John Gray (director)
Sander/Moses Productions (studio)
12 (certificate)
25 mins (length)
19 May 2015 (released)
05 June 2015
French Kiss represents an interesting development both in terms of film financing and in the marketing approach of a major hotel brand. The film is a 25 minute romantic short, set in Paris, and featuring Margot Luciarte and Tyler Ritter as the two leads. Significantly, its release was on Youtube and it was financed by Marriott hotels, who presumably hope it will inspire potential tourists to come and enjoy the city, while staying at a Marriott of course.
Given this context, the film delivers exactly what you would expect. The romance between an overworked American ‘business-tripper’ and an enigmatic, elegant Parisian is played out across almost all of the city’s major tourist sites and with a large dose of ‘magical realism’ to use the language of the press releases. This mainly involves a flying laptop, which guides Tyler towards a series of clues. Paris looks nice, because it’s difficult to make it look anything else, and the production values are fine although they do shamelessly indulge the genre expectations. It is pretty inoffensive and probably appealing if you’re into that kind of thing.
What is more intriguing is the positioning of the film as ‘branded content’, also known as ‘sponsored content’. Given how technology has granted greater agency to the consumer to avoid and skip past advertising, this phenomenon represents those wishing to promote a brand or product taking back control by producing content themselves, with the ultimate aim of selling you something. It is product placement taken to its logical conclusion and is already prominent on sites such as Buzzfeed which features sponsored content articles, the nature of which is determined by whoever it is giving them the cash.
French Kiss was officially launched in Europe with a glitzy, red-carpet premiere at the Marriott’s grand Champs Elysees hotel last Wednesday. Everyone was having a good time and everyone was insistent that this was a ‘real film’, and while it may be an unremarkable one, it may also represent the inevitable future of film finance. Time will tell.