Bacri the grump? Bacri the human being!

File «Tribute to Jean-Pierre Bacri»

«The most famous of French bougons has gone,» read a number of headlines. Well, yes and no. For if a grump, a gronchon or a grognon is someone who grumbles more than he should, Jean-Pierre Bacri grumbled just enough. A master of minimalist acting, he embodied all that is most normal: the human being himself, with all his paradoxes and tragic beauty. A tribute to him.

He was one of those actors who looked like the man in the street. Of course, the likes of Gérard Jugnot and Denis Podalydès are still around to embody the Everyman, i.e. we But Jean-Pierre Bacri was something special. This undoubtedly explains the unanimous praise for his career at the time of his death. There almost always is when people die, but even for a man like Johnny Hallyday, who was the beneficiary of a national tribute, there were people who said: «I, Johnny, never found anything for him». For Bacri, no.

Read also | Tribute to Jean-Philippe Smet

Some people didn't know Bacri when they first saw his face on the cover of a newspaper. And if we've chosen to put him on the front cover of our March issue, it's to show that his talented achievements in French cinema deserve to be honored in a magazine, even if it's run by young people, even if it's only a few weeks after his death. Because there's always an excuse to praise the memory of geniuses and good people. And great artists are timeless.

How to sum up his filmography? First of all, he has been nominated six times for the César for Best Actor, which is quite a feather in his cap. His humility in front of the camera is even classier. The secret of his acting, deployed in dozens of films? His deep understanding and empathy with his characters. You can see it, you can hear it, you can feel it.

The secret to his vision of cinema? Complicity, this time with real people. Agnès Jaoui in particular, with whom he has written nine screenplays, five of which she directed and in which he acted. And excellently too. These include, Le Goût des autres, reviewed in this dossier by Lauriane Pipoz, was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Film in 2001. As for Like an image, won the Screenplay Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

But one of his best films is the recent Public square (2018), reviewed again in this issue. Bacri plays a cynical TV host, reminiscent of the best of them all, Thierry Ardisson. And I can't resist mentioning Kitchen and Outbuildings (1993), because it's hard to save a turnip on its own. A film starring Bacri is «a Bacri». Those are far too few words to describe such talent. But it's all in his films. Monsieur Bacri, bravo and thank you.

Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Frenetic Films