Refusing ‘postnational’ femininity: Fanny Ardant, export French ‘seductress’

Inspired by, and responding to, the volume Is it French? Popular Postnational Screen Fiction from France published in 2024, this article posits Fanny Ardant as a historically overlooked French export star whose appearances in non-francophone films over the past 25 years merit scholarly attention at a time when her filmic corpus continues to grow exponentially. Through analysis of her performances in three films – Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998), La grande bellezza/The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013) and American Star (Gonzalo López-Gallego, 2024) – it is argued that Ardant’s ‘self-staging’ in international cinema has historically exemplified a resistance to postnationalism outside a French context, propagating a ‘timeless’ (if not anti-feminist) notion of French femininity as ‘sensual’, grounded in the notion of the Parisienne.