Camille Cottin: A Comic Reappropriation of French Femininity in a Globalised, Postfeminist Culture

Abstract

This chapter explores how Camille Cottin’s star persona crystallises the circulation of French femininity between contemporary French culture and a globalised postfeminist culture, and in the particular field of comedy, which is strongly determined by national contexts. The author specifically aims to understand how the global postfeminist figure of the Parisienne interacts, within Cottin’s star image, with French comic traditions and what this interaction entails in terms of gender representation.

Since her revelation in the miniseries Connasse (‘The Parisian Bitch’, Canal+, 2013–2015), Camille Cottin has become one of the emblematic figures of the new wave of comic actresses to have emerged in France since the early 2000s. This is a remarkable phenomenon for two reasons: first, because these new actresses have seized the limelight in a French comic cinema that has historically pushed women into the shadows (Vincendeau 2014, 16), but also because they have built their comic personas in ways that are in line with traditional norms of femininity, unlike their predecessors (Jacqueline Maillan, Josiane Balasko, etc.). Camille Cottin’s career has made this development visible: her roles have highlighted both her glamour and her comic potential, using this association as the very basis of her image as a modern woman and allowing her to become the first comic actress to be featured as the public face of Chanel in 2018.

This type of reconfiguration of female comedy can only be fully understood as a symptom of postfeminism, which emerged in the USA in the 1990s. This ambivalent cultural sensitivity, which draws on the achievements of second-wave feminism but breaks with the continuity of the movement in the contemporary context, appears in the media through paradoxical gender representations that consolidate the traditional norms favoured by the 1980s anti-feminist backlash (Faludi 1991) while at the same time acknowledging the new status of women at the end of the twentieth century (McRobbie 2009, 11–15). Specifically, in order to attract the attention of female viewers, who have never before had as much economic and social influence, postfeminist culture offers them new female protagonists they can identify with, endowed with a degree of subjectivity that has rarely been possible for female characters to attain in popular culture so far, and which conflicts with traditional gender representations.

The cultural contradictions of postfeminism began to emerge in France a decade later, through comedy, largely by way of the Canal+ group. Inspired by the success of female comics in US postfeminist culture, the network updated its programming by developing its own female comedy formats in the early 2000s: ‘American-style’ romantic comedies such as Décalage horaire/Jet-lag (Danièle Thompson, 2002), for example, but also TV shows featuring new female comedians such as Connasse, which launched Cottin’s career.

Cottin thus embodies the importing of a US cultural phenomenon. However, as the press have frequently pointed out, she also strikingly reflects the way English-language media have presented the figure of the Parisian woman or Parisienne since the beginning of the 2000s (D’Orgeval 2020): frequently cast as chic, assertive women, the actress seems to have adopted, as part of her persona, a form of Frenchness that has been tailored to the North American imagination.¹ The goal of this essay is to examine Cottin’s career as an actress who has crystallised the movement of the figure of the Parisienne between US and French postfeminist cultures, in order to identify certain effects of this movement on representations of femininity in France. While the actress has clearly drawn inspiration from this Americanised figure, she has transferred the Parisienne to the specific cultural context of French comedy, which is heavily determined by its own national features and is therefore capable of modifying the meaning of the archetype. How has the figure of the Parisienne been reconfigured by this contact with the French comic landscape?

An Ironic Incarnation of Americanised Frenchness

To understand the importance of the Parisienne to Cottin’s persona, we should first look back at the enthusiasm this figure has inspired within postfeminist US culture, which can be explained by its ability to adapt to postfeminism’s inherent contradictions. The Parisienne is a feminine ideal that is perfectly compatible with the new social status of women at the turn of the twenty-first century, as it is associated with a set of qualities that can be seen as markers of female emancipation: the Parisienne is defined by her passionate personality, her free sexuality and her ability to disarm men in order to get what she wants. At the same time, these qualities reveal the figure’s profound ambivalence: despite her apparent modernity, the Parisienne is intrinsically determined by male desire, and the signs of female power that she displays are only celebrated inasmuch as they can help her seduce men. They thus draw on and reinforce the provocative, erotic connotations that define historical representations of the Parisienne (Rétaillaud-Bajac 2013), which make French women’s assertiveness an instrument for arousing male desire.

