It begins as a child left alone: “I hear my heart beating, it’s mum calling me. » Jean-Louis Trintignant knows that he does not have much longer when he chooses to say these words of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), on January 28, 2018, on Radio France. That evening, the actor made a public recording, the CD of which (released in June 2018) will remain as his will. Daniel Mille is on the accordion, Grégoire Korniluk on the cello, Diego Imbert on the double bass, they play music by Astor Piazzolla, and Jean-Louis Trintignant listens to them as he listens to his heart beat to the rhythm of the libertarian poets he loves , Boris Vian, Robert Desnos, Guillaume Apollinaire…
D’Today I took a walk, by Robert Desnos, in I don’t want to die, from Boris Vian, via My beloved little Lou, by Guillaume Apollinaire, and Dear White brother, by Léopold Sédar Senghor, it is a living heart, on the left, in love and returned from everything that speaks to us, in this magnificent voice whose elegant melancholy time has not altered. A voice that remembers, that comes and goes between yesterday and today, in the quivering moment of very old age. Every day, Jean-Louis Trintignant said he was going to die and, every day, he seemed to find a glimmer of happiness, as in that of making known a poem by his grandson Paul Cluzet, I sleep in the west, that we hear in the ultimate CD.
To forget oneself by exposing oneself
The actor lived old age as a contemplative experience, and he liked to forget himself by exposing himself in front of spectators, at the theater, to whom he said “thank you for coming”, as if apologizing for being there to say his favorite poems. There would have been a coquetry in this attitude if Jean-Louis Trintignant had not known everything, and if he had not remained in him a depth of shyness which paralyzed him when he learned the trade, in his youth.
It was in Paris, immediately after the war. And it had happened in a banal way: a young man limply taking a law course in the provinces. An actor passes through the city, he goes to see him. And let go of the right, because he understood that his way was on stage. So did Jean-Louis Trintignant, in Aix-en-Provence, after Charles Dullin (1885-1949) had played there The Miser. He went up to the capital, learned, found himself bad. But he had a presence that the directors immediately spotted. From 1950, Jean-Louis Trintignant hardened his skills in the small rooms of the left bank where the art theater was invented. He is still ” a beginner “ when The world noticed it in a play by Robert Hossein, Limited Liabilityin 1954.
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