At a time when Jean-Louis Trintignant is leaving, it is difficult to identify his trace, so much the man wanted to be discreet, the masked actor, his economical acting, sometimes bordering on absence. Like much in life as on stage or in the cinema, he hated “show numbers”.
Speaking of his profession, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who died on Friday, June 17 at the age of 91, liked to advocate retrenchment and humility. “Being a blank page, starting from nothing, from silence. Therefore, one does not need to make a lot of noise to be listened to. It was without affectation that he confessed to having missed his ideal: “ To remain a clandestine actor.”
The actor of And God created woman and Love ” died peacefully, of old age, this morning, at his home, in the Gard, surrounded by his loved ones”, said his wife Mariane Hoepfner Trintignant in a press release sent by his agent.
Jean-Louis Trintignant was born on December 11, 1930, in Piolenc, about thirty kilometers from Uzès, where he had settled again to end his life, take care of his olive trees, take care his vines (he produced a Côtes-du -rhône which he had called “Rouge Garance”, in homage to Arletty). He was the son of a dessert maker involved in politics, a radical socialist friend of Edouard Daladier, and a middle-class woman who had dreamed of being a tragic actress.
The beginnings of a vocation came to him from there, no doubt, from this woman who dressed him as a girl until the age of 5 and who rocked him with tirades from Racine, when she was not instilling in him the virus of poker (Trintignant was fond of it for a long time, skillful in plucking his prey “with brutal sadism” as if to avenge his mother who always lost and did not possess her“cruelty” ).
But when, after having started studying law, he moved to Paris at the age of 20, it was to enroll at the Institute of Advanced Film Studies. He wants to be a film director. At the same time, he took drama lessons with Charles Dullin (who captivated him in L’Avare ) and Tania Balachova (where he rubbed shoulders with Delphine Seyrig and Laurent Terzieff).
Pathological shyness
He doesn’t want to be an actor so much as he wants to learn how to direct actors. Something is working on him. A need to be someone else, “free, uncontrolled, go beyond”. Later, he will admit to having wandered hundreds of nights, alone in Paris, to smell this perfume of adventure. And took some terrible buns. This young man is suffering from a pathological shyness, which he will train through the theater, at the same time as he will get rid of a South-West accent to be cut with a knife. His first exercises were essentially therapeutic. Painful beginnings, where he hums his texts, head down. “I have long been a somewhat ashamed actor,” he confided. Hidden behind his characters and his partners, unable to exteriorize.
This media notoriety which he would have done without was brutally interrupted by his military service, in the midst of the Algerian war.
Sign movies? He will end up shooting two, A busy day in 1973, and Le Maître-Nagpur in 1979, where the mixture of genres, black humor, and nonchalance, the study of unusual and scathing manners, will confuse the public. Two failures that he will impute to himself: “I was not up to it, not shameless enough.
“ But it was in the theater that his career began, appearing at the TNP, Sganarelle at Jean Dasté, a dreamer at Ionesco, runaway at Hugo Claus… Until his agent threatened to drop him if he snubbed the roles movies. Thus he appeared in 1956 as a young first in a scandalous film, And God… created woman, by Roger Vadim, partner of Brigitte Bardot whose lover he became.
This media notoriety which he would have done without was brutally interrupted by his military service, amid the Algerian war. He was then very politicized, defender of the FLN, rebellious, and, after having swallowed forty egg whites to obtain a record albumin level, found himself in hospital, then two years in Germany.
When he returns, at the age of 30, destroyed by years of bullying (the non-commissioned officers make him pay for having made the “one” of the newspapers), he is to undergo a humiliation: long refined, the Hamlet put on stage by Maurice Jacquemont is a flop, massacred by the critics. “He seems to be bored,” writes a journalist.
