Why Woody Hates Hollywood, Loves France

French film fans love nothing more than having their good taste praised and Hollywood philistinism rubbished by an American - and Woody Allen gave them both yesterday when his new film opened the 55th Cannes film festival.

Gallic cineastes whooped and cheered during the premiere of Hollywood Ending, in which Allen plays a neurotic sixtysomething US film director whose movie is slated in his homeland but is hailed as a masterpiece in France. "Here, I'm a bum," Allen's character says at the end of the picture. "There, I'm a genius. Thank God the French exist."

And French film critics basked in patriotic pride once more during the 67-year-old New Yorker's press conference in which he hailed France for being a bulwark against Hollywood barbarism and argued that it took Gallic aesthetes to recognise the genius of many American artists before they were known in the US.

"The French people have been so supportive of my films for so many years, and so affectionate to Cannes that I thought I ought to make a gesture of reciprocity," he said. "I always find it very, very amusing and very endearing about the French that they discover our artists before we do. For some reason it takes the validation of the French to recognise our most important artists. When you think of Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, any number of film directors, any number of important jazz musicians, they were all appreciated in France first. European culture takes the arts more seriously than we do."

Allen also distinguished the French fondness for his films from the chillier reaction he has received across the Channel. In Britain, interest in Allen's recent films has been slight. His previous picture, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, is yet to find a distributor, nor has Hollywood Ending been bought up for UK release. "I've never had any love affair with English audiences. They have been very nice when I've made a good film and stayed away when I've made a bad one." But he claimed The Curse of the Jade Scorpion would win a British distribution deal.

This is the second rare public outing for the famously reclusive Allen in 2002: he attended the Academy Awards in Hollywood earlier this year to present a montage of clips about New York after the September 11 attacks. "I would never say no to anything that would help New York."

In contrast with his admiration for French culture, Allen said he despaired of Hollywood. "In Hollywood, the films that come out are conceived in venality from the start. They would be happier making a bad film that makes a lot of money than a good film that makes none. That's why the films coming out of Hollywood are so uninspired: everybody's trying to make the most amount of money with the least amount of risk.

"The Hollywood system is an industry. When you think of Hollywood's golden age in the 30s and 40s they were even interested in making money then. Most of the pictures were pretty terrible, but some good ones would come out, but only when talented directors had to fight and fight and fight against producers."

Political intrusion

Asked if he supported government funding to ensure the artistic quality of films, Allen argued that there was often a risk of artistic autonomy being compromised by political intrusion. But he also pointed out that many of the films made by his mentor, Ingmar Bergman, would not have been possible without Swedish government subsidy.

But the love-in between Allen and the Cannes film festival's French contingent was punctured when the Jewish director was asked why he had not heeded calls from the American Jewish Congress to ban the event because it is taking place in a town where, in France's recent presidential elections, one third of votes were cast for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the racist leader of the extreme-right National Front, who was once sued for claiming the Holocaust was "a detail of history".

"I don't believe a boycott is in order," said Allen. "I have never felt that the French people are in any way anti-Semitic." He said the country could be proud of the way it had responded in the second round of the presidential election, when Le Pen received fewer than 20% of the votes cast. "The country came out in a very clear way about issues such as the extreme right, intolerance and totalitarianism. The French acquitted themselves very well."

Critical reaction was cool to Allen's film, in which he plays an Oscar-winning film director reduced to directing deodorant commercials, before making a Hollywood comeback. In the picture, Allen's character suffers from psychosomatic blindness during filming. As a result the film is a mess, and fares disastrously at the box office. Whether this kind of reaction also greets Hollywood Ending in Europe and the US remains to be seen. But many critics thought that, although Hollywood Ending is a pleasant enough diversion that launches this year's festival on a jaunty note, Allen is losing his comic touch.

"Woody's sight gags get cornea," said the headline in Screen International magazine, while Variety critic Todd McCarthy argued that the film was a muddle in the middle with a few amiable gags either side. Other critics argued that if Allen was suggesting that a film made by a blind director could triumph in France, that said more about the limitations of French taste than American barbarism.

But the most scathing verdict on Allen's work came from the director himself. "I don't think my films have been influential in any way whasoever. I don't think I've influenced the public, the United States or other film makers. Sometimes I think my films are appreciated but I don't think I have been of any influence at all."