Carla Bruni: “My life itself is composed of several facets”
“I have always been a rebel.
At the same time, I am someone who knows how to adapt – which is not contradictory.
Through my job, I understood very quickly, for example, that it was completely useless to try to rebel against a public image, against a double who follows you (almost an avatar) over whom we have little, if any, knowledge. no control at all.
My rebellion then consists of keeping a separate dimension, which belongs only to me.
I have a secret life and I like mystery.
I have a unique relationship with public image, undoubtedly because modeling gave me access to this status of representation at a very young age.
What is daunting is crossing the rubicon of notoriety.
You have to prepare yourself for a certain dystopia and decide if you are ready to live your life with this public image.
I accepted it, just as I understood that my image was my servant, not my master.
She is not the one who sets the tone.
It's just a reflection.
I have had enough years of therapy not to be sensitive to the myth of Narcissus, who prefers his image to himself and dies as a result.
The story of Narcissus involves identity and otherness: he discovers his image in the mirror of a body of water and becomes dependent on it.
He no longer accepts the recognition of others, prefers appearance to reality, and he is trapped.
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I don't have multiple identities, but I have a multi-faceted life, which has sometimes been seen as a rebellion in itself.
Somehow, I have always led a double life: I have two countries, two cultures, two languages, two fathers, two names, two jobs.
I never thought I had to choose between my career in fashion and that of a songwriter and performer.
I think people who like my music don't care about my image.
Many are interested in what I create;
others are more interested in my public persona.
Still others like to predict my possible crashes, but I don't pay attention to it.
I rebel against malevolence, I don't listen to it.
That doesn't mean I'm not scared to death when I go on stage.
I seek to give the best of myself, this secret, and necessarily vulnerable part.
My mirror is then the public, but it is real.
He often returns to me a kindness of soul that I love infinitely and that we all need.
What matters to me is going to people and having them come to me.
The worst thing is indifference.
I have always rebelled against this state of anesthesia.”
Vincent Perez: “Playing a woman and emancipating myself from myself”
Actor Vincent Perez at the world premiere of
Napoléon
at Salle Pleyel (Paris, November 14, 2023.) Corbis via Getty Images
“Getting off the beaten track to explore virgin territories and experience unusual, dizzying sensations is a rebellious act.
Rebellion is synonymous with audacity for me.
I experienced it when Patrice Chéreau asked me to play the role of Viviane, a transsexual, in
Those Who Love Me Will Take the Train
(1998).
I played for the first time dressed and styled as a woman, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant.
But I didn't experience it as a disguise.
I have always had something androgynous, a feminine sensitivity.
Abel Ferrara, in fact, had offered me a similar role, alongside Christopher Walken, a few years earlier, but the film was not made.
So I jumped at the chance when Chéreau called me.
We spent an evening transforming me to see if the result was suitable.
Chéreau exclaimed: “Viviane is born!”
I remember staying alone in the room for hours, observing this strange metamorphosis.
For months, I lived in Viviane's skin, in total immersion.
I changed my voice, I learned to put on makeup, to walk in heels and to live in Viviane's head.
Once off the set, my transformation continued.
In addition to my job as an actor, I am a photographer.
So, every evening, I sat in front of a mirror and took a photo of myself to examine the evolution of my facial features and expressions.
Until the end of filming, I was Viviane, even off set.
I deviated from masculine codes to discover what was most feminine in me.
I observed the world differently: I listened to others with more attention and empathy.
Also read: Vincent Perez: “When I was young, I was terrified of disappointing my father”
I had long conversations with Jean-Louis Trintignant and we both seemed to forget that I was not a woman.
My favorite outfit as Viviane was a black blouse worn with a knee-length burgundy leather skirt.
I have bowed legs and I remember that by crossing them so that the movement was prettier, I could no longer walk.
I shaved my body and it took me a long time to find the right lipstick.
But it wasn't just the physical aspect.
I did a lot of research, reading books and watching documentaries about transitioning as a trans person.
I took a tour of destinies which moved me enormously and which I understood the need to correct the terrible “error”, that of a body which did not correspond intimately to what they were.
The transition requires infinite courage.
Viviane played a very important role in my career.
I come from a rigid Spanish Catholic upbringing and feeling this great femininity exacerbated in me was a rebellious gesture, a way of daring and emancipating myself from myself.
I think we are too much in control of our masculine and feminine parts, which prevents us from revealing ourselves fully to others.”
Vincent Perez is starring in
Boléro
, by Anne Fontaine.
Olivia Ruiz: “At 17, I sang in a rock-punk band”
Olivia Ruiz during the 39th Victoires de la Musique ceremony (Paris, February 9, 2024.) Corbis via Getty Images
“When I turned 17, it was 1997. Six years before the release of my first album, and I didn't imagine for a moment that one day I would be successful.
Every evening, I sang in a bar, accompanied by Frank Marty, a musician who is always by my side on stage.
During the day, I was a cleaning technician (I cleaned the toilets and showers of the premises) and in the evening, I got into my Ford Fiesta to go train my skills and perform in this little place on the water's edge which is called Le Bleu, on the beach of La Franqui, near Narbonne, where I grew up.
I smile fondly as I think back to those years.
We formed a rock-punk band called Five, which perfectly reflected my state of mind at the time.
I was against everything and terribly angry.
To describe me, my father often said: “Olivia is a skinned soul.”
What I discovered about the adult world made me nauseous.
I was almost of college age and realized that there weren't enough places for everyone at university.
A large number of my friends, who accessed it by merit, were unable to find accommodation, even with the APL.
We knew that our parents were going to have to sacrifice themselves for us and deprive themselves of everything.
It was driving me crazy.
To describe me, my father often said: “Olivia is a skinned soul.”
Olivia Ruiz
At 17, I discovered guilt.
