Whose Lost Bullet? Netflix, Cultural Politics and the Branding of French Action Cinema

Abstract

The recent appearance of French-language action films on Netflix should be seen as an extension of industrial reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, when action cinema—historically neglected in France—found a home at studios like StudioCanal and EuropaCorp. Netflix has expanded that game, producing and acquiring a flurry of Franco-European content while making its ‘stack’ menus host to a new, sliding game of cultural and generic indexing. Using the recent Netflix film Lost Bullet (Pierret, 2020) as a case study, this chapter proposes a schema for thinking through how postnational French popular culture combines North American genre conventions with Franco-European cultural inputs.

As Netflix exerts new dominance in the wake of the pandemic, its iconic ‘stack’ menus continue to make media consumption into a game of sliding referentiality. Armed with the appeals of gunplay, car chases and hand-to-hand combat, action genres seem tailor-made for this environment, beckoning us with sensorial cacophony as our cursors hover over perpetually loading teaser trailers. Recent experience suggests that this cascade of algorithmic browsing culture might also offer unexpected opportunities for more diverse cultural uptake. The international success of recent non-Anglophone series—Korea’s Squid Game (Siren Pictures/Netflix, 2021–), Spain’s La casa de papel/Money Heist (Atresmedia/Netflix, 2017–2021) and France’s Lupin (Gaumont Television/Netflix, 2021–), to name a few—suggests that foreign languages and subtitles are no longer the impediment they once were, perhaps because audiences have become accustomed to navigating captions on so many other forms of online content.

Somewhere at the intersection of these variables, we encounter the focus of this chapter: a handful of French-made, action-based genre films and series that have gained increasing visibility on Netflix streaming queues. While still modest in terms of the total number of products available, Gallic action is an emergent category on Netflix that seems to be growing. Recent French-produced titles on offer from the platform include rather different modalities—from the expressively subjective motorcycle chases in Burn Out (Yann Gozlan, 2017) to the claustrophobic submarine interiors in Le Chant du loup/The Wolf’s Call (Antonin Baudry, 2019). Some titles serve as vehicles for stars of the present—Lupin’s Omar Sy in Loin du périph/The Takedown (Louis Leterrier, 2022) or Franck Gastambide in Sans répit/Restless (Régis Blondeau, 2022). Others serve as callbacks to stars of the past, as with Jean-Claude Van Damme in Le Dernier mercenaire/The Last Mercenary (David Charhon, 2021). Still others rip their dramatic backdrops from actual French headlines, like the true-crime police scandal story depicted in BAC Nord/The Stronghold (Cédric Jimenez, 2020), or invest in the ever-fertile imagination of the banlieue genre, such as Banlieusards/Street Flow (Kery James and Leïla Sy, 2019). The nascent space for French action genres on Netflix has also begun to spur repeat collaborations, as it did between director Julien Leclercq and star Sami Bouajila, whose pre-Netflix success on Braqueurs/The Crew (2015) begat the similar tonalities of two recent entries—a feature called La Terre et le sang/Earth and Blood (Julien Leclercq, 2020) and, more recently, the series Braqueurs/Gangland (Hamid Hlioua and Julien Leclercq, 2022), an expanded streaming version of their first film. Likely the most prolific creator of French action via Netflix, Leclercq has also begun to build a modest online following among action aficionados, who recognise his spartan style even in more marginal outings such as Sentinelle (‘The Sentinelle’, 2021) from which Bouajila is absent (see Appendix).

Though the financial clout of this recent list of titles is difficult to gauge, such audiovisual narratives present questions about how Franco-European sensibilities might fit into a new cultural calculus dominated by streaming subscriptions. Self-reporting from Netflix remains the primary source for quantitative figures, and that methodology has shifted within the last two years alone.¹ Yet while the fortunes of these titles remain somewhat mysterious, several of them have garnered headlines in the trade press for their ‘surprising’ success on the platform, ranking in the top 20 for their category during the first several weeks of their release. Meanwhile, we should also mention that Lupin, the Netflix-produced adaptation of Arsène Lupin featuring Intouchables/Untouchable (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) star Omar Sy, also includes a significant number of action-based scenes, though not in every episode—a fact that reminds us of action’s abiding malleability as a mode rather than a stable or codified genre of screen practice (Holmlund et al. 2023).

Collectively, the rise of French action genres on Netflix refreshes the cultural and theoretical stakes of ‘postnational’ media production. Like most popular media practices from France, their success stories remain somewhat at odds with the reputation of a national cinema still far more known abroad for arthouse and festival fare than genre-based productions. Do the aggregate features here—non-English dialogue, less familiar cast members, ‘European’ backdrops, fleeting cultural references—qualify these titles as legitimate cultural products from France? What type of methodology might we use to illuminate the significant and ongoing role of French-made action in a global landscape increasingly mediated by search terms rather than cultural specificity? Put more succinctly, what do we do with these French action films on Netflix?

