Dodin Bouffant will not succeed Indochine: anatomy of a French failure

Justine Triet’s film would certainly have won the statuette if it had been chosen by France. But the committee bet on the wrong horse. How could such a failure have happened?

France has been waiting for a new Oscar for Best Foreign Film for 30 years. Since 1993 and Indochina by Régis Wargnier, no French film has won this symbolic statuette. Obviously, there were major French successes which minimized the snub. In particular the cardboard The Artist in 2012. But the specific category of Best Film from the Rest of the World continues to elude French cinema. Worse still: since 2020 and Wretchedno French feature film has been nominated!

And it won’t be this year either. Because The Passion of Dodin Bouffant was not accepted by the Academy voters yesterday. A disavowal accentuated by his zero points in the major César categories this morning! A huge disillusionment for Trần Anh Hùng and its excellent historical film. But especially for French cinema, which had, in its other pocket, the winning ticket…

Yes, there is no doubt (or almost no doubt) thatAnatomy of a fallif it had been selected by the selection committee, would have been nominated as Best Foreign Film at the 2024 Oscars, in addition to being nominated in the premier category of Best Film (exactly like Parasite in 2020). Worse still, the legal thriller of Justine Trietwould have been the undisputed favorite for the statuette, ahead of The Snow Circle (Spain) and Past Lives (South Korea). Already crowned at the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, and recently at the Lumières, Anatomy of a Fall would very likely have made the grand slam and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, on March 10, in Los Angeles!

Yes, but now, France has bet on Dodin Bouffant. The French Oscar committee, made up of seven film professionals, meeting last September, preferred (among five preselected films) the culinary romance of Trần Anh Hùng to the reigning Palme d’Or. A heresy?

5 months ago, the choice of Dodin Bouffant did not seem as absurd as today, the day after the nominations. Indeed, we must remember that in 2022, France had chosen to be represented by Titanium – logical, since Palme d’Or in Cannes – to the detriment of The Event (Golden Lion in Venice), yet in full buzz in the USA in the wake of the debate on the right to abortion. Result: no nomination for Julia Ducournau’s film! This time, the committee wanted to circumvent a form of systematism, by focusing on a gastronomic ode, a sort of showcase of French culture embodied by Juliette Binocheone of the rare French actresses to be famous across the Atlantic.

A choice not entirely ubiquitous on paper, especially since Dodin Bouffant was also honored at Cannes (Director’s Prize), benefiting from excellent feedback from the foreign press. A combination of assets to which was added the very political speech of Justine Triet on the stage of the Cannes Film Festival, little appreciated by the Minister of Culture at the time…

In the end, the committee therefore reached what is, today, the wrong decision. An error of judgment, explained more precisely by a source close to the committee, cited by Variety: “Some people on the committee kept the image of the voters in this category (Best Foreign Film) as old and nostalgic people, and did not take into account the fact that the Oscar voters have changed! They are younger and more diverse than before. They like to be challenged…“

It remains to be seen how to avoid this type of failure in the future. How to select the right film, the one that will finally offer France a successor to Régis Wargnier? With a points system? Through a larger committee? A more eclectic panel of voters? There will always remain an element of uncertainty, the problem also coming from this pre-selection system set up by the American Academy: a single film, for each country, is this really the right way to do justice in world cinema?