Plus ça change

It's difficult to take seriously nowadays François Truffaut's observation that British cinema is a contradiction in terms, and not only because that director's own later work petered out into a haze of politeness and complacency. "This may sound far-fetched," he suggested to Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, "but I get the feeling that there are national characteristics - among them the English countryside, the subdued way of life, the stolid routine - that are anti-dramatic in a sense."

There are many reasons to wish that Truffaut were still alive; one of them is to see how he would have responded to the gradual parity between British and French film-making. Wouldn't the groundbreaking films of the Frenchman Bruno Dumont, for instance, be guilty of Truffaut's roster of those artificial sins inherent in British cinema? La Vie de Jésus (1997), L'Humanité (1999) and Twentynine Palms (2003), with their emphasis on the mundane detail of unexceptional lives, and their determination to wring tension out of that precise "anti-dramatic" milieu, disprove Truffaut's generalisations about the chasm between Britain and France. Indeed, some of the brightest and bravest work staged by modern French film-makers has its roots in British soil. Now, more than at any time since the late 1950s and 1960s and the dynamic beginnings of Free Cinema and the French New Wave, the two countries that Truffaut considered so incompatible have experienced a creative convergence.

When you look at the work of France's most exciting auteurs, it is possible to feel a kinship with their themes and preoccupations. The bizarre strategies and humiliations of working life examined by the brilliant Laurent Cantet in Ressources Humaines (1999) and L'Emploi du Temps (2001) owe something to the sinewy political cinema of Ken Loach. The influence of that director is discernible, too, in the honest depictions of working-class life in the films of Robert Guédiguian (Marius et Jeannette (1997), La Ville Est Tranquille (2000)), as is the stamp of Lindsay Anderson. And François Ozon, a director given to perverse fantasias, has expressed his admiration for the uniquely feverish fables of Powell and Pressburger. Add to this the high regard in which French critics and audiences hold some of the film-makers whom we take for granted - Loach, Mike Leigh, Michael Winterbottom - and the recent announcement that Sylvain Chomet, director of the Oscar-nominated Belleville Rendez-vous, is setting up an animation company, Studio Django, in Scotland, and it becomes clear that our cinematic identities are no longer as polarised as Truffaut believed.

Forty years ago, both countries were riding a thrilling wave of creativity. Truffaut, his reputation already guaranteed by the miraculous triple whammy of Les Quatre Cents Coups, Tirez sur le Pianiste and Jules et Jim, had just completed La Peau Douce and was preparing the script for his first English-language feature, Fahrenheit 451, as well as mulling over an American project entitled Bonnie and Clyde. His friend and collaborator Jean-Luc Godard had enjoyed a similarly speedy ascension after bashing out revolutionary early features such as A Bout de Souffle, Une Femme Est une Femme and Vivre Sa Vie, with Bande à Part following in 1964. Current cinema may offer audiences unparalleled access to international film-making, but it is still possible for latter-day cinephiles too young to have caught an early Rivette, Rohmer or Malle on its first release to look back on the 1960s and glow with envy.

British cinema had nothing to be bashful about, either. Alan Parker delivered a retrospective swipe at the country's 1960s output in his 1986 documentary A Turnip-Head's Guide to British Cinema, arguing: "Whatever the Swinging Sixties are going to be remembered for, it won't be films." But that hardly takes into account the diversity and originality evident in film language of that period. The critic Robert Murphy has noted that "the most clearly marked feature of late-1960s cinema [is] the disruption of the narrative", and it's true that the daredevil experiments mounted in films such as Poor Cow, If... and Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment were both homages to and advances on the groundwork done by the critics-turned-directors of the French New Wave. Suddenly film-makers became alert to the pliable texture of film, and movies were filled with the kind of outrageous fantasy sequences, Brechtian distancing devices and madcap, anarchic humour evident in, say, Zazie dans le Métro.

The cultural traffic flowed both ways. If French cinema liberated British film-makers, then Britain can be credited with passing on a certain toughness that is a defining characteristic of French cinema 40 years on. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, This Sporting Life, Kes - where, for example, would the Dardenne brothers (who made the devastating 2003 drama Le Fils) be without those films?

If British and French film-makers enjoyed mutually beneficial success in the 1960s, and can be said to have common concerns and objectives today, then it is also true that the same commercial pressures have arisen in both cases. The two countries have learnt exactly how lucrative it can be to package a film in a national image that flatters the domestic audience and gratifies the tourists. The most notable example of this in France has been Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's artificially sweetened confection, which makes Paris as jaunty and lovable as the film's winsome heroine - and as idyllic as the image of the city presented in the most unsophisticated holiday brochure.

It's not so different from the brand of Frenchness flogged by Claude Lelouch, most blatantly in his international hit Un Homme et une Femme (1966). That film, with its corny notions of Gallic cool and its blandly seductive soundtrack, was as canny an exercise in marketing as anything that Hollywood could contrive today. Lelouch may decry the dominance of US cinema - in his 1996 film Hommes, Femmes, Mode d'Emploi, one character observes: "America makes big films about small things; France makes small films about big things." But he plays up to it more nakedly than any of his countrymen.

While the cognoscenti deride any hint of populism - Amélie, for instance, was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival, which later came begging for the honour of a gala screening - the pressure to churn out other international hits is still keenly felt. Hence the attention currently being directed in France on to the making of A Very Long Engagement, the latest collaboration between Jeunet and his Amélie star, Audrey Tautou. "French movies have become successful again," Ozon said in 2001, citing the phenomenal box-office takings of Amélie and Le Pacte des Loups. "It's a good thing for the economy. Artistically, I'm not sure. I am waiting. In France, we are always trying to take lessons from America, trying to make some kind of French blockbuster."

That tendency certainly explains the appeal of the wham-bam Taxi series of action movies, which simply rehash a US format in a French idiom. And if Ozon's diagnosis of French cinema's shortcomings is to be believed, it appears that the weaknesses in our respective movies, as well as the strengths, are growing more similar by the day. It is not only France that has spotted the financial advantages of exaggerating its cultural clichés for mass consumption. A film such as Notting Hill or Love Actually is nothing if not our very own Amélie - a cosmetically enhanced daydream of a country that exists only in the minds of those to whom it is being sold. Plus ça change...