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Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel's shadow, dies

2021-02-09T14:11:06.151Z


A fundamental figure in the cinema of the second half of the 20th century, the screenwriter of 'Belle de jour' or 'The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie' has died at the age of 89


The French scriptwriter and playwright Jean-Claude Carrière, known for his collaborations with Luis Buñuel for almost two decades, died this Monday at the age of 89.

He died while he slept at his home in Paris, a mansion hidden in an unsuspected corner of Pigalle, a neighborhood of vineyards and then cabarets, which in a long time housed a brothel and even the Toulouse-Lautrec workshop.

There he lived surrounded by memories, by photographs - the staircase was dominated by an image of the lunch in honor of Buñuel in 1972, with Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and George Cukor among the attendees - and the works of art he collected.

Also hundreds of papers that he kept methodically in cardboard boxes, in which he wrote down an interesting idea, a memorable phrase, the outlines of a possible character.

Carrière was not afraid of the blank page: when it appeared, he would open one of those files, extract a page at random and let luck guide him.

A method inherited from the surrealists, who influenced him so much, which he used to avoid the cold domain of good sense.

With Buñuel things were not very different.

To write the six scripts they signed together, which would lead to films like

Belle de jour

(1967),

The Milky Way

(1969),

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

(1972),

The Phantom of Freedom

(1974) and

That Dark Object of Desire

(1977), they sat face to face for two months, threw ideas on the fly, and gave each other three seconds to decide if they were good or bad, without justification and with instinct as the only pattern.

Their meeting took place at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, when Buñuel was looking for a screenwriter to co-write

Diario de una camarera

, with whom he would return to France three decades after

The Golden Age

.

The complicity between the two, despite their 30-year difference, was immediate.

Until the end of his life, Carrière continued to consider him a teacher.

“For many years, in the face of any difficulty, I have kept asking myself what Buñuel would do.

A true teacher continues to be after he dies ”, he assured in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2015.

Jean-Claude Carrière: "With Buñuel, a day without laughing was a day wasted"

Interview with the French screenwriter and playwright (2015)

Together they managed to transform the prevailing codes in dramatic writing, still slaves of the nineteenth-century theater.

Carrière believed, for example, that the characters had subconscious.

An author should never try to control them, but rather allow them to take incongruous paths.

He used to quote Pirandello, who once responded in this way to the actress who reproached him for the inconsistencies of her character: “And what does he tell me?

I am only the author ... ”.

A quote that he liked for its implicit modesty: Carrière, little given to talking about himself, turned down several honors, such as entering the French Academy, and had the honorary Oscar that he was awarded in 2014 hidden in a closet in his dining room .

"It is not a question of exhibiting it either," he justified himself.

On that occasion he took advantage, despite everything, to vindicate his trade, which he considered "despised" in the seventh art.

“The scriptwriters are shadows in the history of cinema.

Often times, the screenwriter has been perceived as a wretch who aspires to cut the director's wings ”, he affirmed.

A stellar screenwriter, Carrière embodied an exception in French cinema, so marked by the model imposed by the

nouvelle vague

, where the director was always the author of the film.

Born in 1931 in Colombières-sur-Orb, halfway between Montpellier and Toulouse, he grew up in a humble home where Occitan was spoken, in a house of austere winegrowers who lived “without books and without images”.

His father's heart disease made them leave the countryside and move to Montreuil, a Parisian suburb where his family ran a modest café frequented by artists and gypsies, which would inspire his first novel,

Lézard

(1957).

There he met musician Joseph Reinhardt, Django's brother, "the first incredible meeting of my life."

The second would be Pierre Étaix, master of French comic cinema and close collaborator of Jacques Tati, who proposed that he adapt the films

Mr. Hulot's Vacation

and

My Uncle

in novel format.

With Étaix, for his part, he won an Oscar for best short film for

Heureux Anniversaire

in 1962. It would be the beginning of a long career in which he accompanied directors such as Louis Malle (

Milou in May

), Jacques Deray (

The pool

), Milos Forman (

Valmont

), Marco Ferreri (

Liza

), Jean-Luc Godard (

Hail who may, life

), Andrzej Wajda (

Danton

), Volker Schlöndorff (

The Tin Drum

), Nagisa Oshima (

Max, my love

), Patrice Chéreau (

The meat of the orchid

) and Carlos Saura (

Antonieta

).

Already in its final stretch, he collaborated with Fernando Trueba (

The artist and the model

), Michael Haneke (

The white ribbon

), Jonathan Glazer (

Birth

), Julian Schnabel (

Van Gogh, at the gates of eternity

), Philippe Garrel (

Lover for a day

) and his son Louis (

A faithful man

).

In addition, he signed the adaptations of

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

, based on the novel by Milan Kundera, which many considered impossible to take to the cinema, and

Cyrano de Bergerac

, in the version of Jean-Paul Rappeneau that starred Gérard Depardieu in 1990.

To that list of film credits, which encompassed almost 150 titles, we should add his long career in the theater, in which he signed texts such as

L'aide-mémoire

, a play written for Delphine Seyrig, or

La controversia de Valladolid

, with the debate of the colonial heritage as a backdrop.

Carrière made history at the 1985 Avignon Festival with

Mahabharata

, a nine-hour epic based on Hindu mythology, which he considered his most difficult work.

It was also the highlight of his collaboration with theater director Peter Brook, the longest of his career, which lasted 34 years.

He remembered that, after the premiere in the Provencal city, people stopped him on the street.

“But they didn't say 'bravo', but 'thank you', which always seems to me to be symptomatic of a true success,” said Carrière.

  • Carrière and the polysemy of semen

It would be the greatest exponent of his taste for oriental cultures, dating back to the days when he was a kid glued to geography atlases and Tintin comics, whose peasant parents were generous enough to let him place a Buddha in it. Christmas nativity scene.

He continued working with that figurine presiding over his office and, every time he returned to the family home in that town of 500 inhabitants lost in the mountains, he greeted him by placing his forehead against that of the spiritual leader.

Married to the Iranian writer Nahal Tajadod, Carrière was also a great adept of yoga, who continued to practice in recent years, his health already weakened by a heart operation in 2015 that left this masterful screenwriter between life and death, who had the talent to turn worms into butterflies.

His last wish was to be buried in the cemetery of his hometown, 250 meters from the house where he was born, like the prodigal son who, after discovering the world and leaving his mark on it, ends up returning home.

“I have been to magical places with magical people.

Surely there is no life after death, but I fix that there is a life before death, and we have to build it as rich as we can, ”he said at the San Sebastian Festival in 2011.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2021-02-09

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