Hollywood is not obsessed with the elderly and dying…yet

Unlike French cinema

Nomadland poster showing Fern outside her mobile home. Photo: Searchlight Pictures

On this substack, former BBC colleague Henri Astier has put up an interesting guest post. Today’s French cinema, he says, is obsessed with dying and it’s all because it follows demographic trends. Back in the 1960s, it was “all about being young” but the slow fading of the baby boomer generation means the mood is more sombre now.

“Over the past dozen or so years,” says Henri, “French filmmakers have been particularly inspired by dementia, terminal decline and euthanasia”. He goes on to list a few like that from the past three years and then zooms in on the latest film to enlarge on this theme, Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning. As the film arrived in UK cinemas on April 14, you can imagine Henri’s reflections on One Fine Morning are very topical. ( Click here to read his piece.)

The idea that French cinema is obsessed with terminal decline caused me to think about how it is done in other film cultures. Am…