No doubt he was missing this perspective. Narrating Gérard Depardieu without omitting anything about his obscene and odious behavior, nor his indictment for rape, but starting from the actor, his greatness but also his already precocious excesses, looking for the flaws and the great moments of change, well before the final fall.
There is an intelligence of the portrait in “A Very French Affair”, by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Samuel Blumenfeld, in this way of looking for the articulations of a life, and all the warnings never heeded. The red alerts first came from the United States, much less complacent than France in the early days of #MeToo, and even well before.
“A very French affair”, by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Samuel Blumenfeld. Albin Michel
On the set of “Green Card” (1990), with Andie McDowell, Depardieu did what he always did on the sets: he told an American woman that she had “superb breasts”. Except that the person concerned does not give up and gets angry. He takes it as “puritanism”. 1990, first change: while “Cyrano” by Jean-Paul Rappeneau is favorite for the Oscar for foreign film, everything collapses when an American journalist unearths an interview from 1978 in which the actor boasted of having participated, or “assisted”, according to the translation, in rapes at the age of 9, during his delinquent childhood in Châteauroux.
A kind of long process of self-destruction
Gérard Depardieu boasted a lot, even added a lot, according to his brother, but the writings remain. In January 1991, at the Golden Globes, he surprised Julia Roberts on the lips, in front of her then-fiancé Kiefer Sutherland. “Gégé”, they said at the time in France, but the Americans never wanted to hear about the cad “Depardiou” again.
A dozen years later, a second shift with the death of Guillaume, his son, at 37 years old. The actor from “Last Metro”, devastated, neglects himself, and drinks more and more, he who was already consuming several bottles a day. The cinema industry has always known that the ogre multiplies the “pouët pouët” by touching the breasts and the hands on the buttocks. But for a long time, he will continue to embody a certain image of France, its literary genius in Cyrano, its Gaulishness in Obélix.
Also read: A sacred monster that has become a “monster of obscenity”: Gérard Depardieu, the fall of an icon in three acts
However, the menhir is already crumbling. He is left twice, by Karine Silla, who confides that she never saw him “really happy for a single day”, then Carole Bouquet, two rocks. What the authors point out in no way tends to exonerate or mitigate the moral faults and sexual assaults of which Depardieu is accused. But to shed light on a sort of long process of self-destruction, which suddenly accelerated, like the hull of a boat ends up breaking, since his indictment for rape and the broadcast of the “Additional investigation » on his sickening comments throughout his filmed freewheeling trip to North Korea.
“A very French affair”, an allusion to Emmanuel Macron who defended the actor after the broadcast of the documentary, does not reveal a scoop but spends a life in the revealing bath of a photo: Depardieu was such as in himself, from start to finish. He made you laugh, he made you vomit. He did not understand. Because it is an entire society that can look at itself, grimacing, in this sequence of dates, of facts, of slippages over fifty years. If it was disgusting, it was a disgust that bothered an entire generation.
“A very French affair”,
by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Samuel Blumenfeld, Albin Michel, 178 p., 20.90 euros.