BLOND AMBITION
The French excelled in the eighties. Pastels, big shoulders, and the triumph of smart-casual played to their fashion strengths, of course, but the emphases on exaggerated urban sophistication and free-floating existential angst were so up their allée the entire decade might as well have been flying the tricolour.
While the pop music of the era was merely pretending to be French (, Nick Rhodes, Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot and all those jazzy female vocalists in Breton smocks), the films didn’t have to. For at least a brief period in the eighties, France’s cinema was at the vanguard. , as it was called, seized the zeitgeist with a mix of urban alienation (let’s not forget the constant threat of nuclear war and the reality of western industrial decline), Leos Carax’s , and, by some way the most far-reaching, Luc Besson’s .
