Filmmaker Michel Deville is dead

Master of the games of love and chance, Michel Deville had explored all genres (comedies, detective stories, behind closed doors, social films) and experimented with daring narrative modes. Born on April 13, 1931, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), the director died on February 16, at the age of 91, we learned from sources close to his entourage.

Son of a garden pottery manufacturer, Michel Deville has been playing with cameras since childhood and began studying literature at the Sorbonne. He dreams of interfering in the seventh art when the filmmaker Henri Decoin comes to buy flowerpots from his father. Michel Deville jumps at the chance and finds himself a trainee, then assistant, for twelve films, of the author of The Truth About Baby Donge (1951) and Razzia on the chnouf (1955).

Determined to become a director, he offers Eric Rohmer, whose articles he appreciates, to write his first film with him. Flattered, the latter replies that he himself is preparing his own prototype, The sign of the lion, which will be released in 1962. Deville will do business with an editor, Nina Companeez, who, by dint of giving him ideas, finds himself a co-screenwriter, particularly gifted for the dialogues. Deville and Companeez will collaborate for twelve films. Deville will then find another accomplice, costume designer, assistant, producer and co-screenwriter: Rosalinde Damamme, whom he will marry.

The complicity with Eric Rohmer, who appreciates his first feature film, Tonight or never (1961), earned him good treatment in the Cinema notebooks. “A first attempt, a master stroke”writes Jean Douchet, for whom, in Tonight or neverDeville “succeeds in this reputedly impossible alliance: a typically French comedy in an American comedy style”. For lovely liar (1962), where lying is celebrated as a morality of life (a theme that haunts the whole work), Luc Moullet underlines the audacity, the unusual character, the accuracy of the dialogues of this filmmaker in “craftsmanship”. The compliments will stop when Jacques Rivette replaces Rohmer as the magazine’s editor.

Sentimental educations

The failed association with Rohmer illustrates the particular position occupied by Michel Deville in French cinema. Contemporary of the New Wave, he never belonged to the movement. He was nevertheless a bit without being, in that he dared to film stories in a way different from the usual. Story of an evening with friends, Tonight or neverfor example, is set in a single set and is shot in a studio, which people in the Notebooks abhorred. But his originality, as he related in Positive (no. 699) is that, in this type of film, before, “the characters were tearing each other apart, everything was violent, dramatic and conflictual, we threw our four truths in our faces. In [s]we film, nothing happened voluntarily”. Deville decided that he would make a cinema different from that which he had known as an assistant.

Following the commercial failure ofBecause, because of a woman (1962), comedy with chases and tails, where the actor Jacques Charrier twirls from one woman to another, Michel Deville signs a number of films to repay part of his debts, including Lucky Jo (1964), with Eddie Constantine, a parody of popular thrillers, a meditation on the passage of time. And martin soldier (1966), where Robert Hirsch is a theater actor playing a German officer on D-Day, with twists à la To be or not to be, by Lubitsch.

He rediscovers his first inspiration (love initiation) with Benjamin or the memoirs of a virgin (1968), located in the XVIII^e century, where a young man (Pierre Clémenti) is surrounded by women in a castle in the countryside. Very inspired by Marivaux, in the spirit of the paintings of Fragonard and Watteau, this ode to licentiousness, to the games of love and chance, to gallant parties, parades maids and marquises, blasé Don Juans and pastoral damsels for a festival of false confidences, stolen kisses. Nina Companeez’s dialogues are chiseled, but Deville also teaches the art of keeping quiet, illustrating her devotion to caresses, the art of talking with her hands. “Put your hand on my cheek, slowly move down my neck, now let your hand down, again…”explains Francine Bergé to the young man to be fooled.

The same inspiration ten years later, in The gentle journey (1980), where two women tell each other their fantasies and help each other realize them: “Your lips caress the lips of the lady, you caress, you caress, the lady opens her lips…”, whispers Dominique Sanda to a shy teenager. The coherence of Michel Deville’s work, of which the elegance of the image, the refinement of the tempo, the charm of the interpretation has been much praised, is measured over these sentimental educations, as in a playful thriller, Bye Bye, Barbara (1969), wild entertainment, The Bear and the Doll (1970), where Brigitte Bardot, capricious socialite in a Rolls, pursues Jean-Pierre Cassel, a short-sighted and grumpy bohemian in a 2 CV. And a costume film, Raphael or the Debauchee (1971), evocation of an impossible passion, during the romantic century with Musset lace jabots, between a disenchanted dandy, a fan of alcohol and disreputable places (Maurice Ronet), and a desirable young widow (Françoise Fabian ).