The public did not like me
The cinema revived him, thanks to Dangerous Liaisons, by Vadim, but above all to Combat dans l’île, by Alain Cavalier, where he played an extreme right-wing activist, and Fanfaron, by Dino Risi, where he gave the to Vittorio Gassman. He believes he started to be “not bad” this year 1962, nothing more. Something escapes him. “I turned to feel, to sympathy, almost despite myself, sometimes for the money. I was unconscious. For a long time, I was bad. The public didn’t like me. I couldn’t make people laugh. I had a sad voice…”
Jean-Louis Trintignant was indeed one of those actors who, like Michel Piccoli, grow in size with age. It took him years to erase his image of a fragile young man with a disconcerting smile, to insinuate that his complex temperament hid a cutting hardness, and gradually impose this drawling voice tinged with irony, this latent disenchantment, this slightly disturbing stiffness, this sarcastic vagueness with which he will enrich his characters.
Alexandre Astruc is a fine psychologist to portray him as “a jaguar always ready to pounce, only keeping a velvet paw to better deceive his world” when he filmed La Longue Marche with him in 1966.
From A Man and a Woman, by Claude Lelouch, au Train, by Pierre Granier-Deferre (1973), passing through the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet ( Trans-Europ-Express, The Man Who Lies, Progressive Slides of Pleasure ), his wife Nadine ( My love, my love, Le Voleur de crimes ), Trintignant is everywhere, sometimes in anything. In underpants near Michèle Mercier, Angélique by Bernard Borderie, or mute in Le Grand Silence,an Italian western by Sergio Corbucci. What was he going to do in So sweet, so perverse, by Umberto Lenzi? “I had asked my Italian agent to find me the silliest scenario possible, to change it up a bit…”
What audiences don’t know is that they take pleasure in playing characters they hate.
Nevertheless, this period consecrates him. Thanks to Z, by Costa-Gavras, for which he won the Interpretation Prize at Cannes in 1969. The proud and inflexible little Greek examining magistrate hides there behind dark glasses. What the public does not know is that it takes pleasure in embodying characters it hates.
This is the case of this stubborn judge of Z, whom he preferred to the role of the journalist for which he was approached, as of the Catholic flirt in Ma Nuit chez Maud, by Eric Rohmer ( “This false Christian was very unsympathetic!” ), or the chameleon of the Conformist, by Bernardo Bertolucci, which he shoots in virtual absence, directed by a filmmaker exploiting a somnambulistic unsaid at home, and in an atmosphere of drama.
It is indeed during the shooting of this film that he loses his daughter Pauline. “There is something completely broken in my interpretation that is beyond me, ” he confided. At that time, I told Nadine, either we commit suicide or we agree to live for Marie…”
Stuck at Rohmer, perverse at Deville ( Le Mouton enrage, Eauxdepths ), romantic thief at Lelouch ( Le Voyou ), Trintignant will gradually come to terms with himself as he is: childish, ironic, complicated. While giving free rein to his passion for car racing, until participated in the 24 Hours of Le Mans (1980). But that Protestant side still stalks him, that modesty that makes him decline Bertolucci’s offer to shoot The Last Tango in Paris. “I liked the role a lot, but it was too difficult for me, I wouldn’t have had the necessary shamelessness…”
“Why would I have been filming abroad when I had so many roles in France? »
For other reasons, planning or reluctance ( “Why would I have gone to shoot abroad when I had so many roles in France?” ), Trintignant remains deaf to wonderful proposals, in The Servant, of Losey, Casanova, by Fellini, Apocalypse Now, by Coppola, Encounters of the Third Kind, by Spielberg. He was invited twice to Sautet: for the role of Sami Frey in César et Rosalie and that of Michel Serrault in Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud.
We have long seen him as a French Paul Newman. His half-charming, half-carnivorous smile is more reminiscent of Jack Nicholson. This “false madman who forces himself” conceals Dostoevskian darkness, restrained violence, sometimes disturbing electricity in his gaze, a deaf attraction for austerity at the same time as for sin.
There is a secret Trintignant, contemplative, in love with poetry, the one who wrote one day to the Swiss filmmaker Michel Soutter to tell him that he was attracted by his universe and that he would like to be in one of his films, even as an assistant or set photographer (he will be in L’Escapade and Repérages, in the role of the stubborn, indecipherable director). And a baroque, unbridled Trintignant, in which one feels a dawning desire to play the pooches.
