DISAPPEARANCE – A contemporary of the New Wave, he distinguished himself by his whimsical spontaneity and his unconventional character. In 2019, it was the subject of a major retrospective at the Cinémathèque.
“Not to climb very high, but all alone »liked to quote Michel Deville. Born on April 13, 1931 in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), the director died in his sleep at home on February 16, at the age of 91. “I always had fun”, he repeated. He leaves about thirty films, often adaptations of books, and in various registers. “The charm of this job is to have no rules”, affirmed this classical music lover who wished never to “start again” what he had already done. Always attentive to what was happening around him. Considering that it was necessary to give, even “a little sacrifice” At the movie theater.
He presented himself as stubborn, stubborn and courageous in the field of the seventh art and he indeed “sacrificed” a lot. The son of a father who made flower pots, the young Michel Deville stumbled upon the forest setting that Alexandre Trauner had imagined for Juliette or the Key to Dreams, by Marcel Carne. Amazed, the boy rushes to the Cinémathèque, devours hundreds of films, before becoming the first assistant of a benevolent Henri Decoin. In seven years, they will co-sign thirteen films including Razzia on the chnouf (1954), Shepherdess Follies (1956) and The cat, with Françoise Arnoul as a resistant during the Second World War in 1958.
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That year, Michel Deville embarked on the production of a first feature film with Charles Gérard (the future friend of Jean-Paul Belmondo), a thriller, A bullet in the barrel. Then, works with Nina Companeez, the daughter of screenwriter Jacques Companeez who will co-write his screenplays for ten years. In 1960, he made alone Tonight or never, inspired by Marivaux.
To finance it, Michel Deville created his own production company (Éléfilm, because he loved elephants). The two accomplices will collaborate until 1971, often for whimsical and removed sentimental comedies: lovely liar, Benjamin or the Memoirs of a Virginwith Catherine Deneuve and Michèle Morgan, or The Bear and the Dollone of Brigitte Bardot’s last roles, Because, because of a woman. Raphael or the Debauchee, in which Françoise Fabian and Maurice Ronet are passionately in love with each other, is the last film of the duo (Jean Vilar is also part of the distribution).
Michel Deville enjoyed the company of women. Starting with his own, Rosalinde Deville, an extraordinary dialogue writer, who wrote about ten films with him. After Nina Companeez, the director digs a darker vein, films a suicide in The Woman in Blue (1973), another in The Rabid Sheep, taken from a novel by Roger Blondel, where Jean-Louis Trintignant becomes the puppet of Jean-Pierre Cassel (1974). Darker still is File 51a thriller based on the novel – ” a file “, corrected Deville – by Gilles Perrault, with François Marthouret and Didier Sauvegrain, shot with a subjective camera. An individual is crushed there by an implacable politico-bureaucratic machine (César for best screenplay, dialogues and adaptation 1978).
With Catherine Deneuve, at the evening of the Louis-Delluc prize which crowned Benjamin or the memoirs of a virgin in 1968. AGIP / Bridgeman Images
An attentive observer of human relations, the director expresses the difficulty of feelings through ambiguous and perverse characters. Isabelle Huppert and again Jean-Louis Trintignant play a dangerous game in deep waters, after Patricia Highsmith (1981). The art of lying and manipulation, sometimes a scent of scandal underlying The Paltoquet (1986) – his movie “the most personal” he assured – The Reader, who sees Miou-Miou reading Prévert and Sade (1988), or the famous Peril in the house (Caesar for Best Director 1986).
All my films, comedies like others more serious, even serious, have been games for me, with rules (…). And I often had fun making these rules as complex as possible, not to say the most restrictive, where else is the fun? Could this be my “perverse” side, a word that I have read a few times in the press?
For this latest adaptation of On earth as in heavenRené Belleto’s book, Michel Deville explained that after the failure of the Soft trip (1980) he had wanted to return to eroticism. The performance of a naked Nicole Garcia is remembered. Rosalind had advised him: “Take a naked man and woman in a room for a whole night, and there will be eroticism there. » Thus was born Summer night in town, with Marie Trintignant and Jean-Hugues Anglade as lovers of fusion (1990).
Demanding and precise, the filmmaker varied forms and registers, playing with cinematographic conventions. In Sachs Disease, adapted from the book by Martin Winckler, with Albert Dupontel as a doctor, he approaches madness (best director and best screenplay at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 1999). That year, Michel Deville chose to stop the cinema, but, in 2005, convinced by Emmanuelle Béart, he could not help but return to it with a vaudeville, A strings attached, of Feydeau.
“Picture and Word Hacker”
In a note of intent on the box set of his films released on DVD in 2008, the director mischievously confided: “All my films, comedies like others more serious, even serious, have been games for me, with rules (…). And I often had fun making these rules as complex as possible, not to say the most restrictive, where else is the fun? Could this be my “perverse” side, a word that I have read a few times in the press? »
Michel Deville had been writing poems since the age of 9, he had published several collections which he embellished with titles of his own: Zinopinated poems, Zimpromptu Poems, Words in the airto the very direct Take me (Le Cherche midi, 2014). He defined himself as a “image and word tinkerer”. “Poetry is a serious thing! »said this man with the rebellious lock who was perhaps not a poet, but a true lover, and images and words.
The burial of Michel Deville took place Monday, February 20 in Boulogne in the strictest privacy.
TO HAVE ALSO – Spanish director Carlos Saura has died at the age of 91