1970, the dark year of Jean-Louis Trintignant

“Trintignant, complex actor” (4/6). In this year 1969, the day after a Cannes triumph, with three films in the selection and the prize for best actor for Z, Jean-Louis Trintignant estimates, at almost 40 years old, that he must modify his software. Rome remaining his center of gravity, rotating there at an intense pace, he delivered his plan of action to his Italian agent. Everything is going well, he tells her, except that by continuing like this he risks taking himself seriously. The actor then formulates a baroque request: “I would like to make the dumbest film ever. »

Docile, the agent of Trintignant sends him the scenario of So sweet, so perversea giallo, a specifically Italian genre at the crossroads of film noir, horror and eroticism. A husband abandoned by his wife takes a mistress, who tells him that he is going to be murdered. Trintignant wanders in the film directed by Umberto Lenzi with a shotgun, in front of two starlets, one Italian, Erika Blanc, the other American, Carroll Baker, formerly the headliner of babydoll, by Elia Kazan. The French actor stays dressed. His female partners most often evolve naked. “This film is the lowest you can imaginenotes Trintignant. But it put my head back together. »

Read the obituary: Bernardo Bertolucci, the filmmaker of transgression, is dead

He is an actor with square brains who welcomes Bernardo Bertolucci, a young 28-year-old director, to his Roman home in the 16th vicolo delle Orsoline. Trintignant has little time to give him. He feels so at home, on the top floor of a building he adores, with its ocher terraces, from where he could touch the top of the column of the piazza di Spagna and the stars. At night, he gets into the habit, when it’s too hot, of dragging a mattress to sleep in the open air and read poetry. He consented to this appointment to please a mutual friend, the critic and film historian Claudio Masenza. Trintignant opens his door out of politeness. Thinking quickly to return to his terrace.

He has not seen any of Bertolucci’s previous four films, including the most recent, The Spider’s Strategy, not yet released in theaters. He knows that his visitor is the son of the poet Attilio Bertolucci and that he also writes poetry. He still knows that the young filmmaker wants to adapt The Conformist, the novel by Alberto Moravia. He has not read the novel, which remained confidential when it was published in 1951. He finally knows that Bertolucci, since he was 20, has been part of Moravia’s close guard, dining regularly with him and his wife, the novelist Elsa Morante , and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose assistant he was on Accattone (1961).

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