“Your knee is clean now, you can tackle the rest”, spear nastily Jean-Pierre Bacri, owner of the bar Au Père Quiet, to his employee Jean-Pierre Darroussin. We are in 1996, in A family resemblance. And the images of this family masquerade around the grumpy Bacri immediately come to mind. Including when Catherine Frot is offered a collar that she believes is intended for the dog!
The film is signed Cedric Klapisch more Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui are writing in addition to interpreting this adaptation of their play. We are at the heart of the flamboyant era of the Bacri-Jaoui writing and playing tandem, “The Jacri”, as Alain Resnais said.
Four César for Best Screenplay
The general public has known this since 1993 with Kitchen and outbuildings. A prosperous period which resulted in a cascade of prizes, in particular four César for the best scenario for Smoking/No Smoking, On connaît la chanson (produced by Alain Resnais), A family resemblance, The taste of others. Works where dialogue was always essential. No wonder Jean-Pierre Bacri put Anton Tchekhov and Woody Allen in the Pantheon of theater and cinema.
Before this climax, however, things took a long time to come for Jean-Pierre Bacri. When he was born in Algeria in 1951, his father was a postman but, on weekends, he was a clerk in a cinema. Jean-Pierre slips into the room but when the family arrives in Cannes in 1962, there is still no question of choosing comedy as their profession.
Moreover, Jean-Pierre Bacri has made jobs with it. He was employed by a vegetable seller and opener at the Opera. He worked in advertising. He even wore a suit and tie for a few months in a Cannes bank before taking acting lessons and starting to write.
For a long time in the cinema, he also accumulated supporting roles. But quickly, the character of Bacri-grumbler marks the spirits, as in Subway, in 1985, where he spends his time running in vain to catch the wheeled thief Jean-Hugues Anglade.
This grumpy grumpy side, a label he didn’t like, continued to make us laugh for hours at the movies. Obviously when he tries to explain to his dog Didier (Alain Chabat) “That we don’t feel anyone’s ass! ” Or, more recently, four years ago, when he was trying to keep his event team in The sense of celebration, by Toledano and Nakache.
“I like being a successful liar”
However, this character who voluntarily stumbles on words and does not finish his sentences, exasperated, is far from summarizing the career of this actor. Because in the cinema films like The very private life of Mr. Sim, adapted from a novel by Jonathan Coe, have been widely shown. But also because he often shone on stage in Brecht as well as Molière.
The theater was even the breeding ground for his writing talent because most of the texts co-signed with Jaoui were first written for the stage. A working bond that continued well beyond their separation, in life, eight years ago. A man of friends more than of family, he had not had children. “Children are a lot of constraints”, Amused himself to say the actor, always half-fig, half-grape.
One way to concentrate on his art. Always with the same pleasure as he confirmed to us, a little more than three years ago, with more than sixty films on the counter: ” Yes. I like to be a successful liar. To play and to be believed is something a little childish. “
The man was also on the left and said it bluntly when we received him at the editorial staff of West France, in 2013. He also told us: “I am optimistic because I love the world as it is. “
“Death is life”
While complaining, anyway, during another meeting: “Let me be told ten countries where people live better and more freely than in France. Where there is so much democracy, social security, free education. Opinion leaders constantly broadcast a decline. Birds of ill omen. The Zemmours, Finkielkraut. They are typically “it was better before”. To explain to you that it is not going and that it will get worse and worse. It is an abject role that they have decided to play. I would not choose them as actors. Or to take them apart. ” From the great Bacri!
This interview took place on the occasion of the film Great North in which he played a brilliant funeral director. So, of course, we had spoken of death. “I don’t have a problem with that because I’m completely an atheist, so that takes away the mystical side. And death is just the last word in the contract we’ve all signed. So don’t worry: death is life. “
At the same time he said to L’Obs : “There’s nothing worse than guys laughing at their own jokes, right? ” He was right. But his death, this Monday, January 18, at 69, from cancer, does not make us laugh at all.
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