Marie Trintignant would have been 60 on January 21.
Eighteen years after his death under the blows of the singer Bertrand Cantat, his mother Nadine pays tribute to him in a poignant documentary on Arte.
From the first images, the film (broadcast live on January 26 on the channel and between January 19 and April 25 online) evokes the tragic end of the actress.
Read alsoJean-Louis Trintignant: "I can't get over the death of Marie"
"I wouldn't want her to get old (...). I believe that she should never die”
, launches her father Jean-Louis Trintignant, sacred monster of the cinema, looking at the camera.
"But I'm going to die and grow old
," says Marie, smiling.
"Alas Marie no, you haven't had time to grow old
," Nadine retorts in voiceover. She addresses her child as in a love letter: “Like so many battered women, you have received a first blow. When you wanted to leave this man, he persisted in destroying you, in erasing your beautiful face, in tearing you from life”.
The 87-year-old director never filmed again after her daughter's disappearance.
"I regret it today
," she told AFP.
I loved making movies
. "
“The last five films I made, I wrote and shot them with Marie
, she says.
Afterwards, I'm only going to write, I'm not going to shoot
.
His documentary is devoted almost exclusively to the career of his daughter, which began in a sensational way at the age of 17 in
Série Noire
by Alain Corneau, his stepfather, alongside Patrick Dewaere.
Nadine Trintignant explains that she did not want her daughter to be kept as the only image of a battered woman, who died at the age of 41 in Vilnius (Lithuania) in August 2003.
The impossible forgiveness
"It's a very happy documentary and only about the profession, because she didn't want any intrusions into her private life,"
she describes.
The four sons of Marie, born of four different fathers, are hardly mentioned.
On the other hand, we see a lot of directors, actors like Guillaume Depardieu, also deceased, with whom Marie shot three films, including
Comme elle respire
.
He launches that
“she is not boring like all the other actresses and that in addition she smells good”
.
Making this documentary
“brought me to see Marie laughing”
, says Nadine.
“I had not seen her for a very long time, even in film”
.
The director also addresses the death of her daughter Pauline at only nine months old when Marie was eight years old.
“You liked to hug her, you liked to laugh with her.
And then one dark day in Rome, impossible to tell you, your sister died
,” she said, in a voiceover.
"I would take a long time to understand that in a couple, when you lose a child, you no longer expect much from life"
, writes Nadine in a book dedicated to her first husband, Jean-Louis, entitled
C'est pour life or for a moment
, published in November 2021.
But, she assures him:
“You can live with an open wound.”
She does not want to hear about Bertrand Cantat, the singer of Noir Désir, sentenced to eight years in prison in Lithuania in 2003 for having dealt fatal blows to Marie, and released in 2007.
Contacted by AFP, Universal (which owns the catalog of Noir Désir and had released
Bertrand Cantat's solo album
Amor Fati in 2017, the last concert dates of which had been cancelled) refused to comment.
"It's out of the question for me to forgive him. True forgiveness is forgetting what has been wronged you. I will never forget, I can't, therefore I will never forgive
, says Nadine Trintignant.
I had never hated anyone in my life, I didn't know hate.
And hate is something excruciating to feel, which destroys you, which hurts you.
Now I know her”.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/S7ERVSCT4FUVX6R7TUVBDNTH5Y.jpg)
