Chobizenesse (1975)
Directed by Jean Yanne

Film Review

Jean Yanne's virulent one-man crusade against the grubby commercialism that invades all aspects of modern life reaches its dizzying zenith in this merciless satire, the most truculent of the five 'anti-everything' films he directed in the 1970s.  Having gone to war against the world of advertising and pretty well the entire capitalist system in Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil (1972) and Moi y'en a vouloir des sous (1973), Yanne now directs his fire on the industry he knew best: show-business.  And, at the time he made the film, Yanne certainly had plenty of ammunition in his arsenal.  It was time to go over the top, way over the top...

By the mid-1970s, the exploitation 'phenomenon' had managed to get its slimy cancerous tentacles into just about every crevice of the entertainment industry.  Today, when we look back on cinema of the 1970s we can hardly believe how sleazy, shallow and exploitative it was for the most part, a festering morass of cheesy sex comedies, nauseating soft-focus porn and horror films so bad that they can induce a state of irreversible cerebral atrophy.  Even in France, the country who prided itself on its cultural sophistication, exploitation and extreme bad taste polluted a film industry that was in a horrendous state of commercial and moral decline.  When you realise that the most successful French film of the decade was Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974) you begin to share Jean Yanne's despair with the way things were heading.  It was a race to the bottom, in every sense of the term.

Chobizenesse features a music hall impresario - played by Yanne himself - who finds himself in the last chance saloon.  He has one more throw of the dice before he goes under, so he does what every doomed impresario does and enters into a Faustian pact with a group of businessmen who have no understanding or appreciation of art and only want a quick return on their investment.  Having failed to deliver what was agreed - a show that pays tribute to the importance of steel - Yanne's laidback impresario decides that the only way to stay in business is to make an unconditional surrender to public tastes, so he immediately sets about mounting a show featuring bloodsucking bat-people and female nudes draped all over large wine glasses.  Even this proves to be too sophisticated and so we end up with a spectacle of pornographic excess that is too explicit, too vulgar, too succulently salacious, that we are not even permitted to see it.  When Yanne's character finally sees the light and realises the true value of art he ends up a martyr to good taste, massacred by a society that has lost all notion of artistic appreciation.  As it turned out, the real-life Yanne suffered a similar fate to that of his alter ego in the film - butchered by unsympathetic critics who failed to get the joke.  Shame on them.

As a humorist Jean Yanne was virtually in a league of his own, one of the most acerbic and astute funny men of his generation.  Whilst he was an enthusiastic filmmaker, he never became a great filmmaker, and it is easy to criticise his films for their lack of structure, poor characterisation and tendency to replay the same gag over and over again, ad nauseum, until it becomes as painful as a blister in acid.  Chobizenesse is not Yanne's best film but it is probably his most pertinent, a well-timed cry of despair that expresses everything that was wrong with 1970s cinema, if not culture in general.  The showbiz world that Yanne depicts is all too real, one that is totally bereft of integrity and where everyone, it seems, is too willing to play the 'anything goes' prostitute or mooning clown for an industry that had sunk to its lower depths.

The musical numbers that Yanne created for his film - kitsch horrors that are almost unbearable to watch - show the slow pattern of decline from tawdry commercialism to outright porno-exploitation that came about in the early 1970s.  Thankfully, public appetites did improve in the 1980s (outright exploitation is a feast that audiences did eventually grow weary of) and the wholesale sell-out of the 70s was at least partly reversed in subsequent decades.  But still, whilst things are not quite so bad as they once were, Chobizenesse still has a disturbing resonance.  Commercialism still reigns over our culture, deciding what art lives and what art dies, more powerful even than the opinionated non-entities who sit in judgement on talent show panels.  Are we so sure that we will never again return to the decade that taste forgot...?

Film Synopsis

Clément Mastard is the owner of a revue theatre who is fighting a losing battle against bankruptcy.  In a desperate attempt to stave off financial ruin he enters into a business agreement with a group of hardnosed businessmen who insist that their industry, the manufacture and exploitation of steel, be represented in Mastard's next show.  Steel-based musical numbers are harder to come up with than Mastard had supposed and he turns to his former associate Célia Bergson for help.  The latter has turned her back on the sordid world of commercial entertainment and now runs an experimental theatre company.  It is Célia who brings Mastard into contact with Jean-Sébastien Bloch, a musical genius whose talents the world has yet to come to appreciate.  When Bloch's neurotic wife kills herself, the musician takes refuge in Mastard's theatre, so sure is he that he will be blamed for his wife's death.  The impresario agrees to hide Bloch from the police providing he composes the music for his next revue.  Having abandoned the steel-themed show, Mastard decides he has no choice but to give in to popular tastes.  Bloch is not pleased to learn that his musical compositions are being put to the service of a crass exhibition of tacky pornography.  In the end, Mastard sees the light and decides to sacrifice everything for the sake of art...