Jean-Pierre Darroussin has enhanced - and in some cases stolen - some seventy odd movies in the last 30 years, quietly racking up excellent character studies and when offered the chance to 'carry' a major movie - Feux Rouges - he was more than up to the task and succeeded brilliantly. Now he has directed his first full length feature (following and Award Winning Short some years ago) and like another illustrious actor, Gerard Jugnot, he has also written (or co-written) it and plays the leading role. To say he pulls off all three roles wonderfully is to understate. This is a small masterpiece and it was both a pleasure and a privilege to shake his hand at the screening which he attended (and which, in their wisdom, both the BFI and Cine Lumiere had omitted to mention in their respective Brochures). Darroussin has saddled himself with one of the trickiest characters an actor can play, a 'decent' man, the kind perhaps embodied by Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird and by coincidence both characters are lawyers, but whilst Peck - who was, it must be repeated, absolutely brilliant - had a high-profile court case to showcase his innate decency Darroussin has much less to work with playing out his life in an unfashionable area of Paris and performing good deeds which are deliberately misinterpreted so that he winds up almost as a neighborhood Monsieur Hire thanks largely to the poisonous tongue of his fellow screenwriter Valerie Stroh who brands him a pervert. The character, recently divorced, has chosen to virtually cut himself off from his family who are suitably and snobbishly horrified at his new apartment, and dispense more or less free legal advice and even lend money to deadbeat clients, one of whom proceeds to beat up his wife who winds up in hospital and with himself in the slammer it falls upon Darroussin to house the teenage daughter of the marriage. He does all this with no reservations, acting almost trance-like, never doubting that he is doing the 'right' and/or 'christian' thing for which, of course, he must be punished. Darroussin is in almost every scene and displays remarkable assurance and control, contriving to bring glowing oils to what is essentially a water colour pastel. It is to be hoped that the writing-acting-directing team of Darroussin and Stroh continue in this vein with as much success as Jaoui and Bacri with whom, on this showing, they must now be favourably compared.
Review of Le pressentiment
