Benjamin Sire is a composer and journalist. His latest album, Electronica Cinematic was released on April 8.
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And then suddenly the light went out.
Already the heat had washed out the brightness of the day, but then, without warning, black and white filled the room at the same time as evening fell.
The political articles in preparation fly away.
Ridiculous appear these elections which take all the time of the journalist.
Anecdotes are the Matignon desires of one, the panics of the other.
Jean-Louis Trintignant is dead.
Me too, a little tonight.
91 years old?
Normal.
That's life, you tell me.
Yes maybe.
But no.
No.
That's not life, that's not normal.
Because life was Trintignant.
Life.
Its charm with an Italian accent.
The total charm of the one whose shyness could make him consider that he had none, when he embodied it entirely.
The charm, the discretion?
Perhaps, but on the sole condition that they are accelerators of life, accelerators period.
Because it takes charm, calm, control to live 100 lives in the cinema and risk losing as many at the wheel of racing cars including his uncles, including Maurice "Pétoulet" Trintignant, the first French rider to win the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix gave him the virus.
Like my father, his friend at Lelouch, passed it on to my brother, Antoine, and to myself.
A demonetized boomer thing, even if you have to know how to separate the speed from the thermal.
We assume.
The tenderness of Trintignant burst the screen, since his youth, and even more later, when the man had abandoned the suspicion of ambiguity which sometimes ran through his gaze.
Benjamin Sir
All Trintignant, in what he figures for us - figured, sorry -, is in this sequence of
A man and a woman
, where Antoine (six years old at the time), his son in the trilogy closed at the Cannes Film Festival 2019 by the presentation of
The Most Beautiful Years of a Life
, is driving the famous Mustang from the film (which was actually our father's), pretending to drive, while the hilarious Jean-Louis urges him to be careful.
Everything is in the lightness of this soul feigning heaviness, in the burst of laughter of an introspective, in the sudden liveliness of a famous drawl.
Jean-Louis, Antoine.
Antoine, Jean-Louis?
And Anouk.
And Claudius.
But Jean-Louis, Antoine.
We speak.
I know his pain very well.
No coincidence that the two lascars have turned their destiny towards the meanders of the Gard countryside (near their origins), where the sun beats so hard on the limestone growths, that gestures and words only agree to be produced if they are essential.
Charm, discretion, raw truths.
Three times, therefore, Jean-Louis was your father, my Antoine.
And all your life in parallel, car, cinema, humanism, you walked in his footsteps;
just as tormented in your heart of hearts as he was affable and facetious in your surface commerce, when he carried the enigma in his shy face and the fantasy in his heart.
Three times, therefore, Jean-Louis was your father, my Antoine.
As you say, "
according to Lelouch's method, he fully settled into his role as father during the filming in 1965 and therefore in 2018, as in 1986, it was almost natural for me to testify in front of the camera at this fragile man the tenderness of a son.
" Tenderness ?
Again my friends, it is the other word that defines you.
And that of Trintignant burst the screen, since his youth, and even more later, when the man had abandoned the suspicion of ambiguity which sometimes ran through his gaze.
Then the tenderness splashed on the screen in front of the camera of a Haneke turning
Amour
, this jewel of middle age, and again facing that of Claude Lelouch, the red thread of his career, when released
The Most Beautiful Years of a life
, which earned his team a
standing ovation
moved in Cannes.
As if Lelouch, whose attempts oscillate so well between shipwreck and suspended moment of grace, knew that day that it was not necessary to miss.
And probably never has he been so simple, so stripped down, with this intimate film at will, in which Antoine, an accomplished son, seeks to reweave the loving ties of a father on the threshold of death and oblivion, with that , Anouk Aimée, whom he has dreamed of since their aborted love story half a century earlier.
Comrade nostalgia!
And there again it is a word for Trintignant.
Jean-Louis Trintignant is dead and here he is relieved of the burden that we all know and of which he said something like: “to grow old?
It's learning to watch your friends die.
Benjamin Sir
Nostalgia, the one that surfaces without remission in the look as in the voice, as if even the present were a memory, as if even the present were an abandonment.
As if every day Brigitte Bardot/Juliette from
And God...created woman
went dancing from arm to arm wringing the heart of poor Jean-Louis/Michel, as if each moment were capable of reviving the sickly shyness that had made the man and to make everything impossible.
Yet it was this shyness of Jean-Louis Trintignant that opened all the doors to him.
Finally, especially the fight he led against her and whose constancy ends up making him the quintessence of the actor.
The actor, the one who can flee what he is thanks to the shell offered by the role;
the actor, the one who can make fun of reality while sublimating it;
the actor, the one who can forget where he comes from by drowning in the scenario that describes where he is going.
And where he comes from, from this family where collaborative trials and heroic resistance fighters mingle, from this family which sums up the great History, and the small arrangements of the soul, Jean-Louis Trintignant will make it the burden and the engine of his life.
Because he knew too well the man and the transience of his decency, the ugliness of collective hysteria, the dramas that stick to your skin until the grave – and a mixture of anger and modesty here makes us voluntarily ellipsis the death of his daughter, Marie -, the "
derision of us derisory
that Souchon sings.
Enough to do the "
Baufaron
" and flee to other lives, made of boards and film, costumes and make-up.
So this is it.
Jean-Louis Trintignant is dead and I fear, in any case, that the era no longer has the human means to confront such timid giants, so much does it exalt cheeky pettiness.
Jean-Louis Trintignant is dead and here he is relieved of the burden that we all know and of which he said something like: “to
grow old?
It's learning to watch your friends die
.
Yes.
And I'm getting old, and Antoine, Claude, and Anouk are getting old, and all together, whether he really was or through the screen, we saw a friend die.