This chapter outlines some relevant contexts for beginning to search for answers to these questions. It does so by evaluating some of the thematic and aesthetic parameters of Balle perdue/Lost Bullet (Guillaume Pierret, 2020), which seems to offer an early prototype for the sorts of stylistic and cultural interventions that French-language filmmakers can make in the Netflix era. As of October 2021, Balle perdue was the ninth most-watched non-English Netflix Original title, with 37 million views (Moore 2021), and its sequel quickly became the best Thursday international launch in the history of the platform when it was released in November 2022 (Durand 2022). Although at first glance it may read as a ‘Frenchified’ version of the Fast and Furious franchise, Balle perdue’s compact construction, unassuming generic bearing and sardonic flair for localised detail typify the attitude we see in a growing recent line of action vehicles issuing from the contemporary French media ecosystem. As we will see, textual analysis can also reveal how recent films and filmmakers have come to internalise the risks and rewards of these new cultural logics, turning the potential loss of cultural specificity into a wellspring for creative expression.

Netflix and the French Action Complex

Netflix presents a precarious cultural opportunity cost to French creative personnel. As several other contributions to this collection document more extensively, the recent chance to lock horns with a new, unpredictable form of North American hegemony involves a rather delicate balancing of priorities. On the one hand, the global distribution provided by Netflix (and potentially by its (S)VoD competition) offers enhanced visibility to non-English creative talent rarely seen in decades prior, when international distribution was more a question of territorial bottlenecks and the de facto state control exerted by transnational US corporations. On the other hand, as Christopher Meir warns, the sorts of contracts currently doled out for most European producers working with North American (S)VoD platforms belie a familiar, age-old dynamic, since the former has ‘no additional revenues that can be extracted from this popularity’ (Meir 2021, 23). As in the past, the establishment of a continental-based entity—in this case a European (S)VoD giant—may be the best long-term strategy to combat inequity. Unfortunately, European companies seem reluctant and/or unable to abandon their previous funding model, based in the far less agile realm of linear pay-television funding and its more predictable funding ‘windows’ (Meir 2021, 19).

It is here that we encounter our primary exemplar for the present study: Balle perdue, a commissioned, feature-length action film that in many ways internalises this cultural inflection point via its clever play with generic conventions and an awareness of its own cultural branding dynamics. Since there are numerous properties featuring the characteristic red ‘N’ logo on the upper left corner of their menu cards, that affixed letter does little to identify their production status or national affiliations, which become visible only after an initial viewing of the credentials hyperlinked to the menu. This blurring of categories is integral to how Netflix treats the ‘postnationality’ of its products. On the surface, of course, their presentation is rather unvexed on the menu stacks themselves, presenting all ‘Netflix Originals’ as similar artefacts to the eyes of the consumer. As Meir’s chapter in this volume and a more extensive study by Amanda D. Lotz (2022) both point out, the proprietary branding of international products by Netflix blurs distinctions on several grounds. First, the labelling does not clarify the programme’s production status itself—lumping international acquisitions into one category despite the important distinctions between licensed content (that which graced national screens in years prior to its stacking on the menu) and commissioned content (where Netflix participates with local production companies to create new material) (Lotz 2022, 19–21). Here action genres serve as an instructive example, as they are placed on stack menus alongside other products in a manner that does not necessarily discriminate between the categories we might be accustomed to browsing. Films and series are called up to the screen, side by side, as are products from vastly different national ‘containers’ or made by different directors or companies. All these search terms are possible—but not required—unless so instructed by the desires of a given subscriber.

Consider, for instance, the results of a query from typing the word ‘action’ on the menu search bar (see Fig. 1, taken from my personal Netflix account).

