Cinéma-monde, Jacques Audiard’s Les Frères Sisters and the limits of national cinemas

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2019, Jacques Audiard’s eighth feature film, Les Frères Sisters, was nominated for nine César awards and headlined both the UniFrance and Alliance Française French Film Festivals. However Les Frères Sisters/The Sisters Brothers (2018) features no French dialogue, actors, settings or filming locations. Indeed, a growing number of recent films are being labelled as French by national cinema bodies ranging from the CNC to UniFrance and the Césars Academy, despite few clearly ‘French’ characteristics. This article analyses a selection of transnational, transcultural and translingual case studies which have been distributed as French, concentrating on Les Frères Sisters, through the lens of cinéma-monde. Transnational in scope while maintaining connections to the Francosphere, cinéma-monde bends the conventions of national cinemas to foreground ‘a flexible corpus of films that are linked to the francophone world by some combination of linguistic or cultural affinities, geographic contacts, production connections, or reception networks’. The article uses cinéma-monde to consider how films such as Les Frères Sisters continue to be produced, distributed, consumed and judged within the frameworks of national cinemas, but also to conclude that such frames are insufficient to fully understand these films and how they operate in the world.