This ambivalent representation has appeared in fashion magazines associated with US postfeminist culture, which have frequently featured the seductive figure of the ‘French girl’ since the early 2000s. Although she has mainly performed in French cinema and television, Cottin has not been immune to the effects of these US cultural representations, which have influenced her career and even transformed her into a local ambassador of ‘Frenchness’: in Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (France Télévisions/Netflix, 2015–2020), Larguées/Dumped (Eloïse Lang, 2018) or even in Connasse, the actress plays glamorous, dominant women, noted for their provocative mode of seduction and closely aligned with heterosexual desire—even if that means being drawn back into this economy through ‘lesbian chic’ imagery. In Dix pour cent for instance, the lesbian woman she plays finally agrees to have sex with a man she had previously resisted, thus revealing, in line with representations in mainstream pornography, a form of ‘authentic heterosexual instinct’ that can be aroused by deserving men (McKenna 2002, 288).

It would be wrong, however, to consider Cottin as a simple transposition of an Americanised figure to the French context, since she significantly modifies the Parisienne type by moving it into comic territory. Since the early 2000s, French comedy has been reshaped by the introduction of female subjects on screen, who have gained importance on the cultural scene under the influence of US postfeminism: by appropriating a comic subjectivity historically denied them in French media culture, contemporary comic actresses have managed to subvert the limited roles they have been assigned by patriarchal society. Louise Bourgoin and Frédérique Bel are emblematic figures of this wave of female comedy initiated by Canal+, as they were able to reorient their traditional roles as ‘window dressing’ on the set of the channel’s Grand Journal (‘The Major News Show’, Canal+, 2004–2017) news programme—Bourgoin as a weather reporter chosen for her pretty appearance and Bel as a ‘dumb blonde’ on La Minute blonde (‘Blonde Moment’, Canal+, 2004–2006)—by adopting an exaggeratedly innocent delivery style while telling bawdy jokes, thus exploiting a semblance of naivety to underline the comedy’s self-conscious status. As a direct heir to these actresses (having herself been revealed on Canal+ several years later), Cottin does something similar by appropriating the eroticised figure of the Parisienne ironically, in order to distinguish herself from it: her performances show that she is perfectly aware of the archetypal figure she is associated with, and deliberately play with the stereotypes it conveys—especially the myth of Parisian women’s slenderness, fuelled by US fashion magazines (Schneider 2016) and infamously by the bestseller French Women Don’t Get Fat (Guiliano 2006), a food guide that perfectly illustrates the normative dimension of the phenomenon. In Connasse, the series that launched her career, Cottin uses this stereotype to irritate her chosen targets, for instance by complaining—with a certain insensitivity—that she cannot gain weight and is doomed to remain slim. This witticism is also present in the series Dix pour cent, in which her character effortlessly substitutes her lunch with a Diet Coke; revealingly, an almost identical scene occurs in the US series Emily in Paris (Netflix, 2020–)—with a cigarette instead of the Diet Coke—which was roundly decried by French critics for its caricatured portrayal of Parisians. This is no coincidence: Cottin’s comedy relies on the ironic reappropriation of US representations of Frenchness and its clichés, like the ‘accidentally’ slimming diet of Parisian women—the US origins of the Diet Coke indicating, in this case, the actress’s obvious ironic distance from the stereotype in question.

