Beautiful People in European Villas: a Film Genre of Its Own

No discussion of french beach cinema is complete without a mention of" Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" as important a film as any of the others mentioned.

Purple Noon

"To Catch a Thief", not quite the same moods but the Cote d'Azur scenery...wow!

I wonder what the "next St. Tropez" is, so to speak. There is no coastal port that the wealthy aren't willing to vampirize.

Great article. Spent vacations in St Tropez as a travelling student in the early 1970s. It provoked in me a blissful fantasy of "another" world, a life rich with small beauties and pleasures. Even then I understood that I was an American romanticizing an ordinary reality that belonged to other people. But I'm still charmed whenever a film like "Call Me by Your Name" evokes that shopworn fantasy. No matter how cheesy the inspiration, our imaginations can construct beautiful illusions. We should be grateful.

I found it reassuring to hear someone of late refer to Saint Tropez as the Ft. Lauderdale of France. Makes one less prone to that saudade of what Alain Delon's Cote d'azur once was. La Piscine is the best of the genre, imho.

I love these films. I can’t ever remember anything that happens in them, but when I daydream of summer, images from Rohmer films are what usually come to mind. And how fitting for the timing of this article that, in last night’s episode of Patrick Melrose, set in a declining French country estate, Patrick’s dissipated father David utters something to the effect of “the goal is ennui.”

You've described The Talented Mr. Ripley to a T.

Let's not forget Villa Nellcotte, an 'en residence' life script with all the ingredients of a sort of 'Villa Thriller' Cote d'Azur noir.

More contemporary examples, with fantastic Mediterranean settings and not to be forgotten: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (French Riviera), John Cassavettes' The Tempest (Greek islands), and Sexy Beast (Spain).

I visited St-Tropez in 1978 and found it ghastly. It was a combination tourist trap and exclusionist zone for for the conspicuously wealthy.

I thoroughly enjoy this genre of films. Reminds me of idyllic summers in Southern Europe and makes me want to visit again. “Call Me By Your Name” may have been without violence but I was disturbed by the age difference for this story of teenage love. The lead actors look 15 years apart.

Amusing. I lived on the Côte last year. The whole place is Burger King and Paint Ball as far as I’m concerned. It does retain its photogenic corners, heavily cropped. Bottom line, way too many people. I love Corsica — away from the yacht culture. Now that’s a subject! Yachts rent for $350,000 per week. Who does that? Granted, petrol is expensive. Anyway, I’m in a much more gorgeous place in Southern France. Wide open, an immense tended garden, with few people — a big reason people come here, ironically. It is probably as “over” as the Côte is, with moneyed people jawing about their properties, and whatever else they just bought, over frosted bottles of brilliant rosé in the village café. I can ignore them. The closest thing to tragedy here is their banality. The rosé is still, and always will be, wonderful.

Great piece. Captures the sultry allure and complicated moody characters and plot of many a Med. film, especially French. I would add to the Med. villa erotic mystery list John Fowles' novel 'The Magus' and much latter the film starring Anthony Quinn which alas turned out to be quite cheesy compared to the read.

Actual French movies for actual French people. Infuriating! Definitely deserving of a newly invented genre, or should I say box, or should I say specifically American box. After all, impossible to properly belittle a miscellany of unrelated, though in this case European, films without first assigning them a neat label, in this case "villa movie." Good one!

Many thanks for this wonderful article. We enjoy it a lot. By "reverse engineering" we were again in the 1960's for a few minutes.