Fig. 1

Netflix search results for ‘action’, circa August 2022

We can observe here the cohabitation of rather different films. Hollywood is well represented, of course, with blockbuster franchises like Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002) or Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012), prestige ‘social problem’ thrillers like Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006) or The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008), and vaguely xenophobic titles like Beirut (Brad Anderson, 2018) or Siberia (Matthew Ross, 2018). Mixed into the menu of apparent possibility, we also find a handful of more conspicuously ‘othered’ cultural entries—Wira (Adrian Teh, 2019) from Malaysia, Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (Nyeon Ha, 2022) from South Korea, Rurouni Kenshin (Kyeshi Otomo, 2021) from Japan or RRR (S. S. Rajamouli, 2022) from India. Note that all of these options retain, even on the surface, a modicum of distinction from the universalised branding of North American franchises or series: culturally specific dress, titles that bespeak non-Western origins, strategically placed ‘diverse’ cast members and most often some combination of these elements. However, nestled somewhere in the middle of the page, inconspicuous at first glance, sits Balle perdue. The film appears strangely inscrutable, at least on an initial glance. There are scant indications of its national origins unless Stéfi Celma is familiar—here wearing cornrows, brandishing a firearm and almost unrecognisable from her breakout role as Sofia in Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! (France Télévisions/Netflix, 2015–2020). Hovering over the image, perhaps, one might recognise the French surnames of its cast and crew, but it is only by pausing on the teaser—and thereby hearing the French-language voiceover—that any demonstrably ‘foreign’ element emerges. Moreover, the French title for the film (in this case a quite literal translation of its English title) does not appear in the teaser trailer and is nowhere to be found on the title card. Whatever their industrial logic, products like this also present questions for cultural critics. How do we begin to consider the ambivalent address of Balle perdue, beyond its cohabitation of a menu with so many different products? Several factors for how to first address the apparent ‘postnationality’ of the film leap immediately to mind—at least in a historically informed approach to the cultural place of the action genre as it currently germinates and circulates inside (and outside) France.

First, it is crucial to relate the appearance of Netflix action films made in France to a slightly longer recent history. Given their modest number, it would be reasonable to wonder whether French action on Netflix has enough precedent to even be worthy of study. However, the features are strikingly similar to what we can safely call a contemporary tradition of French-made action films that are a more or less direct result of 1990s reforms to the French audiovisual sector, when Minister of Culture Jack Lang responded to increased Hollywood competition by making cable television into the new backbone of film finance (Buchsbaum 2017; Michael 2019). One of the long-term outcomes of this strategy was to revivify popular filmmaking, meaning that genres historically neglected in France could find new footing. And for action genres, this took place primarily at StudioCanal and EuropaCorp, two studios often credited with an upswell in French genre filmmaking over the past two decades more generally.

Second, as I have argued at more length elsewhere (Michael 2019, 142–178; Michael 2020, 2023), we should acknowledge that such ‘globally’ influenced films from France are usually not the homogenised products that critics allege. This is particularly true of action cinema, which has rarely if ever been ‘national’ in a codified way like the ‘heritage films’ (films de patrimoine) that dominated many previous discussions of how European film industries marked and marketed continental culture for international audiences. A cursory glance at the landscape often leads critics to dismiss French-made action as pale Hollywood imitation. In a welcome exception to this rule, action scholar Lisa Purse argues for a critical process that should be less a matter of finding a new label than of conducting fine-grained research into how an ‘internationalising formula’ emerged out of the competing cultural and political-economic interests of French stakeholders during a period of transition in the 1990s and 2000s (Purse 2011, 175). The role of film historians (as opposed to critics) should be to specify how individual films engage with the plural modes of an action tradition that itself had already been internationalised prior to any French intervention. For instance, when we are considering films that take part in a tradition that as a rule already depicts ‘place-ness’ without concern for cultural specificity, theorising a ‘postnational’ mode has less explanatory power. These films vary greatly according to the production contexts and aesthetic goals of their creators.

Balle perdue, it would seem, offers a few possible answers to the question of what sorts of stories and kinds of styles these forms might take when they reside on Netflix. As a creative collaboration between first-time director Guillaume Pierret and stuntman-turned-star Alban Lenoir, Balle perdue offers a low-budget rejoinder to the CGI action films that surround it on streaming queues. Instead, the film is built around a string of effects-free set pieces while also deploying a cunning sense of self-deprecating humour about its own enterprise. In so doing, the film trades on its own unassuming position amid big-budget superhero films and more distinctively ‘cultural’ Asian action genres. Offering what first looks to be a stripped-down, French-language variant on the Fast and Furious franchise (Universal Pictures, 2001–2023), Balle perdue features an ambivalent mix of North American genre conventions and Franco-European cultural inputs.

In some ways, the production history of the film illuminates the details of the landscape described by Meir in his analysis of how (S)VoD platforms have recently inflected a European corporate landscape still acclimating to the strategic creative realities of the ‘platform era’ (Meir 2021, 5). Concisely filmed in 38 days, the film is the feature-length debut of Pierret, a self-proclaimed ‘total autodidact’ (Anon 2022) who, along with co-producer, writing partner and long-time pal Rémi Leautier, spent the 2000s learning to film with a Mini-DV video camera, editing his footage with laptop software, avoiding storyboards and sharing his work on a burgeoning cluster of French online forums for aspiring videographers. Most notable among these, for Pierret at least, was the website Repaire (Repaire.net), where he could share his work and receive feedback from other amateur video-makers. In conjunction with fan forums like Films de Culte (Filmsdeculte.com), such resources offered a generation of millennial artists a chance to workshop and discuss their favourite mainstream genre fetishes and offbeat curiosities, circulating their work outside the more established and ‘legitimate’ enclaves of print publications and their affiliated websites.

