The world of cinema perhaps did not expect him but in 2013 a figure crossed the new French cinema presented at the Cannes Festival. Vincent Macaigne, at the time 35 years old, was the common denominator of several films by new filmmakers from that country: authors presenting their first feature films at the biggest shop window of world cinema and who filmed a restless, sweet and anguished face and body, similar to a small hurricane inside his drama pieces. The films presented were The Battle of Solferino by Justine Triet, The Girl of July 14th by Antonin Peretjatko, and 2 automnes, 3 hivers by Sébastien Betber, objects as special as the strange figure of that actor – someone at the exact opposite end of the glamorous figure of the male actor-model that dominates the films with most success in the last years. This is what happens, in an expressive way, in Les deux amis (2015), film by and starring Louis Garrel, with whom Macaigne forms a tragic-comic team.
A body as a “lab of emotions”: is an idea that might define the work of Vincent Macaigne and that, we venture, will not be foreign to his work previously developed in theatre, a milieu where he met Louis Garrel with whom he would come to act in Les deux amis (2015). Two counterpoints of French cinema that, for a split second, are mistaken for a tragicomic pair that explores itself in its sadness, in the absurdity of their lives, or of a life, usually always dependent on who loves us or no longer loves us. That “counterpoint” of Macaigne, a face already recognised in French cinema, works as a weight that drags the films into a fight against the conventions that settle in the gaze of the viewer. His attraction to risk, or the desire to create an unclassifiable work (for not even life, if lived, submits to being classified), made the actor also choose to direct his own films. Ce qu’il restera de nous (2012) – a title evoking what remains, once again, after death – looks at a family succumbed at what remains for them following the death of one of its members. Opposite characters that refuse, perhaps, to fulfil the destinies that await them – therefore, what the viewer also expects from them. A certainly independent spirit, which could be described as punk, of a filmmaker that writes, films and edits his own film, evolving in the feature Dom Juan & Sganarelle (2016), with the purpose of adapting Molière (just as he had done with Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare) to the scale of opera.
If everything seems to be urgent in Macaigne’s films, that is not due to any kind of “affectation”. On the contrary, it is due to a very particular way of approaching life: an absolute, permanent dedication to work and to the – always frustrating – struggle against our own end, our feelings, our relationships or the very time a film and a theatre play have to tell us about life. Art objects that carry within them an illusion of eternity in view of the themes they approach, and whose bodies, condemned to death, struggle as they can to leave their marks of survival.
Time of the screenings for Independent Hero Vincent Macaigne:
Don Juan & Sganarelle
Vincent Macaigne
April 27 (Wednesday) 21h45, Cinema São Jorge
2 automnes, 3 hivers
Sébastien Betbeder
April 28 (Thursday), 21h45, Cinema São Jorge
Une histoire américaine
Arnel Hostiou
April 29 (Friday), 18h00, Cinema Ideal
Tonnerre
Guillaume Brac
April 29 (Friday), 21h45, Cinema São Jorge
Vincent Macaigne Shorts 1
Ce qu’il restera de nous by Vincent Macaigne
Le repas dominical by Céline Devaux
Les lézards by Vincent Mariette
Moonlight Lover by Guilhem Amesland
April 30 (Saturday),14h30, Cinema São Jorge
Les deux amis
Louis Garrel
April 30 (Saturday), 16h00, Cinema São Jorge
Vincent Macaigne Shorts 2
Le naufragé by Guillaume Brac
Un monde sans femmes by Guillaume Brac
May 1 (Sunday), 18h00, Cinema São Jorge