“Cinema, for me, is always a game, a game of images, words, music, actors”, he said in 1978

The tone of Deville’s films without Nina Companeez becomes more serious, gritty, a bit disillusioned. He is more formal. The Rabid Sheep (1974) inaugurates a reflection on the art of its characters to stage their lives. Here, it is a cripple who manipulates a malleable being and lives through it, by proxy. The frustrated seducer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is the orchestrator of the seductions of his friend, who is his puppet (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an actor, a substitute hero. Same transfer of libido in The Reader (1988), where, paid to read erotic stories, a woman (Miou-Miou) bends to the fantasies of those who hire her, changing roles as she reads. In The Paltoquet (1986), we are immersed in the theatrical decor of the unconscious of a bistro owner, between dream and reality.

These variations are so many demonstrations that life is a game. The Bastard Apprentice (1977), where Robert Lamoureux, with a rascal banter, is a crook with panache. What brilliantly illustrates Peril in the house (1985), adapted from René Belletto, where the guitar teacher played by Christophe Malavoy believes he has mastered his destiny, but is manipulated by everyone, his student’s mother, the tyrannical husband, the voyeur neighbor, a hitman , fool’s game…

Stylist and virtuoso

The filmmaker himself made this playful philosophy his rule: “Cinema, for me, is always a game, a game of images, words, music, actors”he said in 1978 (Cinema 78, no. 236-237). Each of his films is a formal challenge: subjective camera in this clinical study of the universe of the intelligence services whose spies remain invisible that is File 51, adapted from Gilles Perrault (1978), and where everyone is subject to files, computerized reports; without dialogues in The Little Band (1982), one of whose children is deaf-mute; filled with erotic scenes without images in The gentle journey (1980); behind closed doors in real time Summer night in town (1990) ; soundtrack echoing the thoughts of the protagonists, doctor and patients, in Sachs Disease (1999).

Stylist and virtuoso, Deville’s cinema was full of camera movements, ellipses and subtle sequences. In deep waters, adapted from Patricia Highsmith, in 1981, the camera slides from a red apron thrown on a chair to a glass of tomato juice, black and white clothes of a woman at the keyboard of a piano. licentious symbols in Peril in the house : from the reflection of Anemone’s buttocks looking at herself in a mirror, we go to the shot of a glass of cognac, then, some time later, it is a glass of eau-de-vie that two lovers pass on to each other bed.

Michel Deville’s cinema was also a cinema of gazes, those that the director cast on men and women who constantly observed, spied on, manipulated each other. It was a cinema exploring the art of lies, of pretense. And mirrors, in front of which Deville planted Anna Karina to repeat the questions she wanted to ask her lover in Tonight or neverand which abound in All penalties combined (1992). Deville scattered them everywhere, he loved three-sided mirrors, rear-view mirrors or walls lined with mirrors to surprise someone’s intimacy, flatter narcissists, avoid shots and reverse shots.

Games of seduction, board games (the Trintignant d’deep waters is a fan of chess and croquet), games as well as his verbal pranks: follower of Oulipo, author of collections of playful poems (Zinopinated poems, Zinadvertent poems, Zimpromptu Poems, Improbable poems…), Deville used the double meaning (naughty replies, or name of the hero of Peril in the house, Aurphet, which is pronounced like Orpheus…). In the same film, Nicole Garcia asks Christophe Malavoy why he had a striped O embroidered on his pillow. Answer : “You always put a pillow on a bolster, didn’t you know? » A music lover and very attached to the rhythm of his films, Deville accompanied them with classical works chosen for their harmony with the times, moods, tempos: Beethoven for The ReaderBizet for The Bastard ApprenticeSchubert and Bartok for The Woman in BlueSaint-Saens for The Rabid SheepBrahms, Granados and Schubert for Peril in the house…

Michel Deville had been awarded two Louis-Delluc prizes (in 1967 for Benjaminin 1988 for The Reader), the César for best screenplay adapted from a novel for File 51 in 1979, and the César for best director in 1986 for Peril in the house.