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Jean-Louis Trintignant

(per La Bibliothèque de la Cinémathèque française)

hearthesilence wrote: Fri Jun 17, 2022 3:23 pm Jean-Louis Trintignant

(per La Bibliothèque de la Cinémathèque française)

Jean-Louis Trintignant, French Star With a Gift for Introspection, Dies at 91

Damn, I just watched his new doc a few weeks ago. One of the absolute greats

Seconded. The number of great films this man has acted in is amazing.
My Night at Maud's and Three Colors: Red having made a huge
impression on me many years ago.

Also, I quite enjoyed his film (as director) A Full Day's Work

R.I.P. to Jean-Louis.

Perhaps one of the last legendary French actors who is still with us is Alain Delon.

Jean-Pierre Léaud maybe? And of course Catherine Deneuve.

Marina Vlady?

There are also Brigitte Bardot and Anouk Aimée. I'm drawing a blank on other major male actors from that era beyond Delon and Léaud.

fiendishthingy wrote: Fri Jun 17, 2022 11:32 pm There are also Brigitte Bardot and Anouk Aimée. I'm drawing a blank on other major male actors from that era beyond Delon and Léaud.

I thought Michel Piccoli for a moment, but then I remembered

fiendishthingy wrote: Fri Jun 17, 2022 11:32 pm There are also Brigitte Bardot and Anouk Aimée. I'm drawing a blank on other major male actors from that era beyond Delon and Léaud.

And Bulle Ogier and Corrine Marchand. I feel like we're jinxing a whole lot of innocent* people by just mentioning them!

* Alain Delon probably isn't innocent.

At any rate Delon won't be around for too much longer, he's opted to undergo euthanasia.

Watched one of Trintignant's two directorial efforts, Le maître-nageur (1978), and it was not like anything I expected from him. This is one of the weirdest comedies I've ever seen. I'm not sure it's conventionally funny (I don't know that I even laughed once), but it is so admirably strange that I appreciated it nevertheless. The film presents us a fantasia of Stefania Sandrelli, whose dreams always come true and therefore she marries Guy Marchand's small-time traveling singer because she saw him in her dreams. This could be a great set-up for a comedy, and JLT surely knows that and yet nevertheless he abandons this almost immediately and turns the focus almost solely to Marchand's employment as the titular lifeguard by a bizarre "zillionaire" played by Moustache, looking exactly like the bad guy from Sonic the Hedgehog



But after two narrative stops and starts, we realize that Jean-Claude Brialy is actually the star of the film as Moustache's all-knowing valet who delights in tormenting Marchand, allegedly on Moustache's behalf. This is a movie where the rich guy in the wheelchair challenges Marchand to a swimming contest while remaining motionless in his wheelchair and declaring himself winner after Marchand swims the entire lap, to give you some idea of the kind of anti-comedy we're working with. Actually, I think this would be a pretty successful film for the Adult Swim set. Who knew this was where Trintignant's mind would go when given the reins?

Trintignant's first directorial effort, Une journée bien remplie (1973) is similar in tone to Le maître-nageur but its weirdness is more confined within the schematic narrative than in the later film. Once again we have a truly askance comic worldview at play: the film follows humble baker Jacques Dufilho as he systematically executes all 9 members of the jury that convicted his son of murder in a variety of Wile E Coyote ways. But the only real moments of humor that work here are the couple of fake-outs when Trintignant focuses on the seeming murder set-up and then undercuts it, with the rest suffering from admirable but unsuccessful oddness that never overcomes itself. Some feeble attempts at meta-humor (The radio DJ in Vittorio Caprioli's car announces that the song playing is his death tune from Une journée bien remplie, Doniol-Valcroze pops up as the worst Hamlet I've ever seen, &c) fall mostly flat as well. If Truffaut couldn't get this kind of narrative to work five years prior, I don't know why anyone thought Trintignant had a better shot. However, both of Trintignant's works have one thing in common: I can not imagine how either received funding, because who is the audience for these movies?! (And along those lines-- why would KLSC license this one?)

Recall both highly enjoying and being dumbfounded by both of JLT's directed films, though its been a while and I don't recall a lot. Good excuse to revisit, I guess. I think I tagged Une journée bien remplie as "a giallo as directed by Tati", which I guess is catchy if not entirely accurate. As for "how they got funded", it seems to be almost a tradition that acclaimed French actors manage to get a shot or two at direction if they want. Maybe it is a way of keeping 'em sweet, or a hope that the prestige they have accrued in the acting field will rub off and attract viewers, who knows. What struck me is that most of the results are, well, "actorly", in the Cassavettes mode (Jean-Francois Stevenin and Anna Karina's films spring to mind, and I like those too). But that is not one tiny bit the case with Trintignant's bizarre pair.