An important clarification must be made here: Cottin’s ironic portrayal of Parisian women is not unique to her comedy, nor to French comedy. In fact, it is already present in US representations of Frenchness—including in Emily in Paris. Although the series was attacked by French critics for its numerous stereotypes, its purposefully exaggerated depiction of French culture actually reveals a form of ironic distance and a certain self-consciousness about the artificiality of its own representations. As Angela McRobbie demonstrates, this specific type of irony allows postfeminist culture to regulate its own tensions, by adapting norms of femininity to twenty-first-century women’s new gender consciousness, which tends to make those norms obsolete. In order for women to manage this growing contradiction within their identity, postfeminist culture utilises traditional markers of femininity in an ironic mode—that of the ‘postfeminist masquerade’—allowing women to have it both ways: by adding a comic tone to traditional codes of femininity, they can conform to social conventions and avoid being marginalised while at the same time showing that they are aware of the conservative dimension of the gender roles they are performing (McRobbie 2009, 64–65). US postfeminist culture has made ample use of this masquerade in order to reiterate the normative representation of the Parisienne: fashion magazines have systematically presented Parisian women within a retro universe that is out of step with current society (often drawing on 1960s imagery linked to New Wave cinema), thus revealing their awareness of the outdated aspect of this representation (see Fig. 1). Cottin employs irony in a similar way: through her roles, she mocks the myth of Parisian women’s ‘accidental’ thinness but, in doing so, also deflects the fact that she perfectly corresponds to this ideal. The actress’s satiric tone helps her to balance these contradictions within her own image, but also to adapt to the expectations of English-speaking audiences by seamlessly conforming to the ironic representations common in international postfeminist culture. Her modelling work for Chanel, for instance, consists in an advertisement that explicitly plays with the stereotype of the headstrong Parisienne and, unsurprisingly, places her within a retro Parisian decor, filmed in black and white (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 1

The retro Parisienne played by Camille Rowe in ‘How to Speak French with Camille Rowe’ (Available on i-D magazine’s YouTube channel)

Fig. 2

Camille Cottin crossing Paris in black and white in the ‘Suis-moi/Follow Me’ advertising campaign for Chanel’s J-12 watch

At the same time, Cottin’s humour differs from that of US postfeminist culture on one crucial point: the actress’s presence as a fully fleshed out central character is rooted in an ‘authentically French’ identity, which adds a further layer of irony to her performances. Cottin’s national identity certainly helps explain the difference between the reception of Emily in Paris—which, despite its irony, incited the wrath of French journalists for its stereotypical portrayal of Parisian women—and the roles played by Cottin—which have received steady praise. Although the actress makes ironic use of the stereotype, she does not simply mock the Parisienne as a potentially retrograde figure: she also pokes fun at it as an Anglophone image, out of step with the true identity of French women. By playing this Americanised figure ironically, Cottin is thus able to cultivate an exportable media image and simultaneously distance herself from it through a subtle nod to her French audience, establishing a peculiar form of complicity lacking in Emily in Paris—whose artificial representations necessarily alienate French viewers. The dual audience targeted by Cottin is also visible in the ad for Chanel, which presents English-speaking viewers with a chic, sassy Parisienne, in line with their expectations, while building complicity with the French audience through precise references—for example, when she says that the boat that she boards after diving spectacularly into the Seine is double parked [garé en double file], an expression generally used for cars that nods to Paris’s infamously chaotic traffic, and whose comic connotation is absent in the English subtitles (‘Hurry! He won’t hang around’). The title sequence of the film Connasse, princesse des cœurs (‘The Parisian Bitch, Princess of Hearts’, Noémie Saglio and Eloïse Lang, 2015), a feature film inspired by the Canal+ series, is another example of this process: presenting the female protagonist driving through the streets of Paris behind the wheel of a Citroën 2CV, wearing a beret and a striped Breton top while smoking a cigarette, the film creates a self-conscious image typical of postfeminism, playing with an internationally recognisable stereotype. However, this image also contains a second level of irony addressed to French viewers, who would understand that Cottin is mocking the inauthentic fantasy of Paris played out by foreign tourists (‘hicks’ in Cottin’s own words) who wear these clothes even though they bear no relation to the reality of French fashion (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Camille Cottin wears a standardised Parisian uniform in Connasse, princesse des cœurs

This second level of irony thus depends on a particular complicity with French audiences, made possible by Cottin’s ‘authentic’ French identity, a position from which she can ridicule ersatz representations of Frenchness: in the title sequence of Connasse, princesse des cœurs, the artificiality of her costume only takes on this peculiar ironic tone because of its juxtaposition with the character’s coarse personality and her rudeness behind the wheel, interpreted by French viewers as legitimate signs of her national identity, which humorously confront US fantasies built around the figure of the Parisienne.

