I see there’s a French film out this week that I want to avoid. It happens to me quite often. I see the trailer and think “thanks for the warning, I’ll definitely stay away.” It’s a case of the film trailer as hurricane alert.
This particular French film is about two friends who have known each other since the lycée (an age-old theme amongst Parisians, who rarely move away for very long). They start talking about the old days (middle-class Parisians love remembering the grades they got for the ten different baccalaureate subjects, even when they’re 45 years old), and get transported back to their adolescence (a perennial middle-class Parisian theme – I think it has something to do about being bored in their ultra-stable jobs). Cue a return to the 1980s and lots of teenage antics.
Well apart from the fact that it’s all been done before a zillion times (17 Again, Freaky Friday, etc), I have to admit that it made me feel ancient. These two middle-aged actors are going back to their teens in 1986? By then I was already getting bored in my third or fourth job after university. I don’t go to the cinema to feel like a dinosaur. My teenage years were in the 1970s, and by coincidence I was transported back there by a film this week. A much lower-budget production that the 1986 French version.
When I saw the film of those Chelsea fans pushing a black man off the Métro and singing about the joys of racism, it took me straight back to the bad old days when football was better known for its violent fans than its overpaid players. As a kid I used to go and watch Bournemouth home matches, and quite often we’d see running battles, as away fans made a dash for the railway stations. Even the fourth division fans wanted to live up to football’s reputation as a first-division combat sport.
The daily newspaper Le Parisien tracked down the victim of racist abuse on the Paris Métro.
The film, and the outcry in the French press since, showed how a few racists can undo decades of progress. When I first arrived to work in Paris in the early 1990s, the English words that every French person knew were much more limited than today. Most of them were positive, things like “le fair-play”, “le best-seller”, “le hit-parade”, “le garden party”, “le jet-set”. Most of the sports had English names, too (except pétanque of course): “le football”, “le rugby”, “le tennis”, “le badminton”. But one of them stood out as a British black mark on society – “le hooligan”.
Here in France, fighting and general misbehaviour at football stadiums had always been seen as a particularly British thing. The tragedy at Heysel stadium in 1985 had only underlined our bad reputation. There was brawling at England’s World Cup match in Marseille in 1998, too, caused largely by locals who thought that English football fans only travelled in order to accept challenges to fight.
But in recent years, the change in the English game – the transformation into a glamorous, multi-cultural sport that pays armies of stewards to patrol grounds, evicting any spectator who dares to stand up for more than a few seconds – had borne fruit, and I hadn’t heard the French talk about “les hooligans anglais” for years. Until this week.
The irony is that until very recently, Chelsea’s opponents this week, Paris Saint-Germain, had been afflicted by terrible hooliganism amongst their own fans, mainly because of in-fighting between rival gangs. The club had banned the most notorious group, which was called The Boulogne Boys. Yes, a partly English name, because English hooligans were regarded as prime examples of the genre. Surviving groups of PSG fans are keeping up the tradition, with names like The Dirty Squad Paris, Casual Firm Paris, The Old Firm and Hoolicool – all obvious homages to Britain’s hooligan/skinhead past.
At least it was the past until the other day, when a few Chelsea fans indulged in a flashback to the bad old days.
Stephen Clarke’s latest book is Dirty Bertie, an English King Made in France, which describes the young King Edward VII’s visits to Paris that were rarely very moral, but never descended into mere insults.