Pierret’s experience also illustrates the reality of a French production ecosystem in the 2000s that was effectively becoming transnational primarily via the efforts of two studios: EuropaCorp and StudioCanal. Like many of their counterparts, Pierret and Leautier had only modest success in an industry dominated by the ambitions of a select few. In interviews, Pierret describes a landscape of 2000s French production that was largely bereft of opportunity for those aspiring to make action films—or really genre films of any type. No surprise that when the duo did eventually succeed in mounting a modestly distributed short action film—Matriarche (2012)—their main thought initially was that they ‘should mail it to Besson’ (Engle 2020).² His mention of Besson, of course, is not an accident, as the erstwhile director of 1980s classics like Subway (1985), Le Grand bleu/The Big Blue (1988) and Nikita (1990) whose notoriety and influence helped create a ‘go-it-alone’ production company, EuropaCorp, which, following the European success of Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998), became a major outlet for genre filmmaking in France, boldly co-producing a string of unapologetic, international-facing action films in English throughout the following two decades. The financial success of EuropaCorp films like Kiss of the Dragon (Chris Nahon, 2001), The Transporter (Louis Leterrier, 2002), Danny the Dog/Unleashed (Louis Leterrier, 2005), Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014) helped establish Besson as a visible mogul of popular genre cinema in France, a status he used to curry favour with the film establishment during the 2010s in support of constructing the Cité du Cinéma—a state-of-the-art studio outside Paris—intended to house ambitious blockbuster-level films. Besson’s approach did offer an apprentice-style system, giving numerous young directors like Pierre Morel, Louis Leterrier and Olivier Megaton a springboard for successful careers in France and Hollywood. Clearly, though, EuropaCorp’s success soon also made its walls seem insurmountable to directors like Pierret, who expresses his bitterness about his creative prospects in the Hexagon.

By the 2010s, Pierret claims, the conventional wisdom in France was that there were three primary obstacles for aspiring action directors: ‘action is expensive, it doesn’t make money, and EuropaCorp has a monopoly over the genre’ (cinedirectors.net). Having marketed their concept to French producers since 2015, frequently only to have the funding collapse at the last minute, Leautier and Pierret were on the verge of giving up when they succeeded in securing a meeting with Sara May, Director of Acquisitions and Co-productions for Netflix in France, in 2018. It is not surprising that Pierret speaks glowingly of that experience, claiming that he was given near complete creative control and that all of his conversations with May revolved around the technical logistics of mounting an action spectacular (Engle 2020). Granted these comments to the press should be taken with a grain of salt given that the success of the film meant that Pierret was likely already in negotiations to direct its sequel (Balle perdue 2/Lost Bullet 2: Back for More premiered in November 2022). And yet, the narrative spun by Pierret also tracks with a much longer history of French talent working with US production companies, as he mobilises what I have called a discourse of professionalism that effaces overt concerns with national particularity for the sake of ‘just making a film’ (see Michael 2019, 70–79). In the case of the action genre, contemporary French fans and directors often bristle at questions of cultural legitimacy, instead evincing a cosmopolitan sensibility by proclaiming their relative lack of concern about anything other than action itself—what Pierret calls a ‘guilt-free’ action cinema (cinéma d’action décomplexée). The implication here is to embrace what Pierret elsewhere calls his like-minded producers’ ‘radical’ push to make genre films with less regard for cultural value—in this case, the action scenes of spectacular, technical accomplishment rarely seen (or attempted) in French production prior to Besson. For sociologist Sylvie Octobre, a similar discourse can be discerned in interviews with younger consumers in France, who evince a similarly ‘omnivorous’ sensibility of what they call ‘aesthetico-cosmopolitanism’, wherein a sense of ‘good taste’ derives from an embrace of North American culture that rejects previous hierarchies of legitimacy brought to cinematic expression (Octobre 2020). Of course, this sensibility parallels the rebellious stance of the New Wave generation of the 1960s in some ways, but Octobre is careful to delineate how the present moment is distinct from days past, when foreign cultural forms rarely circulated so easily beyond Cinéclubs and the Cinémathèque française.

As we also know, directors and their films can sometimes tell very different stories about the weft of their subject matter. To wit, I would argue that the film itself also participates rather cleverly in a form of running meta-commentary about what it means to produce a Frenchified version of US genre tropes and adopt the commercialised production methods associated with these. Renault, after all, participated in the funding of the film—a factor in its product placement that Pierret, despite his zest for de-hierarchising elite French cultural practices, remains tight-lipped about in interviews, but which became quite clear on Twitter feeds around the time of the film’s UK release. Crass commercialism notwithstanding, the film does make the Renault part and parcel of its stylistic approach and narrative drive, as the car encapsulates both the hero’s journey and, I would argue, a larger thematic statement about the postnational.