Camille Cottin’s franchouillardise: Between Comic Unruliness and Misogynistic Comedy

As the example of Connasse, princesse des cœurs reveals, the personality traits employed by Cottin to underline her French identity are flaws: while they may initially seem to point to a form of anti-patriotic self-criticism, these flaws in fact allow the actress to announce her franchouillard roots, which serve as a basis for her ironic Frenchness. Derived from the word français along with the pejorative suffix -ard, the adjective franchouillard (as well as its noun form franchouillardise) refers to anything that is ‘typically French and folksy’ and is generally used to ‘gently mock’ the mores of French people.² This makes franchouillardise especially compatible with comedy and allows it to serve as the basis for the franchouillard comedy omnipresent in the history of French comic cinema, which caricatures the quirks and flaws of the French people with a certain tenderness. Cottin’s taking up of franchouillard comedy is hardly a coincidence: it has played a decisive role in French cinema during periods of national identity crisis, encouraging a sense of belonging among viewers by making them laugh at ‘flaws associated with the average French person’ (Duval 2007, 134). Roland Duval cites the example of the post-war comedy La Traversée de Paris/The Crossing of Paris (Claude Autant-Lara, 1956): mocking the pettiness and selfishness of the character Jambier, the film allowed the French to reclaim their national identity through laughter, an identity that had recently been tarnished by collaborators and black market profiteers during the Second World War (Duval 2007, 135). Although Cottin uses franchouillardise in an entirely different cultural context, it seems that she does so according to a similar logic of national identity, to deflect the threat posed by the Americanisation of French culture—a development of which her own career is a symptom. Franchouillardise thereby allows her to reaffirm her true national identity and to destabilise from within the Anglophone representations of Frenchness that have shaped her image.

Franchouillard comedy has traditionally been the domain of male stars in French cinema, and thus bears on the gendered aspect of Cottin’s performance: by adopting this style of comedy to revisit the figure of the Parisienne, the actress transgresses the traditional norms that define this figure and transforms it into an image of female unruliness. The qualities associated with the Parisienne thus become pretexts for Cottin’s deployment of franchouillard comedy: she transforms the prickly character associated with French women into typically French irritability, which appears on screen as a tendency towards anger and bad faith—exemplified by the agent for stars she plays in Dix pour cent, who lashes out at her assistant when reminded of meetings she would rather forget, and emblematically by her Connasse character, who complains (in English) that ‘the cars are not going the right way’ when arriving in London.

There is also a significant physical aspect to these characters’ bad temper. Cottin has in fact made angry outbursts one of the hallmarks of her acting: when her characters are frustrated, her slender body is suddenly transformed by sharp, nervous gestures, the reddening of her skin and screams that amplify and carry her voice. In addition to its physical dimension, Cottin’s comic potential also relies on a specific use of language that has always been a crucial part of the franchouillard cinematic tradition: from Michel Audiard’s dialogue to the verbal duels in the film Brice de Nice (James Huth, 2005), French comic cinema frequently portrays its characters’ ill-tempered nature through quarrelling and witty repartee (Chion 2008, 92). Cottin’s characters excel at this: her cutting rejoinders are largely responsible for earning her the insulting moniker of Connasse in the eponymous series, and the agent Andréa Martel’s caustic comments cause her assistant to quit her job in the very first episode of Dix pour cent.

This verbal comedy is also closely associated with a style of informal language that is a key aspect of the franchouillard tradition, but which is also, more generally, a historical feature of French comic cinema. According to Michel Chion, this pervasiveness of informal language is explained by the lack of a neutral tone in spoken French, which is perceived as formal whenever speech is grammatically correct (Chion 2008, 8): the question ‘comment allez-vous?’ [‘how are you?’], for instance, is usually replaced in conversation by colloquial expressions (‘comment ça va?’). In order to establish a connection with the audience, French comic cinema thus favours everyday language, relying heavily on informal and slang terms—even if that means falling into the linguistic vulgarity typical of the ‘Gallic spirit’, a bawdy, rebellious attitude traditionally attributed to the French. Cottin’s irreverent language includes numerous references to sex and to excretion, which when used by a woman convey boldness and insubordination: while Andréa in Dix pour cent perplexes her colleagues by suggesting that they fill their competitors’ offices ‘de merde’ [‘with shit’], even the usually well-mannered young woman she plays in Telle mère, telle fille/Baby Bump (Noémie Saglio, 2017) rebels against her mother-in-law by shouting profanities (‘Bite! Couille! Sodomie!’[‘Dick! Balls! Buggeration!’]). This use of language allows the actress to reinforce the sexually transgressive quality of most of her characters: whether involving unrestrained sexuality (Dix pour cent, Larguées) or even a tendency towards exhibitionism (Connasse), Cottin subverts the erotic potential traditionally associated with Parisian women, turning this quality into a tool for social destabilisation. The linguistic aspect of this reappropriation is particularly effective, since Cottin interferes with the very language of Frenchness as it is portrayed in the English-speaking world, where spoken French is often presented as a key element in the perceived sensuality of Parisian women. Language is, for instance, particularly eroticised in the video ‘How to Speak French with Camille Rowe’ posted on i-D magazine’s YouTube channel, where the model’s lips appear in close-up while she speaks in French (‘La langue française est sensuelle’ [‘The French language is sensual’]).³ Cottin’s bold use of language turns this dynamic on its head, creating a comic contrast between her delicate, feminine appearance—compatible with the Americanised conception of Frenchness—and her deep voice and franchouillard vocabulary—which undermine it.

