within his overall revisionist account. This remains however an engaging book which features several well-written case studies, a challenging and dynamic thesis, and above all an invigorating and enjoyable account of French cinema which is inspiring in its passion and enthusiasm for its subject.