Putting It Back Together

Comédie française: Ça a débuté comme ça…
by Fabrice Luchini
Flammarion, 2016, 256 pages, 19 euros

A fabled actor has written a book, a good one. His face will be familiar from films like Gemma Bovery, Bicycling with Molière, Potiche, The Women on the 6th Floor, In the House, Molière—or, filmed before his days of wine and roses, Emmanuelle 4. An accomplished stage performer who, from an obsession for other people’s writings, has made the simple act of reading texts to audiences a pleasure and a subversive cultural battleground. In a filmed theatre performance, the audience in a packed auditorium face a sparsely furnished stage that holds a small wooden table, a kitchen chair and a not-very-comfortable-looking lounge chair. A casually dressed man, sprightly early sixties, comes on carrying an armful of old books. He bows to his audience, puts them on the table, takes one and sits in the lounge chair. He starts reading. It is a difficult poem by Paul Valéry. His words are clear and chiselled, his facial expressions well known by film-goers. It is the beginning of another sell-out performance. Soon the audience will be laughing.

The reader is Fabrice Luchini (pronounced lu-kini). The first book he takes up is almost falling apart from use. In his readings he does not play the role of author, like Simon Callow as Charles Dickens; being Fabrice Luchini is performance enough. The authors he reads are not always easy, nor popular, nor respectably Left: he is a strong champion of Céline and “the pope of the anti-moderns”, Philippe Muray. Yet sell-out audiences over the last thirty years seem to enjoy what he offers.

As an actor, or playing himself in radio and television interviews, Luchini is always at least slightly disturbing. Surviving stage and film directors find him difficult, but rewarding. Wise media interviewers light his fuse, and stand back. Passionate, funny, and wonderfully non-Left, he plays Fabrice Luchini better than anyone else can. His book Comédie française: Ça a débuté comme ça… (Comédie française: It started like this…) is an autobiography of sorts written between June and September last year. There are diary entries, memories of his life, reflections on texts and authors he loves.

There is more than a whiff of a theatrical backdrop for his beginning: “The scene commences with lunch at the hotel Montalembert …”: a posh hotel restaurant in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He is lunching with an editor of Le Point magazine to discuss a cover feature on Jean de La Fontaine. Though our narrator is hidden away, with his charming host, at a “minuscule” table in a corner near the fireplace, everyone drops by to say hello. With passion the two men discuss the fables and Luchini suggests that La Fontaine, a miracle of language, gave birth, so many years later, to the writing of Céline. Not everyone may see the connection. They are interrupted by Bruno Le Maire. The politician in his forties is a possible Right candidate for the 2017 French presidential election. The author of a witty book on his time as Minister of Agriculture under President Sarkozy, he has already launched his campaign to represent the Republicans. Months ago he was considered an outsider but he has rapidly become a possible contender. Le Maire joins the conversation and quotes from the fable of “The Wolf and the Dog”. Luchini finds fault with his diction. Le Maire accepts the criticism, and is invited to the theatre. Exit Le Maire.

Enter Jean-Louis Trintignant, and some Parisian theatre people. Seeing the group, Luchini is envious, for he feels solitary: “Hysteria seduces, dominates and isolates.” He wonders whether to give them a wave of welcome, like a Proustian duchess, then decides to walk across and chat. The sensitive author feels their greeting is without great warmth, but without hostility. He is asked what he is doing at the moment.

The scene would be a highlight of one of his own movies. Our narrator suffers an eye-popping external convulsion as an internal nuclear explosion takes place. An inner voice screams a suffering monologue which has something to do with “The magic of Paris!” No doubt possibly polite to his questioner, he confides to us that he has been playing in the theatre for six months, has made newspaper headlines, been on the radio and television, and they ask him what he is doing. Perhaps even calmly he talks of his work, of his authors. Trintignant steps outside for a smoke, Luchini joins him, and asks if he can visit him at his country home, where he now produces a respectable wine and grows olives.

