Charles Berling fears the worst. The 66-year-old actor will be Bernard Montiel’s guest on RFM this Sunday June 16. For an hour, the headliner of Ridiculous will look back as much on his private life as on the highlights of his career, from his debut on the big screen in the 1980s to his last appearance on television in The Enchanter, lending his features to Romain Gary. The actor will also give his point of view on political issues. In an extract that Gala.fr has been obtained, we hear the star rant about the artist’s position within a society. His host actually reminds him that “in a statement, (he) said about Putin that he hunts artists like many dictators and that this is a first bad sign.”
“Of course !” exclaims Charles Berling in response. “We artists are here to open the mind, to make people understand that the world is never as simple as we believe, that it is complex and that is so much the better. Artists are not “lesson givers, as I often hear people say, it’s false. By nature, they want to open their own eyes to all the magnificent diversity that surrounds us.” declares Émilie Berling’s father with conviction. And to quote a sentence from Andrei Tarkovsky, that he “really like” and which summarizes his position: “Artists are not there to impose ideas, but they are there to prepare man for his own death. They irrigate his soul so that they turn towards good.”
Although he is wary of dictatorships, Charles Berling also takes a dim view of the capitalist trend that Western societies are taking: “Public services, whether hospitals, the army, justice or national education, are very undermined by a liberalism which tends to consider that everything must be private.” For the actor, the State must be strong enough to guarantee proper democracy. “Otherwise, we will fall into dictatorships and we will be told that only the money counts and that it is the law of the strongest,” he continued. As for the current context, marked by chaos following the dissolution of the National Assembly, the ex of Virginie Coupérie-Eiffel launches a clear observation… “I’m not here to whine, but here we are in a huge crisis”he concluded.
Charles Berling “scared” by “Putin’s dictatorship”
Charles Berling does not shy away from talking politics. Already in March 2022, in the run-up to the presidential election, he had demanded from Gala.fr his socialist ideas while warning against Vladimir Putin: “I see a dictatorship like that of Putin at the moment which has been established for 20 years, I find it frightening, including the Chinese Communist Party, so obviously I feel left-wing, in the sense that I would like democracy, of universalism, a certain number of values But afterward, what is the left today?
Photo credits: screenshot RFM