Crashing the New Wave : As this year's Cannes Film Festival will show, French directors are again making movies people want to see.(Brief Article)

Something radical has happened to French cinema over the past couple of years: Gallic directors are back to making movies that people want to see, abroad as well as at home. Of the 185 million movie tickets sold in France last year, 41 percent were to French films--up from 28.5 percent the year before. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amelie" raked in a remarkable $30 million worldwide since its release last year. Francois Ozon's "Eight Women," a campy musical-mystery packed with France's most bankable actresses--Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert and Virginie Ledoyen--has wooed critics and audiences across the continent. And Olivier Assayas's kinky cyber thriller "Demonlover," starring Chloe Sevigny and Connie Nielsen, will premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this week. The festival's artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, calls "Demonlover" "a very contemporary movie that doesn't resemble a New Wave picture at all."

Few French films do anymore. After decades of "navel-gazing" as one critic put it, the New Wave--that genre of self-conscious films dealing with themes of alienation, madness and erotic love--has finally gone into decline. "For three decades now, French film critics and writers thought the New Wave was the only cinema that mattered," says Jeunet. "Now that is changing. We are fed up with seeing two people sitting in a kitchen talking for two hours." Younger filmmakers, especially, seem eager to move on. "The New Wave has nothing to do with my life or my cultural references," says Mathieu Kassovitz, 30, who costarred in "Amelie" and directed "Hate" and "The Crimson Rivers." "When I was 15, Steven Spielberg was doing his best movies, like 'Jaws' and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Those are the movies that influenced me. Not Godard or Truffaut."

To longtime students of film, such words are sacrilege. The New Wave began in the late 1950s, when a slew of know-it-all French critics at the Cahiers du Cinema journal decided they could make movies better than the ones they were reviewing. They were devotees of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, both generally dismissed back then as commercial directors. Not so, claimed the Cahiers writers, who included Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard. "Hawks summarizes the highest virtues of the American cinema, the only one capable of providing us with a sense of moral value," wrote Rivette in 1953.

First the Cahiers clan made a spate of short films, just to see if they could. Truffaut's 1957 experimental short "Les Mistons" was so revolutionary it prompted one of his Cahiers colleagues to declare: "Truffaut has reinvented cinema." Two years later, Truffaut, then 27, made the riveting coming-of-age film "The 400 Blows." In 1960 Godard made the modern girl- loves-a-hood picture "Breathless," starring the fresh-faced American Jean Seberg and French newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo. He shot it in four weeks on a minuscule budget with a handheld camera that he kept in the basket of a bicycle he rode from one location to the next. Wrote one critic, "This wonderfully daring film breaks ...