Vive le boboisme

You all know how it is with a certain type of French film. The women are beautiful, and so are the men. They smoke, but they do not have rasping coughs. They gather for al fresco suppers at their beach houses, and open bottles of cru classé wines that are drinking perfectly right now. They are good friends, with wholesome appetites and slim silhouettes.

They are probably parents but we don’t see their children unless it is to admire their immaculate compliance with the adult world. Unlike their hapless counterparts north of the Channel, they don’t waste their time talking about the deficiencies of the state school system, because they have unshakeable faith in their own state school system.

Instead they talk of life. They wave their arms charismatically and make references to the philosophers they studied in their perfect schools. Their conversation is witty and fluent, and touches intellectual and emotional depths. Before the end of the evening, two of them will have paired off, seduced by the erotically charged debate. There are more cigarettes, more wine, more philosophy. None of them needs an early night because they don’t appear to have jobs, though they seem strangely well off. By the end of the film, they have wrestled with the dilemmas of human existence, but their affluent lives go on. There is always next Saturday night.

The French are not without a sense of self-deprecation, so they have a word for these admirable creatures: they are the bobo set, the “bourgeois bohemians” who fill the air with exotic ramblings and yet enjoy all the material comforts of a gilded life. It is a pejorative, ironic term. Yet the bobos are the envy of the world. They have worked out how to be rich and interesting, replete and reckless.

Earlier this week, I decided to look for a prominent French person to explain the paradoxical allure of bobo life to me. I happened across Guillaume Canet, the handsome actor, writer and director, who was holding court in a Soho hotel to promote his new film Little White Lies, which opens in London on Friday. Canet also directed Tell No One, critically acclaimed, commercially successful and notable for casting Kristin Scott Thomas as a tousle-haired, chain-smoking lesbian, seemingly cocking a snook at the entire British film industry: “This is what we can do with your posh glacial actresses! Be very afraid!”

Little White Lies has been phenomenally successful in France, but some critics have been less than kind, accusing it of being, well, a little bit of a bobo fantasy. In brief, a group of friends wrestle with a dilemma when one of them has suffered a serious accident. Do they stay with him, or do they go on their annual summer jaunt where they will drink wine, analyse relationships etc? The wrestle lasts around three seconds. Off they go. But will their decision come back to haunt them?

. . .

Canet bristles when I bring up the accusation of boboisme as we drink tea in his room. “It shows those critics do not understand the film,” he says as feistily as his gracious manners allow. “Of course it is the wrong thing to do,” he says of the friends who leave their friend in the lurch. “But I understand why they did it.”

He contrasts the film with Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, to which it is thematically related. “They don’t really question themselves,” he says of Kasdan’s good-timing baby-boomers. His protagonists suffer, however. They try to understand their emptiness. They feel genuinely guilty, and they are given a lesson, he says.

Maybe they look too good, I ask? (Canet’s girlfriend, Piaf’s Marion Cotillard, stars as a beautiful woman with man trouble, an improbable staple of French bobo cinema.) Canet shrugs his shoulders and I see his point. Why shouldn’t characters from a Ralph Lauren ad feel the prickle of existential doubt like the rest of us?

We have to look at the phenomenon more broadly. The bobo tendency is a symptom of a country grappling with two distinct traditions. The bourgeois element reflects France’s superiority in, well, just about every constituent of a hedonistic life. Beautiful people, fabulous fashion, the best food and drink. Even the Chinese, driving the price of Château Lafite through the heavens, have succumbed.

The bohemian part of the French tells them that all these trappings are superficial. That life must also be free-wheeling, spontaneous and scrupulously reflected upon. This combination of sensuality and intellectual austerity is one of the great legacies of western culture. The French should be loud and proud about their bobo roots. The rest of the world hates them for it, of course. But all they need to do is light up another cigarette, and blow the smoke in our jealous faces.

peter.aspden@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/aspden