This Trintignant, that of Flic Story, where he plays the role of the killer Emile Buisson (1975), mean and withdrawn, needs to break the too clean mirror that notoriety hands him. He leaves his family for the time of a shoot, and settles in a hotel, to remain the odious unscrupulous character that Jacques Deray asks him to embody. Another time, he stuffs his ears with earplugs to refine a role that, according to him, would benefit from being deaf. No one knew about it, neither his partners nor his director, worried to find that he did not understand very well what he was being told.
Shadow areas
Trintignant is never darker, even threatening, than when he is injured in his flesh, decked out with a cane. He is extraordinarily terrifying as a cynical banker, displaying the icy rigidity of an Erich von Stroheim, in La Banquière, by Francis Girod (1980). Funeral in La Terrasse, by Ettore Scola, as a depressed screenwriter who mutilates his finger in an electric pencil sharpener. Diabolical in Le Bon Plaisir, by Francis Girod (1984), as a lame President of the Republic, like Talleyrand, a role in which he draws inspiration from François Mitterrand, “his way of walking frozen and talking, like Tino Rossi”. Each time, he explained, “I try to limp differently.”
In L’Œil écarlate, by Dominique Roulet (1992), he was a man in a hurry who had had to get used to his infirmity, in Look at men falling, by Jacques Audiard (1994), a “dog always ready to bite, constantly on the defensive”, which solitude had made a philosopher. The last roles of Jean-Louis Trintignant, who showed immense weariness in acting and kept announcing his retirement, are poignant in what they reveal about the man, his gray areas, his vagueness, his drunkenness, his awareness of being at the end of the road.
Struck with grief after the disappearance of Marie, Jean-Louis Trintignant feels the need, in order not to sink completely, to come back under the light of the stage.
“Death that prowls, it now transpires from my characters, despite me, even if no one asks me. These are the roles that interest me, I feel more at ease there. Thus the character of the judge in Three Colors: Red, by Kieslowski (1994). Or the double role in Those who love me will take the train, by Patrice Chéreau (1998): a provincial bourgeois welcoming the friends of his deceased brother, and the deceased himself, a homosexual artist. Trintignant released a funeral monologue: “I am 70 years old, I am tired. I’m closing up shop and my life is meaningless.”
Nobody, then, imagined the resonance that the tragic death of his daughter Marie, with whom he had returned to the boards, in such a luminous and complicit way, would give to this sentence in 2003. Struck with grief after the disappearance of this second child, Jean-Louis Trintignant feels the need, in order not to sink completely, to come back under the light of the stage.
That of the theater first of all, in the company of the poets he reads on stage (Apollinaire, to whom he had already paid homage in the company of his daughter, or later, in music and on the stage of the Odéon, Vian, Prévert, and Desnos). But it is more essential to the cinema, where he had left the sets for a long time, that the actor returns for a final comeback, bathed in the black light distilled by the extra lucid cinema of the Austrian Michael Haneke.
Amour, a terrible film in which he plays an old music teacher whose wife (Emmanuelle Riva) has Alzheimer’s disease, triumphed at Cannes in 2012, where he won the Palme d’Or. In the process, the film won five Césars at the ceremony of the same name, including that of best actor for its main interpreter.
The actor, who says he has been tired of cinema for three decades, swears that he will not be taken back there again, but tastes it again despite everything with the same director, five years later, in Happy End. At 86, he plays the patriarch of a bourgeois family from Calais, declining and dysfunctional owners of a construction company. If the key to the film, which turns into an exercise in public demolition and macabre farce, is not very difficult to find, Trintignant at least is perfect, treating it to a surreal and dubious taste that was not made to displease him.
In Cannes in 2019, he still climbed the steps alongside Anouk Aimée and Claude Lelouch for The Most Beautiful Years of a Life, a reunion more than fifty years later of a couple of A man and a woman.
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