Action Cinema and Cultural Translation

Numerous media scholars have written lately about the effect of Netflix and other streaming platforms on the phenomenon of branding as a cultural process of negotiation. Timothy Havens (2018), for one, argues that what separates the streaming giant from its competition is its ability to capitalise on what he calls translational branding. In many cases, this involves the use of paratexts that explain or bring out different elements of a product to help it speak to audiences in other parts of the world. Havens uses the example of marketing the Netflix Original series House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–2018) in India via a separate series of advertisements in which two well-known Indian actors play a father–son duo. The son explains the Netflix series to his father, who fantasises about using the diabolical methods of Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in his own workplace (Havens 2018, 328–329). Havens explains that what makes this type of branding new is that it works both to indigenise the individual show (House of Cards) for Indian audiences and to promote the parent brand (Netflix) more generally.

Questions remain about how this process of translation might work between two media ecosystems conventionally considered to be closer culturally than India and the UK. As it turns out, here, too, the ‘guilt-free’ features of Balle perdue become a way to help the film straddle multiple cultural contexts. It is clear that certain paratexts for the film function in the case of Balle perdue to market it as a Franco-European take on American genre tropes. Although he was uninvolved in the production of the trailer for the film that Netflix made for international audiences, Pierret acknowledges that it fosters a clear connection with The Fast and the Furious precisely in its emphasis on the more extreme moments of action absurdity in the film (Engle 2020). However, what is perhaps most interesting in this case is how a certain awareness of action film branding becomes central to the humour of the film and its narrative intrigue.

From the first instant, Balle perdue overtly equates the car and its mechanical attributes with its thematic sensibility as a French-made action film. In the initial shot during the credit sequence, the viewfinder tracks from right to left, scanning a sparsely lit garage housing what appear to be assorted car frames and parts, then comes initially to rest on Lino (Alban Lenoir), bent over and soldering new parts onto the engine of one of the scrap vehicles. With his work centred in the frame, we also note the author’s name at the bottom right of the shot, here giving Pierret a writing credit (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Balle perdue’s Lino (Alban Lenoir) at work on Pierret’s action vehicle

As the opening sequence of the film continues, it plunges us into a highly improbable (and logistically impractical) burglary scene. Lino and his apparent sidekick, Quentin (Rod Paradot), nervously prepare the souped-up vehicle for a robbery attempt where it will be used as a battering ram to break into a jewellery store. Lino revs the vehicle, rejecting pleas for sanity from Quentin—‘Your car won’t hold!’ He then sends the car barrelling down the sort of narrow, typically European urban alleyway it looks designed for navigating, bursting through a shop window, then losing control and ploughing through several interior walls before landing—in a cascade of glass and cement—on an adjoining block. As sirens approach, our impetuous driver-hero is then trapped by possibly the worst-timed seatbelt malfunction ever. Quentin retreats on foot and Lino resigns himself to certain capture.

The self-effacing humour of this scene offers a first entry point for reading this film in a postnational light. The unexpected scale of Lino’s engineering success (blowing through multiple walls) leads to unpredictable failure on an exasperatingly small scale (a malfunctioning seatbelt). Lino is thus hamstrung not by his lack of ambition but by the utterly conventional (and frustratingly automatic) limitation imposed by prior conceptions of vehicle safety, which here seem absurd in the context of what has just transpired. Notably, even the title of the film contains a double meaning lost in its English translation. Whereas the title Lost Bullet suggests primarily a detective hermeneutic—something lost must now be found—the French version Balle perdue contains at least one other strong connotation, akin to what Anglophones would instead term a stray bullet. In this sense, then, the suggestion might be the threat of unintended consequences. As Lino navigates the opening sequence in his ridiculously under-equipped European hatchback, it is easy to imagine Pierret—like callow sidekick Quentin—having doubts about the viability of his little action vehicle, perhaps destined for algorithmic anonymity despite an ambitious design.

Moreover, Lino’s choice of transportation might also be seen as an ironic reference to an entire history of transatlantic, auto-vehicular differentiation. Narratively, it has a role in the intrigue; our hero is a savant mechanic known for maximising this type of vehicle against all odds by retrofitting it with used parts. Minutes of screen time after his imprisonment, Lino is sprung by the leader of a ‘Go Fast’ crew headed by detective Charas, played by the Franco-Algerian actor Ramzy Bedia, primarily known for his buffoonish comedy partnership with Eric Judor on M6 (Les Mots d’Eric et Ramzy, 1997), but also for their remarkably uninhibited action film spoof, La Tour Montparnasse infernale/Don’t Die Too Hard! (Charles Nemes, 2001), and a cameo role in Dix pour cent. Charas, we quickly learn, leads a crew of undercover narcotics agents trying to stake out illegal drug trade across the border. The drugs, it seems, are transported rather quickly through the French provinces by, well, cars that go fast, and he can use a mechanic-savant like Lino to help him catch the criminals by retrofitting a fleet of Renault hatchbacks for the cause. It is during his recruitment pitch that Charas also shows Lino his ruby red Renault 21: the vehicle that will come to figure most prominently in the intrigue to come.

