Different tastes? Islam, métissage and food constraints in French multicultural comedies

Abstract

The early 21^st-century French comic narratives have revealed a tendency to exaggerate differences between France and Islam. They display nostalgia for white, Christian, pork-eating France in popular multicultural comedies, such as Philippe de Chauveron’s Serial Bad Marriages trilogy (2014, 2019, 2023). Among hundreds of multicultural comedies released in France between 2000 and 2020, only a handful relate directly to Islam and métissage, that is, cultural and ethnic mixing between the white (secular and Christian) French women and Muslim men living in France. An insight into four French comedies: Il était une fois dans l’oued (Bensalah 2005), L’Italien (Barroux 2010), Il reste du jambon? (Depetrini 2010) and Les goûts et les couleurs (Aziza 2018) aims at showing how camera work, setting, characters and dialogues construct a parallel between Islam and difference via gastronomic and romantic encounters. My analyses demonstrate that displaying cultural ignorance related to Islam and its food rites relies on comic devices, such as irony, sarcasm and satire that partake in establishing cultural hierarchization. This article argues that the narrative and generic choices characteristic of multicultural comedy expose clichéd representations to a degree that cannot be entirely explained by reclaiming the right to blasphemy (exercising comic freedom in religious matters). Instead, visiting prospective parents-in-law and other festive scenes (such as religious celebrations and weddings) establish the popular iconography of Islam as an exoticized, humourless, and conservative religious culture. However, some of the analysed examples suggest that a more nuanced attitude to food on screen can create an unexpected terrain of subversion within the ambiguous genre of multicultural comedy.