A sewer rat called Rémy has succeeded where generations of statesmen failed: spreading a bit of love between France and the US.

After years of discord, the French might have taken offence at an American yarn about rats in a Paris restaurant. Instead, the country has fallen madly in love with Ratatouille, a Hollyood story about a rat with culinary talent.

The new 3-D animation from Disney’s Pixar studios has topped the French box office in the two weeks since it scored the biggest opening day for an animated film in France.

More than three million people have seen it. Audiences in stuffy Paris quartiers are applauding the feelgood finale, in which Rémy the rat triumphs with a message that echoes the can-do doctrines of President Sarkozy: if you work hard, you will prosper. Mr Sarkozy is expected to see Ratatouille after his return yesterday from his summer break in New Hampshire.

Cinema critics in France and even the guardians of its gastronomic temple have pronounced the US blockbuster a work of genius. Their reviews have exceeded the superlatives that the film received from American critics. “Rich, sumptuous, this is one of the greatest gastronomic films in the history of the cinema,” raved the normally staid Le Monde. “It is a burlesque comedy, often funny, above all an apologia for individual creativity.” Télérama, the usually caustic weekly arbiter of cinema, invoked Marcel Proust and An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly, in its encomium to the film, which has its British premiere at the Edinburgh Festival on Friday.

“It has been a long time since any film has celebrated France, its cuisine and Paris with so much brio and dazzling kitsch,” the magazine said.

With Ratatouille, Hollywood has returned to its Francophile past after a phase in which Frenchmen have played the bad guys and Homer Simpson called them cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

In response to rat mania in France and the US, the Paris council cinema division has started “Ratatouille tours”. Fans are taken to Rémy’s haunts, such as the Seine Embankment, the sewers and the Aurouze pest-control shop in Les Halles. This ancient boutique, which features in the film, is famous for the stuffed rats hanging in its window. An exhibition of original art for the film is also doing well at the FNAC entertainment store.

Disney films about cute rodents are not new. Ratatouille is a Gallic hit because its makers used their ultra-realistic technique to get France – and rats – right. The treatment plays to American dreams of old magical Paris, full of accordeons, berets and Citroën DS, but it is precise on the tough business of haute cuisine.

In six years making the film, Brad Bird, the producer, sent teams to study the ways of great Paris kitchens, such as Taillevent, Guy Savoy and La Tour d’Argent. They drew on that venerable restaurant on the Seine for the physical model and part of the plot.

In the film, Auguste Gusteau, a great chef, has died after his restaurant is downgraded in the ruthless ratings system. La Tour d’Argent has recently lost a star. Also evoked is Bernard Loiseau, the Michelin three-star chef who committed suicide in 2003 because he feared demotion.

In another realistic touch, “Gusteau’s” went downhill after a bad review from Anton Ego, a terrifying restaurant critic. Peter O’Toole provides Ego’s chilling voice in the English-language version. And in a self-mocking antiAmerican touch, the villain chef called Skinner is betraying Gusteau’s reputation by using his name for a brand of microwave food in the United States.

Strained relations

— France was instrumental in America’s birth, sending troops to help the Continental Army to fight the British. The Marquis de Lafayette, a French general, was even given an honorary doctorate by Princeton

— One of the most fertile cultural exchanges between the two nations occurred in 1831, when Alexis de Tocqueville toured the US. As a result, he published Democracy in America, a classic work of political science still read by students today

— Relations soured after the First World War. Georges Clémenceau, the French Prime Minister, mocked the conciliatory nature of US President Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point peace plan with the words: “Even God was satisfied with Ten Commandments, but Wilson insists on fourteen”

— After the devastation of the Second World War, the US spent billions of dollars on reviving the French economy along with the rest of Europe as part of the Marshall Plan

— General de Gaulle upset relations when he withdrew France from Nato’s military structure in 1966, hoping to make his country an equal rather than a follower of the American superpower

— Relations further deteriorated when President Chirac refused to support the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Americans were encouraged to boycott French products and french fries were renamed freedom fries

— President Sarkozy tried to mend fences this summer when he became the first French president to take his main holiday in America

Sources: Princeton University; www.tocqueville.com; Yale University; Times archives

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