Pierret and Lenoir are on familiar ground here, of course, as there has been something of a recent mini-cycle of ‘Go Fast’ films borne on the cultural imaginary around the drug-running trade. These include at least two EuropaCorp productions, Le Convoi/Fast Convoy (Frédéric Schoendoerffer, 2016) and Go Fast (Olivier Van Hoofstadt, 2008). None of the generic turns in Balle perdue are particularly surprising on these terms. Unbeknown to Charas, some of his own agents cannot resist the lure of double dealing, led by Areski (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and Marco (Sébastien Lalanne). When their boss discovers their corruption, Areski shoots him in cold blood in the front seat of that same red Renault, and after removing his body, they torch the car and stow it in an out-of-the-way vacant lot—overlooking, of course, the bullet from Areski’s gun that still lies embedded inside. Given his recent prison sentence, Lino then becomes their perfect candidate to frame for the crime. Some thirty minutes into the film’s runtime, we are set up for his epic action comeback.

We might be tempted to write off Pierret’s choice of the Renault if it were dropped in later scenes. To the contrary, the film develops the role of cars throughout, bringing the metaphorical association between cinematic and action vehicles full circle. As Areski and Marco attempt to turn the authorities against Lino, he realises the importance of finding the lost/stray bullet, breaking out of prison and frantically searching for the 21, enlisting the intermittent help of others he manages to convince of the truth: his partner Quentin and his ex-girlfriend Julia, the lone member of the ‘Go Fast’ team who suspects the truth about Charas’s death. Given this thoroughgoing use of car branding throughout the film, it cannot be a mistake that the climactic scene, a standoff between Lino’s revamped red Renault (equipped with a Mad Max: Fury Road-esque bulldozer contraption on its hood), takes on the corrupt establishment, with the image track careful to display a competing brand logo on its bumper: Ford.

Pierret has been candid in interviews about his choice of the Renault 21, a vehicle iconic for its ordinariness, one that he deemed at once ‘typically French’ and redolent of a certain ‘military history’ somehow appropriate for his film and unexpectedly popular with the car aficionados he encountered online (Engle 2020). And yet from this simple reference point we might derive any number of a veritable network of possible connections—local, global or otherwise. It is certainly unlikely that international audiences register the details of the venerable French car manufacturer, or know of its iconic rebranding of the 21 as the Clio. It is perhaps even more doubtful that, despite the admirable efforts of cultural historian Kristin Ross in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1996), audiences know how essential American cars have been to French cinema’s much longer conception of modern cool—think Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961) or Un homme et une femme/A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966). At the very least, however, any Netflix viewer grasps that Lino’s ride is strikingly quotidian and unremarkable compared to those of any James Bond or even the vehicles in other contemporary French action films. Franco-European audiences might note, by way of further comparison, Lino’s plausible connection to EuropaCorp’s Taxi franchise, which established the firm’s domestic success on the appeal of a taxi driver retrofitting his vehicle into an overperforming sports car. Clearly, in Balle perdue, vehicular craftsmanship and cinematic creation are co-associated in a far more systematic and self-conscious way than is typical, gesturing to the structuring risks—and unpredictable rewards—of Lino’s predicament and, of course, of making action cinema in the ‘platform era’ of contemporary French media.

Towards a Postnational Typology

Entertaining and fast-paced, Pierret’s film presents us with an example of how a future Franco-European cinema might look when forms of culturally diverse cultural uptake are taken for granted as an a priori part of how streaming culture circulates. And yet, one of the more salient and endearing features of recent French action films is also that they are rarely able to dispense with the observable vestiges of their specific cultural identity. Given the multiple potential features that can ensue from this combination, it might be useful to plot the approach of a film like Balle perdue on a broad, genre-specific typology for how to think about the ‘Frenchness’ of contemporary action genres in the context of increased global circulation.

