Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is out now and the critics agree: it is very, very French.
While Sandfall Interactive’s RPG has been praised for its inventive storytelling and stylish visuals, its country of origin has also become a point of fascination for players. Clair Obscur is proudly French, packed with visual references to the country’s rich art history. If your playthrough has you eager to learn more about other media that paints a portrait of the culture, allow me to welcome you to the world of French cinema. There, you’ll find a storied history of eccentric, rule-breaking films that can be tender, unpredictable, and human. If you love the way Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 reimagines the RPG genre in a fresh way, you may be able to appreciate how French filmmakers have done the same with movies for over a decade.
For the sake of comedy, I’ve put together a list of 33 obscure French films that you can dig into alongside your playthrough. Are these films actually obscure? Okay, look: The cinephiles among you are going to scoff at how basic some of these picks are, but if you’re more of a gamer, most of these films will probably be entirely foreign to you. Still, I’ve tried to work around some of the obvious picks like Breathless and The 400 Blows in favor of more experimental or less appreciated work by the medium’s biggest names. I’ll highlight a few foundational ones to get you started, but everything on this list should be on your watchlist.
Ballet Mécanique
Much has been made about the way Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 experiments with the RPG form established in Japanese classics like Final Fantasy. You can’t talk about French formal experimentation without mentioning Ballet Mécanique. Released in 1924, the Dadist short is famous for stretching the limits of what a film looked like at a time where the medium’s voice was still being hammered out. It’s a flurry of stream of consciousness imagery and animation that set the stage for what would become a legacy of cinematic rule-breaking. Does Clair Obscur owe a bit of its spirit to it? I’d like to think so.
Last Year at Marienbad
Part of Clair Obscur‘s power comes from its visual design, which can often as surreal and unsettling as it is gorgeous. I’ll take that as a good excuse to recommend one of my favorite films of all time, Last Year at Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais, the avant-garde drama takes place entirely at a hotel and centers around an affair. It’s a slow, disorienting film designed to mess with your sense of time and place. It’s most iconic shot sees the camera peering out into a garden, where people and shrubs cast inconsistent shadows. Though it certainly isn’t as fantastical as Clair Obscur, it’s similarly haunting in a way that will stick with you even if you don’t fully understand what’s going on.
Au Hasard Balthazar
Clair Obscur may be “weird,” but it’s also remarkably tender. It tells a human story about collective grief and a world banding together to overcome it and create a better future for those still to come. There’s something heart wrenching and grounded in all of its over the top design. What’s a great French film that captures that same feeling? Au Hasard Balthazar, another personal favorite of mine. The quiet film follows the life of a donkey as it is passed around between farms and families. It’s a story about an animal, but it’s through his innocent eyes that we get to observe the chaos of human drama around him. It’s the classic that set the stage for films like Flow to tug on audience’s heartstrings, all while rethinking who the star of a film needs to be in order to connect with humans. Balthazar is basically Monoco is what I’m saying.
Weekend
You can’t talk about French film history without mentioning Jean-Luc Godard and the New Wave movement. Godard, alongside filmmakers like Agnès Varda and François Truffaut, took pleasure in breaking just about every established rule in cinema in his day, from utilizing rough handheld camera shots to randomly slicing jump cuts into scenes. But the films of the French New Wave movement weren’t entirely counter-culture works; they were incredibly indebted to American films and looked to build on the works that inspired French filmmakers of the era. You can draw a parallel to Clair Obscur there if you’re, oh I don’t know, trying to figure out a good excuse to write about Weekend in a video game article. Weekend is one of Godard’s most challenging and formally inventive films, couching a seething consumerist satire into a series of unforgettable sequences. You’ll never look at a traffic jam the same way again (but be warned that it also contains a grisly animal death that’s tough to stomach).
Atlantics
Admittedly, those four films are a tough place to start if you’re entirely new to film like it, so I’ll close this off with more of a transitional film that’s easy to track down. Atlantics is a 2019 drama from director Mati Diop and it’s available to watch via Netflix. It’s both dense and sparse in the same breath, touching on everything from grief to a refugee crisis in a quiet ghost story that has stuck with me ever since I first watched it. More than any film on this list, it’s the one I’d most directly pair with Clair Obscur. It’s not because it’s loud and stylish, but rather because it does such a tremendous job at building a relationship between the human and otherworldly. It’s a spiritual film that uses the ocean as a recurring visual, not too dissimilarly to the way that Clair Obscur has players peering out at the Paintress across a vast ocean. Am I really pushing it here? You bet, but I’m just trying to bring a little culture to the RPG sickos! Sue me!
The rest of the list
- The Beaches of Agnès
- The Beast
- Beau Travail
- Black Girl
- Day for Night
- Eyes Without a Face
- Fat Girl
- Fantasmagorie
- Forbidden Games
- Goodbye First Love
- The Illusionist
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
- La Bête Humaine
- La Haine
- Last Summer
- Les Misérables (2019)
- Ma Mère
- Mon Oncle
- Murmur of the Heart
- Petite Maman
- Rififi
- Saint Omer
- Sans Soliel
- The Seventh Continent
- Stranger by the Lake
- Summertime (2015)
- Tout Va Bien
- Vagabond