The language associated with franchouillard culture is thus a key component of Cottin’s comedy, allowing her to subvert the Americanised figure of the Parisienne attached to her and to strengthen her bond with her French audience. This language has determined most of her roles, but is particularly visible in Connasse, princesse des cœurs because of its distinctive use of spoken French. This feature film, composed entirely of hidden camera shots, extends Cottin’s playing field to the UK, where she is forced to interact with English-speaking characters, swapping her native language for an apparently improvised Franglais. Despite using this hybrid language, her roots in franchouillard verbal humour continue to provide the main drive behind the comedy. First of all, the actress infuses her Franglais with jokes that are unintelligible to English-speaking viewers, since they involve wordplay based on typically vulgar, franchouillard expressions: for example, she transforms the expletive ‘bordel de merde’ [‘fucking shit’] into ‘bordel de shit’, and awkwardly translates the expression ‘avoir un balai dans le cul’ (literally, ‘to have a broom up the arse’) with the phrase ‘you take your balai off your cul’. The humour of these lines of dialogue thus depends on the French audience’s familiarity with franchouillard language, which remains at the heart of Cottin’s comedy even when she is using it in a somewhat different form.

However, the Connasse character’s franchouillard language is actually mixed with English in Connasse, princesse des cœurs; and far from being anecdotal, this blending of languages reveals the instability of the character’s cultural identity, defined by what are presented as native French characteristics yet inspired by the female comic figures who have emerged from US postfeminist culture, therefore echoing a North American phenomenon. This cultural influence even becomes an issue within the story of the film: although the protagonist is an incorrigible Parisian, she moves to London, shows that she can speak English (with skill when she applies herself) and makes numerous references to the Anglophone postfeminist culture she is so familiar with at various points throughout the film (quoting the film Dirty Dancing [Emile Ardolino, 1987], striking a ‘Titanic pose’ [James Cameron, 1997] on board the ferry bringing her across the English Channel, etc.). The Connasse character’s Franglais reflects the tension in her national identity in a way comparable to that observed by Michel Chion in the film Brice de Nice, also famous for its use of Franglais: both deeply influenced by and out of step with the English-speaking world, the hero’s Franglais expresses ‘the internal turmoil of the self-conscious Frenchman’ faced with the Americanisation of his national culture (Chion 2008, 223). A similar internal struggle seems to underlie the Connasse character’s Franglais, though in this case it has a firmer patriotic dimension: it reveals the weight of English-language cultural influences on the character, but also her willingness to resist the erosion of her French identity.

