In over 70 films he played a whole series of “anti” characters, becoming an icon of popular cinema. But not also drawing forays into authorial production
A vital, adventurous, popular piece of French cinema has died. After a heart attack that hit him on August 8, 2001 on stage, in the manner of Moliére, Jean Paul Belmondo disappeared from our celluloid dreams at 88, being born with Italian ancestry on April 9, 1933 by Paul, a sculptor of Sicilian origin. -Algerian. But, by the will of the cinema, somatic grit, hot personality, type of character and added hobbies such as boxing and football, Bebel, as not only his friends called him playing with the nickname of Gabin, is in all respects immortal, even if with two wives and four children.
The case history of his over 70 films, who arrived with the diploma he got from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Paris, saw him risk many other dangers: he walked on the abyss, he challenged gangsters in Borsalino, he died for love, he played the Marseillais bandit who makes the verse cinephile in Bogart and runs through the streets of Paris, from behind, shot to death, until he collapses on the pedestrian crossing in “Until the last breath” by Godard, on 1960, declaration of the birth of the nouvelle vague. Thus he inaugurated, with unscrupulous naturalness, the series of cult sequences and the collaboration with the father master of the “nouvelle vague”, which will then continue with “La donna è donna” and with the cerebral and didactic “Pierrot le fou”, gangster movie, ’65 , with final explosive. He was impervious to fashions, a lover of the theater on which he appeared at a very young age, declaiming the classics, aware of the anomalous seductive power of the flattened nose and volitive lips: he was someone with whom he could not get away with it, neither men nor women had to lose. Belmondo, first seducer (as a young man he was part of Carnè’s “Sinners in blue jeans” with Charrier and Terzieff), then father, finally grandfather-patriarch with fans, became in the 60s, together with Delon – with whom he made a mythical couple in the elegant “Borsalino” by Deray, 1969, and in the recent and pathetic “One of the two” – the prototype of the export-type star, the new Jean Gabin (with whom he acted in the melancholy “When winter returns”), with the heroism and disposable eroticism to be fed to popular imagination, nor should we forget the film shot with Sautet “Asfalto che scotta”.
It was often held, in his brilliant career, on the trail of action and braggart cinema, almost the cartoon of the hero with a slap face, pulling swashbuckles as in “Cartouche” with the Cardinal, in ’62, and then in the “Spouses of the second year” with his beloved Laura Antonelli, in 71, for whom he had left Ursula Andress; or facing situations worthy of James Bond, but with the benefit of the grotesque, in the series of the “Man from Rio” and Hong Kong, great personal and muscular successes also as a stunt-man, up to the “Brain” of Oury. An infinite series of scoundrels and policemen, of sparrow hawks, excommunicated, heirs, incorrigible, axes of the aces, scrolling through the titles. But the nature of a two-faced actor, extroverted and introverted, allowed him a double expressive accounting: on the one hand the cinema of Sundays, virile and ironic, even if gradually more and more repetitive and worn, by De Broca, Verneuil, Oury; on the other hand, the innovative, objective, critical cinema of Chabrol (“A double mandate” and “Trap for a wolf”, 72), the ambiguous noir film of Melville (“Leon Morin priest”, “The spy”), Godard, who he made him intellectual in spite of himself, creating his myth; by Resnais (“Stavisky” of ’74, not a casual re-enactment of a famous financial scandal), Luis Malle (“The Thief of Paris” ’66), where Jean Paul becomes an elegant silhouette, sometimes even a parody of the other Belmondo, the athletic and national popular one loved by the crowds for his incredible heroism, who on the set did not want stunts: he told everything in a premature autobiography, in ’63 which did not include the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement that he would have retired in 2016, when the health was unsteady and he could confess that the rivalry with Delon was just a matter of marketing.
In the 70s he specializes in the police, with contempt for danger and rejecting the stunt doubles in the stories of Lautner, Labro and the more sensitive Jacques Deray, while in the 80s he becomes on the twilight screen, but still gets the Cèsar award in 89 for “A life is not enough” by Claude Lelouch , with whom he will then shoot an updated version of the “Miserables” in 95. He was among the few who never accepted Hollywood proposals, he was an Italian-French, so sensitive to our cinema that when he returned there, after his illness, he shot a remake of “Umberto D” and in 2011 he was awarded the Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement in Cannes. And he was also, if necessary, a good romantic with his lost pains of love: from the cold and silent “Moderato cantabile”, 60, by Brook, written by Duras, with Jeanne Moreau, to Truffaut’s most passionate film. , “My drug is called Julie” (Catherine Deneuve, no one in the world will ever love you like this), and “A Guy I Like” by Lelouch, also in ’69, in which he is a composer who makes Annie discover Girardot more disappointments than illusions of love.
His forays are noteworthy in Italian cinema, at the time, the early sixties, of the great co-productions with France: from the bespectacled anti-fascist bookseller of De Sica’s “Ciociara” to the murky altoborghesi Veneto loves of “Letters of a novice” by Lattuada, from the “Mare matto ”By Castellani, a sailor from Livorno embraced by Lollo, at the beautiful“ La viaccia ”by Bolognini, in which an intense, credible, young Tuscan farmer of the turn of the century succeeded, dressed by the genius of Piero Tosi and in love with the Cardinal prostitute until his death. His theatrical activity should not be underestimated, to which he would have returned with regular passion facing above all traditional heroes in the round: in Italy he was admired as Cyrano de Bergerac, a character he resumed in many ages, to whom he once again gave his psychosomatic nature arrogant and unhappy, a desperate rebel perhaps without cause but with the faculty of self-parody, an ideal passage from the Gabin era to that of Depardieu. Maurizio Porro
His raids are remarkablein Italian cinema, at the time, the early sixties, of the great comproductions with France: from the bespectacled anti-fascist bookseller of De Sica’s “Ciociara” to the murky altoborghesi loves of “Letters of a novice” by Lattuada, from the “Mare matto ”Of Castellani, embraced to Lollo, to the beautiful“ Viaccia ”of Bolognini, in which an intense, credible, young Tuscan farmer of the turn of the century succeeded, dressed by Piero Tosi and in love with the Cardinal prostitute until his death. His theatrical activity should not be underestimated, to which he would have returned with regular passion facing above all traditional heroes in the round: in Italy he was admired as Cyrano de Bergerac, to whom once again he gave his psychosomatic nature of bold and unhappy, a desperate rebellious perhaps without cause but with the faculty of self parody.
September 6, 2021 (change September 6, 2021 | 20:21)
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