The Visitors Take Sarasota

JACQUES TOUBON WAS BEAMING. THE French Minister of Culture was informing a gala audience at the 5th Sarasota French Film Festival that the film they were about to see, Jean-Marie Poire's Les Visiteurs, was a hit of monster proportions. "The Visitors is the double of Jurassic Park," touted Toubon. "We are the best." At that moment, Americans in attendance had to be grateful that the U.S. has no government executive whose job it is to flack for Roseanne Arnold or Pearl Jam simply because their TV show and record album are at the top of the American charts. But the Floridians who packed the Sarasota Opera House in this sparkling Gulf Coast resort town would sit through any speech, however fatuous, that signaled the re-emergence of one of the world's most congenial -- and least likely -- film festivals.

It remains one of the divine mysteries of civic entrepreneurism why this retirement community would care to host a five-day showcase for films from a proud but ailing industry 6,500 km away. Yet this year, its first without heavy sponsorship by the state of Florida, la fete Sarasota has progressed from an endangered species to a cheerful inevitability. The French and the Floridians actually seem to be getting along. Most events are sold out, with a packed house of local Sarasotans, French movie stars and U.S. distributors. Zarazodah, as the French call it, is now a beguiling fixture on the cinema landscape.

The French are feeling fine and feisty too; it's amazing how a hit movie can restore the color to one's cheek. Toubon may have fudged the numbers a bit (since Jurassic Park opened in France only in October, whereas The Visitors has been playing since February), but the Poire comedy is a genuine phenomenon, earning a record-smashing $70 million. "We have no dinosaurs," Poire said smilingly on opening night. What The Visitors has is a solid farce premise (a 12th century knight and his servant are magically stranded in today's French suburbs), a toilet-bowl sense of humor and a few tricks swiped from Hollywood: breakneck pace and gaudy visual effects. The time-travel buffoonery of Encino Man meets Ghostbusters' technical sorcery. En France.

When one heard French spoken in Sarasota, the subject was often the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The GATT pact would abolish quotas protecting local products, including movies. The American film industry dominates screens in France (and much of the rest of the world), and its producers tell the French: Make movies your people want to see. But for the French, opposition to GATT is a holy war against America's cultural imperialism -- what used to be called Coca-Colonization -- and in favor of small, distinctly savory vintages from home.