With two Césars (the French equivalent of Oscars) to his name and one Cannes Palme d’or, Jacques Audiard is one of France’s most successful and exportable filmmakers. He is not typically considered a progressive director or even a political one and is therefore not an obvious choice for inclusion here. I nonetheless turn to him because, perhaps better than any other director, and possibly despite himself, he undertakes a relentless probing of shifts in subjectivity, gender roles and family relationships in the context of neoliberalism. I begin by exploring some of the debate around his work, partly to give a sense of how it has been perceived, but mainly to open lines of inquiry that I will draw upon. I then focus on two films, Un héros très discret (A Self Made Hero, 1996) and Un prophète (A Prophet, 2009), to show how, whatever their apparent themes (myths of resistance, in one case, prison survival, in the other), they track the emergence of a distinctly new kind of subject that one might qualify as neoliberal. Broadening the scope, I will show how characters in other Audiard films are haunted by a precarity indissociable from neoliberalism but from which they escape by remaking themselves as entrepreneurial neoliberal subjects. Bringing gender into the frame, I then focus on two early works to show how their reworking of subjectivities also requires a reshaping of gendered identities and relationships. Then, looking specifically at De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone, 2012) and Dheepan (2015), two more recent films, I look at how Audiard’s cinema increasingly figures not simply reworked subjects but refashioned families. Although the neoliberal subject is almost always discussed as an entrepreneurial individual, neoliberalism requires a remodelled family to secure its work of reproduction in a way that Audiard’s films bring to the fore. I conclude by asking whether Audiard’s films open real avenues of escape from neoliberalism or simply show characters who, despite their self-reinvention, essentially learn to live under its sway.

Between conservatism and radical destabilisation: Audiard and the critics

Back in 2015, legendary French journal Cahiers du Cinéma brought out an issue taking aim at the ‘political void’ (‘vide politique’) of French cinema. The journal’s then chief editor, Stéphane Delorme, particularly targeted a dominant strand of works, typified by Audiard, which used political situations as a mere backdrop for genre filmmaking (Delorme 2015a, 5).