This book, the French reworking of a 2020 collection edited by Marie Cadalanu and Phil Powrie, The French Film Musical, addresses the form and history of a relatively heterogeneous genre hovering between typically French real life entertainment like chanson and operetta and the multimedia sphere of modern music industry, with its methodical blurring of boundaries between theatrical performance, radio and television broadcasting, music for home entertainment, specialized press, etc.

Although French musicals are close to their better known American equivalents, there are also vital differences between them. What distinguishes the French production is above all its extreme diversity. French musicals are less streamlined than the Hollywood genre: the link between music and dance is rather loose, the storylines are not always strongly related to the songs or other musical intermezzi, the relationship with older musical genres is more directly stressed, not all musicals are labeled as such, and the genre is never positioned as a strategic part of a studio’s production line, for example. These alterations make the French musical perhaps less visible, yet therefore not less popular or interesting. Yet they also explain the quasi-disappearance of the genre when French film production shifts from studio to auteur creation, even if some New Wave directors like Jacques Demy continue to make important contributions to the genre. Movies like Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) or Peau d’Âne (1970), technically more innovative than the rightly famous Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), are thus the last great flare-up of the genre in France.

French musicals have been immediately present since the early days of sound cinema, in spite of the wide-spread suspicion of the conservative return to “filmed theater”. However, the initially derivative character of these movies, most of them more or less slackly adapted from music hall and operetta performances, did not prevent them from finding their own place in the new movie culture. Rather than elaborating a “new” genre, French musicals developed a wide range of subgenres, making clever use of local dialects (the “Marseilles” musical for example and its portrayal of Southern layback culture proved dramatically successful) and borrowing from a great variety of musical styles and genres (jazz, big band, chanson, “exotic” crooners, operetta – the latter itself a genre with multiple internal variations), while always staying in direct touch with the realities of daily life, certainly in the politicized 1930s, and featuring characters as well as situations that exceeded the mere sphere of show business and stage entertainment. Finally, the link with popular theatre (vaudeville, light comedy, melodrama) and the ubiquity of punning and double entendre, are incomparably more prominent in French musicals than in their US or German competitors.

This well edited collection demonstrates a thorough knowledge of American and other scholarship on both the musical and genre theory in general. Several articles also deploy a profound expertise of musicological analysis. The complete book (500 pages!) represents an excellent contribution to a better understanding of the genre, not by defending an all-encompassing definition of the musical (this may be thinkable for the Hollywood production, but not for the more heterogeneous French production), but by proposing a set of family resemblances mainly focusing on the shifting relationships between various types and degrees of musical presence, diegetically motivated or not, in various types and styles of stories, not all of them necessarily presented as musicals.

Three main lines structure this open genre approach of the musical: 1) a strong emphasis on historical and geographical contextualization: the object of analysis is the archive of the movies as much as the movies themselves), 2) a thorough commitment to close reading, all the more interesting since in certain cases the movies are almost impossible to access for non-specialists (and even for specialists in certain cases it is difficult to do so), 3) a special interest in the medial and social circulation of these works, which are never only movies: on the one hand because they adapt other works borrowed from the stage or the radio or record business, before being transformed themselves in new spectacles and recorded music; on the other hand  because these movies also enter the world of print culture, via novelizations or celeb magazines, particularly relevant given the explicitly popular and low-brow character of almost all French musicals. All chapters of the book closely stick to this overall research program, just as they faithfully follow the open definition approach of the genre, hence nuancing family resemblances rather than trying to define the whole genre through some generalizing analysis of a single movie or subgenre. The presence of a complete list of movies that belong to the genre, the detailed bibliographical information in each chapter, and a smart combination of different indexes dramatically increase the use-value of this publication, which can rightly claim to be the ultimate reference work in the field for the coming decade.

Finally, Comédies musicales à la française also innovates by offering a stimulating merger of national and transnational perspectives (it is better to avoid the term “global” or “world” cinema, given the fact that the period under scrutiny goes from the 1930s to the 1960s, that is a period with only very reduced presence of non-Western cinema). No national musical movie tradition can be “pure”, and all chapters clearly demonstrate the permanent mix of borrowed, copied, transformed, remediated and original elements in the French, German, and US productions. In this context, it is important to link the notion of national culture with that of linguistic community, for the musical genre is strongly affected by the end of multi-language production (with the same editor, the same setting, the same story, but with different actors). The increased gap between languages logically reinforces the development of national styles. Hollywood musicals and French musicals are both musicals and it is possible to unveil French influences in the US production and vice versa, but apart from that they are really very different. This book discloses this dialectics of the national and the transnational in very convincing ways, and it does so in exactly the same way as all the chapters address the genre issue: via archival contextualization, close reading, and analysis of the circulation of the works in their expanded media field. Good examples in case are for instance the analysis of the American careers of French artists (actors, singers, writers, directors) in Los Angeles and the culture clashes that accompany their overseas activities.