We all grew up with Bertrand Tavernier.
Mr. Cinema.
He was the symbol, the embodiment, the passion.
The director, who disappeared this Thursday at 79 years old in Sainte-Maxime (Var), had dealt with all the major genres in the American style.
This is because the author of "A Sunday in the Country" had been brought up at a good school.
Press officer of the great filmmakers across the Atlantic, he had interviewed them at length in “American Friends”, his bible.
Being the friend of John Huston, Elia Kazan or John Ford teaches you, obliges you, trains you, elevates you, transcends you.
Tavernier will have retained the taste of a cinema very anchored in the history, the adventure, the thriller, and the taste of the actors.
It was a figure that could be ominous.
Meeting Bertrand Tavernier was intimidating.
But he knew how to transmit a seventh art which has survived thanks to him: who else would have succeeded in great adventure films like “the Princess of Montpensier” (2010) or “the Daughter of d'Artagnan” (1994), resuscitating the swashbuckling cinema without anything academic, at a time when it had disappeared?
As in the irrespirable thriller "L.627" (1992), where we hold our breath from start to finish in this brigade which hunts down delinquency on a daily basis.
A spectacular, engaged, demanding and accessible cinema
Son of a writer and resistance fighter from Lyon, René Tavernier, Bertrand Tavernier had his first success with “l'Horloger de Saint-Paul” (1974), the beginning of a long collaboration with Philippe Noiret (“Let the Festival begin”, "The Judge and the Assassin", "Coup de torchon", "Life and nothing else", and this marvelous aging role in "the Daughter of d'Artagnan", where he plays the musketeer and old father of the heroine played by Sophie Marceau).
We smile just thinking about it, at this mix of “Three Musketeers” and “Twenty Years After”.
These films on horseback, bridle down, they are the French westerns, and Tavernier, a great admirer of Delmer Daves, the director of "the Broken Arrow" (1950), knew it very well.
A sacred revealer or accelerator of actors.
He loves them deeply and makes them see them differently.
It is in “Une Semaine de vacances” that we discover Gérard Lanvin in 1980. And apart from Pialat, who showed the darkness of Guy Marchand like him in “Coup de torchon”?
If he had a sense of the setting and panache of American cinema, he had also inherited the love of the great supporting roles of classic French cinema.
It is all these parts of history that he carried at arm's length.
In the 1970s, the public immediately praised him, but the comet tail of the New Wave prevented seeing its true modernity in resuscitating a spectacular, engaged, demanding and accessible cinema that we thought was dying.
His "American friends"
However, what love in his way of filming Sabine Azéma and Michel Aumont (and of course Louis Ducreux) in "A Sunday in the countryside" or of giving Philippe Torreton the screen setting he lacked in "Captain Conan" and “It starts today”.
Two fights: the real one, that of the war, and that of the school.
This great faithful before the Eternal offers Noiret and Azéma "Life and nothing else", still in the rubble of the First World War.
Tavernier as a sculptor of images mixes the story up to the most contemporary: in 1995, "The Bait", with Marie Gillain as the seductress of death, is inspired by a recent news item which shows the drift of a youth attracted to money with no more sense of the value of a man's life.
This premonitory film is one of the best of the witness Tavernier, polemicist, visionary of an era which slips more and more towards gratuitous and stylized violence.
The time of cynicism.
But he himself is already running elsewhere, in the dream of a real American film, "In the electric haze", shot in Louisiana with Tommy Lee Jones and John Goodman.
Tavernier surely touched his Grail there, joining more intimately his "American friends".
He became their peer and their equal.
Before switching back to the adventure film or the political satire of “Quai d'Orsay”.
Unclassifiable then, with a palette as varied as the great masters across the Atlantic that he revered, for whom signing a film in costumes, a western, a war film or a comedy is part of the profession and of his genius.
Huge ferryman at the head of the Lumière Institute in Lyon, of which he remained the president, we understand to what extent it is the boss of French cinema who has just disappeared.
A man of disheveled passion, venerated late, well of knowledge, swashbuckler.
A wonderful storyteller.