Politics & Power Quote by Philip Kaufman

Kaufman is doing something directors rarely admit out loud: pointing at a market gap and calling it cultural, not just commercial. By contrasting European cinema's comfort with adult relationships against Hollywood's long habit of sanding them down, he's not praising Parisian sophistication so much as diagnosing an American allergy to messier intimacy. "Adult" here isn't just code for sex; it's code for moral ambiguity, midlife compromise, desire that doesn't arrive with a clean three-act redemption arc.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke of the industry's default adolescence. For decades, American studios have treated romance as either premarital fantasy (the meet-cute machine) or marital crisis as a punchline, while the truly knotty stuff - long-term longing, betrayal without villains, tenderness mixed with boredom - gets shunted to art houses or cable. European film, in this stereotype, becomes the permission structure: you can show people having complicated sex and complicated conversations without branding it "adult" in the ratings sense, as if maturity were a niche content warning.

Kaufman also frames this as demand, not deficit. "Huge audience" is a strategic claim aimed at financiers and gatekeepers who assume seriousness equals small returns. Coming from a director known for sensual, psychologically literate work, it's an argument for taking grown-up viewers seriously - and for believing that Americans haven't rejected adult stories so much as been underfed them. The line reads like a pitch, but it lands like a cultural provocation: the audience is here; the industry just keeps pretending it isn't.