In a prescient 2004 analysis of globalised Hong Kong action cinema that anticipates features discussed here, Meaghan Morris draws on Deleuze and Guattari to specify how contemporary action filmmaking so often exists on a continuum between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ forms of circulation. For Morris, the major form is typically driven by global stars, big budgets and special effects, keyed towards mainstream audiences and multiplatform distribution, while the minor one draws on lesser-known athlete-performers, a cost-cutting aesthetic, niche audiences and localised circulation (Morris 2004, 190). Key among the aesthetic distinctions she draws are the city spaces of action scenes, which in both cases serve as functional backdrops, but can be distinguished in terms of class context and the mobility of the characters. Here Morris evokes terms proposed by spatial theorist Marc Augé, claiming that the major tradition gravitates towards globalised ‘non-places’ of the privileged modern city (hotels, resorts, airports, commercial centres), while its minor counterpart relegates its staged fights to more working-class ‘any-place-whatevers’ (buses, trains, factories, wharfs). These designations are not mutually exclusive, but rather evocative of a multifaceted generic tradition that moves freely between forms. Whence the explanation for the emergence of performers like Jean-Claude Van Damme, among so many others, whose rapid ascent from ‘minor’ to ‘major’ star tracks with the pre-internet circulation of films like Bloodsport (Newt Arnold, 1988) on DVD and VHS. While Morris could not quite have foreseen how the minor form would circulate in an era of YouTube and viral content creation, her framework helps to describe how transnational action directors can knowingly borrow from different traditions within the genre, priming their products for different types of uptake on multiple platforms. Moreover, the model can also be extended and expanded to describe the parameters of a localised creative palette. This is particularly true in a codified cultural sphere like the French media industries, where talents like Pierret and Lenoir use their knowledge of the genre’s mixed global and national address to position themselves within it in clever ways.

In this context, Balle perdue becomes a fascinating found object, figuring somewhere on the continuum of global action’s perpetual potential for identifiable cultural reference points in a generic context usually unconcerned with elevating them. While they are without ready access to the digitally enhanced, star-driven, ensemble casts of the James Bond or Mission: Impossible franchises, French-based directors can still benefit from a generation of athletic performers based in France, riding in the wake of Besson’s EuropaCorp efforts—Lenoir got a first career break as a stuntman in Taken. The film combines the genre’s tried-and-true formulae of constructive editing with the technical resources of the Cité du Cinéma and an expanding group of independently run post-production outfits based in Paris (for instance, Le Labo and StudioB). Moreover, its accumulation of ambivalently ‘local’ features—the actors’ spoken language; their plucky Renault hatchback; its subsequent breakneck journey down identifiably Gallic (or at least European) city blocks; its temporary disappearance into a countryside dotted with nondescript rural warehouses—form a fungible ‘place-ness’ more typical of action screens generally. Here the film embraces elements of the minor mode, eschewing by economic necessity the CGI world-building exercises of an unapologetically major entrant like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson, 2017), embracing instead the pulpy intrigue more redolent of ‘minor’ tendency entries like Taken, albeit in French and on the more budget-conscious end of the spectrum than Liam Neeson’s career-altering cameo with Besson. Moreover, while variations on the ‘major/minor’ axis have been most visible in English-language productions from EuropaCorp over the past two decades, the French action complex has also experimented, albeit more rarely, with another stylistic option: the ‘alt-global’ tendency, which attempts to mount French-language versions of the ‘major’ mode, but in a culturally distinct lexicon. Among intermittent attempts in this vein through the years, the best remembered exemplar remains StudioCanal’s now cult-classic horror-heritage-martial arts blockbuster Le Pacte des loups/Brotherhood of the Wolf (Christophe Gans, 2001), which mounted a genuine effort to establish a visibly Franco-European cultural spin on the ‘major’ mode.

Meanwhile, it would also be a mistake to throw Balle perdue into the same category with more ardently localised fare that has also appeared lately. Another recent Netflix title, BAC Nord, proves a case in point. That film, trading on the local news story of a highly publicised police corruption case, stars Gilles Lellouche, François Civil and other recognisable faces (at least to French audiences), staging its action against a backdrop of ‘non-places’ that are (at least theoretically) actual geographical locations in the northern suburbs of Marseille. It is also worth noting that BAC Nord also took a different route to Netflix, first gaining funding and distribution access within its home country, then playing at European festivals and on French screens for a full run before being acquired (as opposed to commissioned) by Netflix for its ‘Original’ label. Culled from a more culturally reputable pole of filmmaking in the Hexagon, it also gathered legitimacy in other ways for the film establishment, garnering multiple César nominations for its gritty depiction of street violence (despite a concurrent controversy about its apparent endorsement of police brutality). At the time of writing, other recent French-language releases like Athena (Romain Gavras, 2022) have just begun to populate Netflix offerings, embracing a similarly chaotic banlieue imaginary and presenting a rather dystopian vision of urban, Franco-European life that both deals in fictitious hyperbole and seems to aspire towards a more authentic form of cultural commentary suggesting a place for them on the ‘minor’ axis of the generic spectrum. While there is not sufficient space to pursue all the cultural and political ramifications of these types of ‘neo-local’ depictions here, it seems clear that their variations on banlieue action can and should be schematically separated from Pierret’s emerging franchise, which may deal in similar landscapes and action choreography set pieces, yet does not seek (nor achieve) such cultural cachet, investing in a more unpretentious rendition of the minor action modality.³

