French Film Fest 2005---36 Quai des Ofèvres

A policier the way it should be! Oliver Marchal the director of the cop film 36 QUAI DES ORFÈVRES was also an inspector in the criminal brigade in Versailles before he took to cinema. It’s a different story that he became a cop in the first place because of cinema, because of Melville...it is always heartening for someone in the business of creation (whether art or literature) to know that life follows literature follow life and we're part of a recursive cycle. After seeing Marchal’s film I met with Maryam Keshavarz the critically acclaimed director of THE COLOR OF LOVE. We swapped stories of when we had both made something (in her case a film, in mine a story) and months later found real life mirroring the art that had been produced. A scene, a moment, an episode, we’d already lived in the process of creating it and then gone through it once more for real.

Back to Marchal. I heard Marchal speak after the screening of his film at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center yesterday. He described Gérard Depardieu who plays the bad cop as un chien fou--a mad dog, in that Depardieu on the set needs to touch people and grip their arms and talk and connect using flesh, space, and smell. Daniel Auteuil who plays the good cop on the other hand is a "cerebral actor" in the words of Marchal. Auteuil was nominated for a César for Best Actor for the film. This contrast that Marchal raised between Auteuil and Depardieu took me back instantly to another film, a comedy, in which they’ve played together—THE CLOSET(Le Placard) directed by Francis Veber. In that film Depardieu plays the hulky male frat boy grown old and falls in love with Auteuil who is rumored to be gay but really isn’t. A successful comedy, that film nonetheless hangs on the exact same dynamic between the two actors that 36 does.

I’ve been thinking of actors in terms of the roles they play (Isabelle Hupert in almost all her films) and also in terms of acting-pairs like some binary star system. If Depardieu and Auteuil are an obvious pair that come to mind since they play polar opposites in 36 then a less obvious pair is that of André Dussollier and Auteuil. Dussollier was nominated for the César for Best Supporting Actor for his role in 36 and plays the senior policeman who has to choose between Depardieu and Auteuil. Dussollier like Auteuil, is a cerebral actor and the distance between them in 36 is not much different than the way their dynamic hung, suspended between tension and the possibility of mutual understanding in UN COEUR EN HIVER (A heart in winter?) directed by Claude Sautet. In that film the men are partners in a violin repair service, Dussollier rustles up the business while Auteuil is the expert luthier. Auteuil gives Emmanuelle Béart (Dussollier’s girlfriend) the eye but when Béart falls for him he rejects her.

According to Marchal, Depardieu gave his fullest from the start and then as a director Marchal found ways of fine tuning the performance. And while, in contrast to Depardieu, Auteuil might be cerebral in 36 he is glacially cerebral in UN COEUR. His entire success as an actor lies in fine-tuning his art at the very extremes of human consciousness. He uses barely perceptible and implausibly subtle expression to carry him enormous distances between masochism, depression, violence, mirth, and rectitude. Just look at his eyes in SADE, MA SAISON PRÉFERÉE (My favorite season), L’ADVERSAIRE (The Adversary), LA FILLE SUR LE PONT (Girl on the bridge), LA VEUVE DE ST. PIERRE (The Widow of St. Pierre) and you will find revealed in those eyes a range of human types that few of us could dare to live.