A Trio of Jean-Louis Trintignant by Norma De Guerre
Another Oscar season has come and gone. And wouldn’t you know, for all of Hollywood’s obsession with youth, attracting the eyeballs of youth, and hiring an Oscar host who is all about Youth (or at least being juvenile), guess which era ruled? I’ll give you a hint: you know it well. Admit it, you got a little misty when Barbra warbled “The Way We Were.” You know why it was a big deal for Dame Shirley Bassey to belt out, “Gold FINGAAHHHH.” Even if you didn’t personally partake, you really got the joke about Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and cocaine trees. And after all, it was our man Jack Nicholson who strolled out to present Best Picture. Oh, and that Best Picture? We’re old enough to remember watching Argo’s Iranian hostage drama unfold live on TV, and we’re old enough to remember how a well-crafted political thriller like Argo was the movie norm rather than the award-worthy exception. Alas, kids today…
The movie-mad boomers among us also probably loved seeing the stars of Michael Haneke’s tough, delicate, and heart-wrenching Best Foreign Language Film Amourwork their onscreen magic one more time. Emmanuelle Riva deservedly got many an award and nomination for her performance as the infirm wife, but let’s not forget her equally anguished screen husband Jean-Louis Trintignant. There was a time in the 1960s and 70s when he was the foreign cinema bomb. He was a tightly wound, golden-haired package of overt repression and hidden emotion, creating an indelible portrait of a deeply disturbed Fascist in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 art cinema gemThe Conformist. Even in an ensemble film like Costa-Gavras’s 1969 Oscar winner Z, Trintignant could still pop. He was that weirdly and counter-intuitively charismatic. Trintignant may have faded a little from American movie consciousness as he got older, but his presence in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1994 film Three Colors: Red still meant something. So when he came out of retirement to do Amour, some of us (okay, me) got a little verklempt.
Z, coincidentally, was also the very first foreign movie to score the double Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominations that Amour got. And it too won the Best Foreign Film statuette. What’s striking about re-watching it now isn’t just that it holds up. It’s also how relevant it still feels. Though the film is based on the 1963 assassination of pacifist Gregoris Lambrakis and the subsequent military junta in Greece, Greek expatriate Costa-Gavras and his writers neither identify the country nor name the main characters, turning the story into a universal warning against the threat posed by small groups of extreme right-wing nut fanatics with access to power. The moving camera, sharp editing, and location shooting pump up suspense as mysterious thugs pursue key witnesses; newsreel-style crowd scenes become threateningly chaotic, emphasizing the government’s collusion in the assassination. As the official investigator who’s supposed to just follow orders, Trintignant becomes a quiet seeker of justice among the noise and lies. All of the people around him yell, emote, and gesticulate, but he never does—his stillness among all that sound and fury gains force as the case unfolds. Despite his preference for darkened glasses, he’s the least shady government figure around. But in a world where the press’s thirst for sensationalism constantly threatens to trump the story, and working class male rage is exploited for political gain, “justice” faces a helluva challenge.
Trintignant’s Marcello Clerici is on the opposite side of the political fence in The Conformist. Adapting Alberto Moravia’s novel, Bertolucci turned the more straightforward book into a subjective, elliptical story about the psychological birth of a Fascist in pre-World War II Italy. Bertolucci uses flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks to reveal how Clerici is driven in the present by his sexually traumatizing past. The luscious cinematography lines Clerici in shadow stripes in his wife’s apartment, and overwhelms him in cold marble Fascist buildings and mental hospitals. His warped psyche is its own mad prison. And Trintignant strides through it all in turd-brown suits, never relaxing his tense demeanor even when his wife wants to lay him on a train. He’s so restrained that the few times emotions do break through become all the more devastating. And when he makes a crucial, life-negating discovery in the final scene, Trintignant’s response is both horrifying and utterly comprehensible.
Trintignant is still a bit of an oddball in Three Colors: Red. As an embittered, retired Swiss judge, his favorite pastime is eavesdropping on his neighbors’ phone calls. He also likes to keep all the rocks his neighbors throw through his windows in retaliation. But writer/director Kieslowski has more on his mind than an aging man’s eccentric isolation. From the opening shot, zooming through telephone lines for a call that ends in a busy signal, Kieslowski’s intricately structured narrative plays off connections missed, accidental and intended, seductively weaving a story of interlocking destinies among Trintignant’s unnamed judge, Irene Jacob’s aptly named model Valentine, and a young jurist. A wounded dog brings Valentine into the judge’s life, and she’s horrified by his blunt, seemingly amoral attitude towards both his pet and his hobby. But as they start to reveal their own stories of loss and loneliness, Valentine sees how Trintignant’s placid callousness is perhaps the calm, deeply felt acceptance that comes with age and wisdom. From the orange-amber lighting to the judge’s red-brown study and the enormous scarlet billboard of Valentine, Kieslowski infuses the film with the title color’s redemptive glow, lending emotional weight to the judge’s quiet transformation. The final film in Kieslowski’s trilogy afterBlue and White, Red’s ending brings together the trio’s loose themes of liberty (blue), equality (white), and fraternity (red) in a manner that leaves the stories hanging. But the final shot of Trintignant gazing out his window is a gorgeous, low-key sign that everything will be okay.
So if you’ve seen Amour and are wondering about Trintignant, or you just want to revisit some of his older movies, Z, The Conformist, and Three Colors: Red are all available on DVD on Netflix. Z and Three Colors: Red are also streaming on Hulu Plus. They, and he, are worth it.