Franchouillardise again plays a decisive role in this assertion of national pride, since beyond the internal identity struggle it reveals, the Connasse character’s Franglais can also be interpreted as reflecting a form of everyday French chauvinism. In a video interview for French online magazine Madmoizelle, Cottin explains that her character’s strong French accent and rough English (transforming the phrase ‘don’t bother me’ into ‘you don’t come pour me déranger’, for example) are used in the film to show that she makes no effort to make herself understood, thus revealing a typically French reluctance to speak foreign languages and reinforcing her national identity.⁴ The Connasse character also relies on the bellicose language of franchouillardise to assert her superiority as a French woman, peppering her Franglais with scathing insults aimed at the English-speaking characters. These characters are thereby unknowingly dragged into verbal duels typical of French comedy films, which give Cottin an unfair advantage as she uses terms they do not understand and cannot respond to: they can only remain silent as she provocatively calls them ‘coincés du cul’ [‘anally retentive’] or ‘celluliteux’ [‘lardasses’]. The insults she directs at male characters also have strong homophobic and misogynistic connotations (‘coquettes’ [‘teases’], ‘pédés’ [‘poofs’]) that aim to belittle them by feminising them: while these insults are paradoxically delivered by a woman, they can only be seen as descending from the franchouillard comedy appropriated by Cottin, a masculine comic tradition relying on a patriarchal use of language. It is important to note that language has traditionally been the most important site of power relations between characters in French cinema: unlike in Hollywood cinema, for example, which uses the gaze as a vehicle for domination (Mulvey 1999 [1975]), French cinema relies on the linguistic arsenal of male characters, who use language to confront one another and above all to dominate female characters, reducing them to silence (Moine 2006, 77–80). Misogynistic insults are therefore a common trait of French comedies and, by extension, of the franchouillard tradition adopted by Cottin without any reconsideration: she employs these sexist insults in the majority of her roles, and in a particularly emblematic way in the film Toute première fois/I Kissed a Girl (Noémie Saglio and Maxime Govare, 2015), where her character calls her rivals ‘pute’ [‘slag’], ‘blondasse’ [‘bottle-blonde’] and ‘catin’ [‘whore’].

The patriarchal legacy of franchouillardise means that the relationship between the performers and the audience is more than one of simple complicity between compatriots: it is also a relationship of male complicity, which tinges Cottin’s performances with a form of misogyny descended from this comic tradition. Faced with the influence of US postfeminism, the franchouillard tradition at the heart of the actress’s comedy thus raises two intersecting issues: national resistance and gender resistance. Franchouillardise allows Cottin to undermine the foreign cultural representations that have influenced her career, asserting her French identity as a means of resisting the threat of Americanisation; simultaneously, however, this aspect of her comedy interferes with the new feminine perspective brought about by imported postfeminism, blunting its subversive quality. Re-evaluating Cottin’s ironic Frenchness in light of this observation, it becomes clear that she not only caricatures the Parisienne as an Americanised ideal, but also as a female figure, whose femininity is presented as an object of ridicule in line with the traditions of franchouillard comedy. The Connasse character is a striking illustration of this dimension of Cottin’s comedy: as her insulting name clearly reveals, she is above all a misogynistic caricature, exaggerating the flaws (vanity, selfishness, venality) associated with femininity by patriarchal culture.

Camille Cottin Abroad: The Disintegration of Her Comic Persona

Although Cottin subverts the Americanised stereotype of the Parisienne with her franchouillardise, her performances convey an inherent misogynistic bias for this very reason. Nonetheless, this franchouillard tradition has become an integral element of her comedy, as proven by the fact that her comic persona systematically vanishes when she appears in foreign productions, where franchouillardise is impossible to express. Her comic power is evacuated from the purely dramatic roles she has recently been offered in Hollywood (Stillwater [Tom McCarthy, 2021], House of Gucci [Ridley Scott, 2021])—despite the fact that her international career was launched by the success of her role in Dix pour cent, whose comic aspect is obvious. The transformation of Cottin’s image outside the realm of French comedy reveals more than just traditional Hollywood typecasting: a similar phenomenon seems to have shaped her role in Mouche (‘Fly’, Canal+, 2019), the adaptation of the British TV series Fleabag (BBC Three/Prime Video, 2016–2019). Even though Mouche is a comedy series produced in France, it has not been a resounding success: critics have pointed out that Cottin struggles to achieve the same comic potency as her English-language counterpart, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (for example, Bordages 2019). Yet the French adaptation follows the original script closely, relying on the same distinctive device: at various points throughout each episode, the protagonist expresses herself by addressing the audience directly, breaking the fourth wall to share mischievous, sarcastic comments about the action. The comedy of the original series relies heavily on this process: it allows the female protagonist to take control of the plot and guide its interpretation—thus asserting a form of comic insubordination with respect to the rules of the diegesis—but also, and above all, it serves to build a strong rapport between the audience and the eponymous heroine, which is at the heart of the series’s comic contract. The complicit position viewers are placed in encourages them to identify and laugh along with Fleabag, taking pleasure in her unruly nature. This complicity is reinforced by the status of the actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge: while she was little known at the time of Fleabag’s release, promotional interviews for the first season focused mainly on her role as the series’s creator and scriptwriter, as well as on the semi-autobiographical aspect of the main character—‘Fleabag’ was the actress’s childhood nickname (Jung 2016). The blurring of the boundaries between actress and character shapes the show’s humour: it transforms the protagonist’s witticisms into authorial trademarks, and at the same time deepens viewers’ feeling of familiarity by giving the character a stamp of authenticity. This invites them to believe that they are hearing Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s own confessions and strengthens their embrace of her comedy. This feeling of complicity and familiarity is missing in Mouche, however: the French adaptation lacks the autobiographical mythology surrounding the original, but as Mimi Kelly and Victoria Souliman point out, the failure of the series is also due to the fact that the audience already know Cottin and perceive her performance as inauthentic, as it does not align with the persona she has developed through her roles in French cinema and television (Kelly and Souliman 2022, 14).