Distinguishing titles like these might, then, suggest that another dimension be added to the major/minor dyad provided by Morris (2004) to explicate the varying ways in which cultural specificities do (and do not) intercede in conventions. Indeed, the sheer diversity of possible approaches helps to concretise an emerging schema for contemporary French action directors conceptualising their films according to cultural logics that play rather differently than any drop-down thumbnail sketch can render visible (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Postnational action cinema—a semiotic typology

In this vein, it might also be appropriate to plot other examples of action genre production on this chart. The first episode of Lupin, for instance, could figure somewhere on the ‘alt-global’ and ‘neo-local’ axes, drawing as it does on perhaps the most bankable global French star (Omar Sy’s journey from Intouchables to Marvel is well known) as well as a backdrop of overtly globalised tourist landmarks (a heist at the Louvre and its pyramid), and a centuries-old, more locally resonant cultural reference point (Arsène Lupin), as if to offer an ardently French version of ‘quality’ products offered by US streaming platforms (cf. Pettersen’s chapter in this collection). As with any semiotic approach, the placement of any chosen title here is less crucial than the conceptual exercise of querying the apparent options, weighing how various features resonate in a shifting cultural landscape redolent with multiple perspectives.

The bundle of issues covered in this chapter may well raise more questions than it answers. As Netflix commissions more action films like Balle perdue rather than simply acquiring them from French distributors, it seems likely that others will pursue a similarly hierarchy-free form of cultural address to the one sought by Pierret in his debut feature. Rather than a morass of differently pitched US ‘clones’, what appears instead here is an emerging menu of possible options, one that interfaces in interesting ways with the increasing intervention of Netflix and other streaming platforms in transnational genre production. The table in Fig. 3 might also offer some conceptual clarity on how film practitioners work within the emerging parameters of a marketplace where national identity increasingly mingles with numerous other sliding forms of referentiality on demand.

The anecdote about the Netflix menu from earlier in this account offers some important reminders about legibility in different contexts. It remains an important question whether or not key geo-cultural distinctions ever even emerge for many international viewers watching monolingual products amid the cascade of other streaming content. As we have seen, however, Pierret and his Balle perdue crew also seem aware of their film’s socio-cultural status in the current state of play in the streaming industry, suggesting a not-so-subtle link between their French underdog hero, his deft mechanical labour and a larger meta-textual quest to render both of these things visible amid the shifting games of citational plurality that characterise global popular media at large. For some, working in an omnivorous manner between traditions becomes a way to market authorial credibility to the press. Pierret, for his part, frequently cites titles like The Shield (Fox Television Studios, 2002–2008) and Jack Reacher (Christopher McQuarrie, 2012) as influences for his films (Engle 2020). And yet his reverence for prior North American franchises also marks an attitude as characteristically French as it is ‘global’—carrying with it a long legacy of cinephilia for Anglophone products, but also a certain militancy against the cultural and economic inertia of a smaller, risk-averse national industry. In this light, the broad thematic resonance of Balle perdue’s climactic confrontation—between Lino’s back-from-the-dead Renault 21 and a highway blockade of corrupt French cops brandishing US-made police cruisers—should not be lost on audiences from any shore where ‘beating Hollywood at its own game’ remains a persistent temptation. With a third instalment in the series reportedly on tap for 2024, it’s hard not to root for Lino’s scrappy vehicle to continue holding its own—boldly advancing French stakes into an internationalised genre without undue fear, as it were, of what might be lost.

Appendix: Action-Oriented French-Language Netflix Originals (March 2023)

Films

• Athena (Romain Gavras, 2022)

• BAC Nord/The Stronghold (Cédric Jimenez, 2020)

• Balle perdue/Lost Bullet (Guillaume Pierret, 2020)

• Balle perdue 2/Lost Bullet 2 (Guillaume Pierret, 2022)

• Banlieusards/Street Flow (Kery James and Leïla Sy, 2019)

• Braqueurs/The Crew (Julien Leclercq, 2015)

• Bronx/Rogue City (Olivier Marchal, 2020)

• Burn Out (Yann Gozlan, 2017)

• Le Chant du loup/The Wolf’s Call (Antonin Baudry, 2019)

• Le Dernier mercenaire/The Last Mercenary (David Charhon, 2021)

• Frères ennemis/Close Enemies (David Oelhoeffen, 2018)

• Loin du périph/The Takedown (Louis Leterrier, 2022)

• Le Monde est à toi/The World is Yours (Romain Gavras, 2018)

• Paradise Beach (Xavier Durringer, 2019)

• Sans répit/Restless (Régis Blondeau, 2022)

• Sentinelle (‘The Sentinel’) (Julien Leclercq 2021)

• La Terre et le sang/Earth and Blood (Julien Leclercq, 2020)

Series

• Braqueurs/Ganglands (Hamid Hlioua and Julien Leclercq, 2021)

• Lupin (George Kay, 2021)