I found small jobs and an apartment, which was a chicken coop.
In the evening, I sing verses by García Lorca and covers of Serge Gainsbourg or Édith Piaf in punk version, with a muscular, frontal voice, as high and loud as possible.
I also wear clothes that match this sound: black leather biker jacket, neon yellow platform shoes and hair dyed neon pink.
I was terribly stubborn, a born disobedient, and I knew that no one was going to be able to lock me into the narrow box that society had designed for me.
Today, I feel in harmony with the 17-year-old girl in the photo, in search of uncompromising purity.
It is always in me, because “I am gifted with an absurd sensitivity, what scratches others tears me apart”, as Flaubert wrote to George Sand.
She sometimes looks at me with a certain disapproval and calls me “bourgeois”, because I live in Montmartre.
But we can be proud of each other because I have made a point of remaining simple, humble, never cut off from the world.
And finally, this teenager runs through my new album entirely and emerges in the title song,
La Réplique
: “I am one of those who swim against the tide / Who refuse the direction of the wind / The one that no one can catch / Nor try to 'to jail.""
New album:
La Réplique
, Glory Box Music.
Olivia Ruiz will be in concert at the Olympia, in Paris, on November 20.
Bertrand Burgalat: “I indulged in desperate activism”
Bertrand Burgalat at the Un Rien C'est Tout Gala, at the Musée de l'Armée (Paris, March 7, 2024.) Corbis via Getty Images
“I became annoying from the mid-1970s, systematically going against my parents and their advice.
The generational conflict was exacerbated at the time, I was zealous.
I had just become diabetic and, after realizing that the medical injunctions on the subject were unrealistic, I had gradually started doing anything, drinking, smoking, alternating between ketoacidoses, comas and hypoglycemia, driving from the age of 11 on small mountain roads, shooting pistols in the forest.
At 17, having passed the baccalaureate between two drunken years, I shifted gears by devoting myself to desperate political activism.
I had found, with the solidarists, a family: three years earlier, one of them, Alain Escoffier, had set himself on fire in the Aeroflot hall to the cry of “communist murderers”, others had gone to distribute leaflets and Solzhenitsyn's books on Red Square, before supporting Massoud in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion.
What attracted me was an anti-materialist revolt, a disinterested commitment, because there was only hassle involved, probably also a dark romanticism which was not exercised at the expense of others, punctuated by maxims of José Antonio Primo de Rivera such as “Life is not worth living except to burn it in the service of a great cause”, or “We want a difficult paradise”.
At 11, I was doing anything, drinking, smoking, and alternating with ketoacidosis.
Bertrand Burgalat
My family, terrified, explained to me that this commitment would continue with me all my life.
But this threat of social suicide tended to galvanize me: raised in the cult of the Resistance, I did not understand that career calculations were opposed to what seemed to me a duty.
Even today, this distant past is invoked when people seek to discredit me.
I have no nostalgia for this not particularly happy moment in my life, but very little remorse: it was the best part of me that was at work.
From these years I retain a total absence of prejudice and judgment based on family, social or cultural origins, because there was, paradoxically, among the people to whom I felt closest, a kindness and an open-mindedness that I rarely encountered them in the professional circles that I frequented subsequently.
My father died in 1983, my mother twenty-two years ago.
Now there's not a thing I do that they wouldn't approve of, I even do inhalations when I have a cold.
But I would have preferred that they saw this while they were alive and that they did not suffer from my ingratitude.
I hope they still read
Le Figaro,
because I would like them to know that.”
Bertrand Burgalat will be in concert at the Petit Bain, in Paris, on May 15.
Tatiana de Rosnay: “Empowering my white mane”
Tatiana de Rosnay attends the La Closerie Des Lilas Literary Awards, (Paris, April 18, 2023.) Shootpix/ABACA
“My first revolt took shape at the age of 20, when I moved to England to study literature.
The students at my university, located in Norfolk, in the north-east of the country, had little in common with the bourgeois environment of the chic Parisian or English neighborhoods where I had grown up.
Most of them were artists with non-conformist looks, in line with the punk rock codes of the 1980s. My first act of rebellion was to challenge my look as a demure young girl.
I started wearing a black leather jacket with Fuck the Queen on the back, razor blade necklaces, black nail polish and outrageous makeup.
At the end of my studies, in 1985, I was hired by a large Parisian auction house.
By day, I was the preppy girl and by night, I was running around the nightclubs in punk outfits.
My first act of rebellion was to challenge my demure girl look
Tatiana de Rosnay
Already at that age, I had gray hair – the first white strands grew when I was 19.
At 30, I did my first full dye to cover them.
It was awful.
It was above all a losing battle, because my white hair grew back quickly... For ten years, I submitted to this tyranny.
At 40, I decided to let my white hair grow.
My husband loved my “pepper & sex” hair, as he called it.
But most people thought they aged me horribly and were a symbol of sloppiness.
I felt enormous pressure on my age and these judgments hurt me, especially since I still had everything to prove – I was not yet a recognized writer.
Despite everything, I decided to accept my choice.
The fear of age is so present in our society that it dictates our most intimate choices.
Even when, at 46, I published
Her Name was Sarah,
the book that revealed me to the public, my family, very focused on appearance, advised me to dye them to appear on TV.
I resisted.
I don't wear my white hair like a flag to which we should adhere, but it has constituted my identity for twenty years and I am proud of it.
I am 62 years old and I find that my rebellious white hair is taking on an increasingly beautiful light.
This rebellion gave me strength within myself.
Before, I wanted to match codes.
Even during my punk days, eventually I wore some sort of uniform.
This white mane allowed me to embrace myself as I am, while being extremely flirtatious.”
She has just published
Poussière blonde
(Éditions Albin Michel.)