Critics generally agree, however, that Cottin is the ideal actress to take on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s role, especially because of her characters’ snappy wordplay and sexual independence, which echo the main character’s traits:

Who in France, then, had enough presence to take on the role of the endearing loser, capable of shooting glances directly at the camera and delivering cynical monologues, all the while getting laid by male partners throughout each episode? Canal+ and Jeanne Herry had the same thought as you and me: it could only be Camille Cottin. (Olité 2019)

But although Cottin is apparently perfectly suited to the role, Kelly and Souliman (2022, 10) argue that the grotesque, even despicable nature of the Fleabag character conflicts with Cottin’s image as the ideal Parisienne. In the majority of her roles, this figure serves as the basis for the actress’s unruly quality, but also for the heterosexual ideal she represents, making her incompatible with Fleabag’s ‘repulsive’ femininity (Kelly and Souliman 2022, 15). In addition, this ‘repulsive’ femininity derives its comic value from being juxtaposed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s typically British restraint and awkwardness; but this tension vanishes in Cottin’s performance, since her persona is already defined by a form of vulgarity rooted in franchouillard culture, which, as we have seen, extends the sexual aspect of her image as a Parisian without producing this kind of antagonistic effect. At the same time, Cottin’s failure in Mouche is also ascribable to translation issues: director Jeanne Herry chose to remain faithful to the original script and to translate Fleabag’s screenplay rigorously, often to the word, without adjusting it to the distinct linguistic qualities of French comedy—preventing Cottin from using the slang and colloquial language her franchouillard comedy relies on. Whereas Waller-Bridge addresses viewers with the neutral pronoun ‘you’, Cottin uses the formal French ‘vous’, creating distance between her character and the audience. Another difference in register occurs when Cottin’s Mouche uses the vocabulary of sexuality: the word ‘penis’ used by Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag to describe the bodies of her lovers has a similarly neutral connotation in English, but a much more formal one when used by Mouche—as this kind of vocabulary is usually replaced by slang in spoken French (Chion 2008, 188–189). Revealingly, the only occurrence of vulgar language in the series is in one of the rare added lines: feeling bored while at work in a tea room, Mouche tries to amuse her friend and co-worker by offering a customer ‘un petit jus de bite’ [‘a small dick juice’]. While this crude language is perfectly consistent with the verbal comedy that typically defines Cottin’s performances, it clashes with her overall performance in Mouche. This line thus reveals the discrepancy between Mouche’s language and Cottin’s, whose characteristics are undermined by a translation of the screenplay that is too literal and does not allow for the change in register needed to deploy her franchouillard comedy. The translation restricts the actress’s persona, interfering with her ability to inhabit the role: by neglecting the critical work of franchouillardise in Cottin’s image, Mouche ends up creating a conflict between the protagonist and the actress’s persona, hindering any sense of comic collusion spectators might feel with her.

