For four decades the English-speaking world has stubbornly resisted Johnny Hallyday and his peculiarly Gallic brand of dinosaur rock. But now the man who represents all that is laughably naff about French pop music and culture is being given half a million pounds of British public money to launch a new assault on these shores.
The Film Council, the lottery-funded body set up to back British film-making, last night sank £500,000 into a French-language comedy called L'Homme du Train, starring the ageing rock star as a washed-out criminal who longs to settle down to a life of quiet suburban conformity.
It was not so much that the council was backing a foreign-language film that flummoxed many in the London film establishment, it was the choice of Hallyday as star that caused most hilarity.
Five times married, most recently to the 25-year-old daughter of his old bandmate, he is now regarded even by the French as faintly embarrassing. Ninety-four per cent of women in a recent poll said they would never sleep with him, a humbling statistic for a sex symbol, even one has who spent an exceedingly long time being 58.
However, the film's English co-producer, Carl Clifton, hopes that Hallyday's kitschy appeal will work on both sides of the Channel and the Film Council is bullish, too, trumpeting the record of its director, Patrice Leconte, the man responsible for the sublime Hairdresser's Husband and Monsieur Hire.
But Alexander Walker, the veteran film critic, who has crusaded tirelessly against what he sees as the wasting of public money on "hopeless" film projects, was less optimistic.
"Oh dear me," he said, when the Guardian broke the news to him. "Hallyday? Really?
"I wish them luck. They will need it. Hallyday is pretty clapped out in France and he was never a name here. He's not just a throwback to the sixties, he's a throwback to the fifties.
"But the most deplorable thing about this is the complete lack of transparency.
"We don't know what the total budget of the film is. The Film Council refuse to tell us. We have a right to know. It is public money."
However, the council robustly defended the decision. "We think this could broaden the range of French films shown in this country. When the council was set up, we said we would invest up to 20% of our money in European co-productions. That has to happen if our industry is to grow and British producers can branch out."
He said that British film-makers like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach have only been able to make films in the past because many European funders have invested public money in their projects, and now it was time for Britain to reciprocate.
