Tribute to Michel Piccoli by Serge Toubiana

Home , Marco Ferreri, Max et les ferrailleurs, Michel Piccoli

www.smartymagazine.com

"Extravagant! Isn't it extravagant? "The expression often comes back in his mouth, expressing a permanent feeling of curiosity, of questioning about the world and things. If there is one man who is never jaded, it is Michel Piccoli. Yet his record of service would allow him to distance himself, to take a step back and be content to live on his symbolic pension. This is not the case, because that is not like him. Michel Piccoli retains an almost childlike capacity for astonishment that commands admiration. How does he do it? Mystery. This state of childhood allowed him to go through several decades of cinema, no less than six, and to cover the whole spectrum: from Sautet to Godard, from Boisset and Rouffio to Granier-Deferre, without forgetting the two ogres that were Luis Buñuel and Marco Ferreri, to whom he was faithful. And then: Demy, Costa-Gavras, Louis Malle, Jacques Doillon, Rivette, Hitchcock, Pascal Bonitzer, Youssef Chahine, Leos Carax, Ruiz, Manoel de Oliveira and more recently Nanni Moretti and his Habemus Papam. The list is too long.

Dialogue with Michel Piccoli, September 2013

THE CHILDISH PLEASURE OF THE GAME

This form of disbelief or candor, this childish questioning is at the basis of his method, which is obviously not one. More precisely his approach to the acting profession: unfailing availability, a taste for extravagance precisely, true humility that allows him to follow almost blindly any kind of artistic adventure. Piccoli, like his fellow actor Mastroianni, ideally embodies this "state of actor": to love to play, to love to be another, to love to slip into other worlds through back doors. How many films has he made? More than two hundred. Including the many televisions that punctuated the fifties, but not counting his many roles in the theatre. And then, in 1963, THE revelation: his role in Le Mépris, just half a century ago. About Rafle sur la ville by Pierre Chenal (1958), in which Michel Piccoli plays (he is a police inspector and dies at the end while lying on a grenade in the P.J.'s office), Godard had written in the Cahiers du cinéma in April 1958: "Admirable Michel Piccoli". He remembered this when he gave the role of Paul Javal, the screenwriter married to Camille, the sublime Camille played by Brigitte Bardot. Paul Javal, as everyone knows, is Godard disguised as Piccoli. A role that counts in an actor's life. Contempt," Piccoli said, "is an entirely autobiographical work by Godard, autobiographical of that moment in his life. It tells the story of a moment of pain, of questioning oneself about love, literature, cinema, money. I think it was a very special moment of worry in Godard's life. » Fritz Lang wrote to Michel Piccoli in August 1963, from Beverly Hills, California: "Jean-Luc certainly had one of his best days when he chose you for the role of Paul (...) When I think of your great scene inside Malaparte or the scenes we had together, I always felt that he was not an actor playing a role, but that he was a living man, searching for his vocation, his true soul, and suffering.

"Can you imagine a more beautiful compliment? Godard himself was not stingy in his praise: "I took Piccoli because I needed a very, very good actor. He has a difficult role and he plays it very well. Nobody realizes that he is remarkable, because he has a role that is very detailed. "What was difficult? Being Camille Javal's cheating husband? To play the role of a mature man, abandoned by the sublime Bardot? To embody the doubt, the secret of a man overwhelmed by the adventure in which he is dragged? What is certain is that Le Mépris shakes up Michel Piccoli's all-too-quiet trajectory. Beyond his forties, becoming a leading actor will be the challenge of an actor who made appearances in films: for example Renoir's French Cancan (1954), in which he plays a slightly falot and stiff captain, moustache and black hair, a comic look à la Hulot, making hand kisses to the ladies; or Les Mauvaises Rencontres d'Astruc (1955); later, Melville's Le Doulos (1962).

SEDUCTION AND PROVOCATION

In the wake of Godard's film, he went from one film to the next at a rate of four or five, sometimes six in the same year, playing the role of mature men, seducers and libertines. Marcel Bluwal's Dom Juan, made in 1965 for television, remains in his memory, Molière's text seemingly made for his voice, ironic, greedy and disturbing. His character of a perverse bourgeois in Belle de jour (1966) fixes for a long time the character of Piccoli on the screen: elegant and secret, master of his feelings and undressing with his eyes his sublime partners (Catherine Deneuve in this film and in Alain Cavalier's La Chamade, or Romy Schneider in Claude Sautet's films), a libertine figure, organizer of parties and rituals from which he pulls the strings for his sole enjoyment. But the façade cracks and Claude Sautet is there to capture, in Les Choses de la vie, then in Max et les Ferrailleurs, Vincent, François, Paul and the others, or Mado, the flaw of the bourgeois man too smooth enclosed in his certainties. Psychological or social fault, which Piccoli embodies with magnanimous grandeur. He is brilliant in Une étrange affaire de Pierre Granier-Deferre (1981, based on a novel by Jean-Marc Roberts, who recently disappeared), manipulative and charismatic, always on the move, dragging his mystified collaborators into his senseless sequel. Genius also in Les Noces rouges de Chabrol (1973) where, under the varnish of the provincial bourgeoisie, the purely bestial sexual impulse pierces through.

DILLINGER OR THE LEAP INTO THE VOID

And then there is the film that makes the switch, that operates the "jump into the void" (title of Marco Bellocchio's film, which earned Piccoli and Anouk Aimée a double interpretation prize at Cannes in 1980): Dillinger est mort by Marco Ferreri (1969), in which the actor is suddenly confronted with the emptiness of his own existence, with a deadly confrontation with himself, having fun handling a transitional object, a revolver of which he doesn't know what to do with, an object that sends him back to his nothingness, thus logically to suicide. The end of the social, the flight of society with its restrictive codes: the freedom of the individual is at this price. Piccoli takes a taste for it and remembers his meeting with Ferreri as one of the most intense moments of his entire acting career. The actor's ability to switch in the blink of an eye from the virile and hairy dominating male to the child, or if one prefers, from the ogre to the little thumb, fascinated the author of Pipicacadodo so much. After Dillinger comes L'Audience, Touche pas à la femme blanche*, and above all La Grande bouffe, where Piccoli, dressed in an ugly acrylic turtleneck sweater in delicatessen pink, with his companions Mastroianni, Tognazzi and Noiret, gives his all in their joyful and - this time again - deadly rituals. This dimension of the grotesque is essential if one wants to perceive the truth of an actor. It belongs to the sphere of provocation, farcical in Ferreri's work, surreal in Buñuel's, but it refers above all to the deep black hole of childhood and the pleasure of regression in Michel Piccoli's work.

In his work as an actor, because it is indeed a work and on the scale of a life - and in his work as a filmmaker, the three films he has made, where we find childhood, regression, burlesque at times, but above all, FREEDOM.

For, as an admirable and extravagant actor, Michel Piccoli is above all a free man.

Text by Serge Toubiana on the occasion of the retrospective devoted to Michel Piccoli in 2013 at La Cinémathèque française. Serge Toubiana is President of UniFrance, former director general of La Cinémathèque française.

19 May 2020

www.smartymagazine.com

Contacts

smArty Intern'l Ltd Ibex House Baker Street Weybridge KT13 8AH

[email protected] www.smartymagazine.com