The “Selfish” Mothers of Contemporary French Screen Comedy

Abstract

This article explores a salient trend for “selfish” behaviours featuring in comic depictions of motherhood and the female actors who embody it in French cinema and secondarily television in the late 2010s. I identify tensions between various postfeminist ideals and the self-sacrifice and morally exemplary behaviour associated with contemporary parenting norms, including as coloured by US influence, which combines in an exigent admixture with traditionally more draconian French approaches. Specifically, the article focalises the emergence of the “can-do” mother who combines maternity with professional and successful fulfilment in female-authored film, as well as the “mother behaving badly” informed by comparable Anglophone representations. In both cases, it homes in on the images of star actors (in particular, Julie Delpy, Catherine Deneuve and Marina Foïs but also Karin Viard, Virginie Efira and Juliette Binoche) as key determinants in the ideological resonance of the portrayals under examination, with their popular personae fleshing out and tending to endorse recently expanded parameters for contemporary French motherhood.