By preventing Cottin from expressing the franchouillard language that forms the basis of her comic identity, Mouche deprives her of the tool she used previously to subvert the figure of the Parisienne and, consequently, brings out the idealised Frenchness that also forms part of her persona—but without any of its usual irony. Instead of her characteristic nervousness, the actress thus delivers a distant, sensual performance, acting out a more fantastical version of the Fleabag character, compatible with the eroticised figure of the Parisienne. The story itself is altered in order to make her character more compatible with male desire: several scenes of heterosexual seduction were added to the French version, which highlight the protagonist’s link to the ideal of the Parisienne through the attention she receives from men (‘T’as du chien, ma colombe!’ [‘You’re full of charm, young maid!’]). The shift to a more normative femininity in the French version is also visible in the reception of each series and the terms used to describe the two main actresses: whereas Phoebe Waller-Bridge is presented as ‘hilarious’ (Géliot 2020), journalists have described Cottin with adjectives such as ‘impertinent’ (Olivier 2019) and ‘biting’ (Martin 2019), compatible with a sexualised image of femininity.

Mouche thus reveals the way Cottin’s image is reconfigured around an Americanised ideal of Frenchness when deprived of her usual franchouillard comedy. This phenomenon goes far beyond the case of Mouche, affecting the entirety of her international career, where the distinctive French characteristics of her comedy are inaccessible to viewers. The characters she plays in Killing Eve (2018–2022) or House of Gucci, for example, are variations on the figure of the Parisienne: although they are not explicitly connected to the city of Paris (or even to France, in the case of House of Gucci), they are invariably chic, sexual, assertive women. The only thing left of Cottin’s comic persona in these roles is a touch of postfeminist irony, which exists independently from the actress’s national identity and is exemplified by the ostensibly standardised entrance of her character Hélène in the series Killing Eve, wearing red high-heeled shoes and large dark glasses (see Fig. 4). Cottin’s franchouillard comedy and her implied rebelliousness, however, are conspicuously absent from these performances.

Fig. 4

Camille Cottin’s flashy ‘Parisian’ chic in Killing Eve (S03/E04)

This brief survey of Cottin’s international appearances reveals the full extent to which she transforms the figure of the Parisienne in her roles in French cinema and television, taking it into comic territory and, above all, endowing it with a franchouillard identity that is an integral part of her comic presence. The actress’s roots in franchouillard culture allow her to assert her true national identity and to subvert the Anglophone figure of the Parisienne by performing it with visible irony, mocking its intrinsic artificiality with the complicity of French spectators. However, since it is grounded in the physical and linguistic traditions of franchouillard comedy, Cottin’s ‘authentically French’ image has ambivalent consequences in terms of gender representations. As a male comic tradition, franchouillard comedy allows Cottin to transgress the norms that determine the fantasy of the Parisienne and to transform her character into a subversive figure, but only by means of inherently misogynist comic devices built up by the long line of franchouillard actors in whose footsteps she follows. Although ideologically charged, this national tradition serves as the foundation of Cottin’s comedy, which collapses when she ventures outside French cinema and its distinct comic heritage: in foreign films and series, the actress’s image is reconfigured to conform to the Americanised image of the Parisienne, as the franchouillard comedy that has allowed her to undermine this figure is non-viable in an international context.

Cottin’s international career thus reveals the fundamental limits of her comic rebelliousness: used to resist the normative influence of postfeminist representations from the English-speaking world, this unruliness allows Cottin to set herself apart from the idealised figure of the Parisienne on the sole condition that she conform to the misogynistic elements of the franchouillard tradition in her French roles, thus weakening the subversive potential of female comedy. Although Cottin is unable to completely transform these traditional representations, the tensions surrounding her comic persona are nonetheless revealing. Caught between a fetishised image of Frenchness and a franchouillard comic tradition that violently mocks it, she exposes the impossible choice women are forced to make in contemporary patriarchal societies: either submitting to alienating norms of femininity or adopting the oppressive norms of masculinity. By appropriating a comic culture from which women were long excluded, the postfeminist scene to which Cottin belongs thus brings to the forefront a disturbing reflection of the female subjective experience, ‘which manages to make one smile at an impossible situation […], while reminding one that there is no way out’ (Melchior-Bonnet 2021, 224).