Wf you had to characterize Jean-Louis Trintingant in a single sentence, you could say: he was the star who didn’t care about his fame. Just the roles he turned down (e.g. in Bertolucci’s “Last Tango” and Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”) would have been enough for an entire film career. Festivals and award ceremonies were a nuisance to him, and he avoided his admirers. He retired from cinema at seventy, only to reluctantly and rarely return in front of the camera for a few immortal roles. At eighty-three, after Michael Haneke’s “Love”, for which he won the European Film Prize and the French César for best actor, it was finally over. But once again Haneke was able to persuade him. In “Happy End” he plays a patriarch, founder of a construction company, who wants to die. He approaches a few migrants on the street to ask them to help, but they balk at his grim determination. In the end, his granddaughter pushes him into the sea in his wheelchair. He smiles at it.
A brooder and a hesitant
The childhood from which this acting career grew cannot have been a happy one. Trintignant’s mother dressed him in drag for years because she didn’t want a second son. Then came the German occupation; the father, an industrialist, went to the Resistance, while the mother was publicly shaved at the end of the war because of a liaison with a German officer. At nineteen, after dropping out of law school, Jean-Louis Trintignant went to Paris to learn the art of the stage. At the same time he is studying at the film school: He wants to learn how to direct and instruct the actors. Nothing will come of it; the urge to play is stronger. In his early twenties he gets the heroic roles that suit his face, most notably Hamlet the Brooder and the Hesitater. In front of the camera, later, he will develop his hesitation to perfection: in “My Night at Maud’s” he shies away from sleeping with Françoise Fabian for an hour of filming, and in Truffaut’s “On Love and Death” he avoids Fanny Ardant around until he really can’t help but kiss her. Finally, in “Love” he hesitates for a long time until he presses the pillow on the head of his wife, who is suffering from terminal dementia, in order to save her. Indecisiveness is often annoying in movies. At Trintignant, it’s heartbreaking.
An affair with Brigitte Bardot, on the set and after the shooting of “And always lures women”, made him famous. But he didn’t want the fame or the woman everyone lusted after. After military service, which he served in Germany, he returned to the big screen in smaller but better films like Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso (which in German stupidly means In Love with Sharp Curves) and Murder Included in the Fare. from Costa-Gavras.
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