Horrified he is being a bore, he is unable to refrain from excitedly blurting out the opening lines from Molière’s The Bores: “Good God, what star was I born under / to be always persecuted by bores.” His eruption into the classics leads him to suggest, to us, that there is no difference between great writing and the real world. To develop his point he explains that he is not an actor who arrives at the theatre hours before the performance. He turns up several minutes before his entrance, chats with the stage manager about money, politics, women, and then, when he is about to step onto the stage, tries to say, like Sacha Guitry, “Just a moment, I’ve something to tell them and I’ll be straight back.” And that, he says, “is my method”.

It’s been a set-up. From the opening scene this is where he has wanted to bring us. In just eight pages we have met a magazine editor, a leading politician and a great actor, and around them and himself there have been quotations, discussions and references to La Fontaine, Céline, Proust, Cioran, Molière and Guitry. The linkage of great writing with a modern expensive restaurant, the name-dropping and his theatre performances have been elements in an argument that literature is not locked in a university compartment in our lives, but is part of our everyday experience. Luchini presents this idea as a passionate revelation. Classical writing is not a past-tense monologue; it is part of our contemporary conversation. Although he does not say it, his popular readings of brilliant writings are acting to restore a broken culture too self-absorbed to hear voices from our past.

Comédie française is autobiography and discussions of the authors and texts he loves. Born Robert Luchini, he is a child of the 18th arrondissement, from rue Ramey on the slopes of Montmartre in the shadow of Sacré Cœur. His parents, French mother and Italian father, had a fruit-and-vegetable shop, and he remembers in his childhood making deliveries to the grander apartments high above. One of three brothers, he thought of himself as the only one: “From that came my devouring desire to be the favourite.”

At thirteen he finished school. His mother found a newspaper advertisement for a job—it was the 1960s when there were both newspapers and jobs—at a hairdresser’s in the fashionable Avenue Matignon, just off the Champs-Élysées. If he was taken on it was convenient for he could catch the number 80 from beside the Montmartre Town Hall (a few months ago the square on which it stands was a migrant camp) directly to work. Travelling through Paris on the back open platform of the number 80 is beautifully evoked. His mother took him to the interview where the owner suggested that if taken on his hair needed to be longer and he needed a new Christian name. Neither suggestion presented a problem. Child Robert suggested Jean-Octave or Fabrice. The owner went with Fabrice, and Fabrice Luchini gave his first performance to get the job: “I said anything, I explained that I had always dreamed of being a hairdresser, it’s more than a passion: a vocation! I became Fabrice.” Six days later he learned he had won. He was reborn, and employed.

He washed, swept and cut hair, read Freud, enjoyed being young in Paris, studied theatre—a self-educated young man attracted by the language of classical theatre. His evolving taste in reading was influenced by books passed to him by friends. Aged twenty he was sent, with the possibility of a film part, to meet New Wave director Éric Rohmer, whom he had never heard of. When the door to the director’s apartment opened, Luchini, for absolutely no reason, suddenly said, “Aged thirty, Zarathustra left his country and the lake of his country.” On cue Rohmer replied, “You read Nietzsche? Wait!” He rushed towards his own coat hanging in the hallway and returned waving a book, “We’re reading the same! But I’m reading in German!” Their first meeting lasted, says Luchini, for seven films, though the first was a disaster.

A year in the making, Perceval le Gallois starred Luchini as Perceval. The premiere was a huge name-dropping event, with the president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and the intellectuals—Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan. The fashionable cinema was packed, but by the end of the screening most had fled. Publicity for the film, set in twelfth-century France, referred to the quest for the Holy Grail, and the audience was expecting Monty Python, says Luchini; instead they got strange language and horses on green concrete grass. The young actor recovered, slowly. Among the appalling critical notices there was a single favourable comment by the critic and philosopher Roland Barthes who had, in the late 1970s (he died from injuries received when hit by a laundry delivery van in 1980), a pop celebrity following among the young intellectualocrats. The film served as an introduction, though perhaps when they met at Barthes’s apartment the great philosopher may have been expecting a less hetero actor. Luchini is neither homo nor Left: “I would have really liked to be Left, but the difficulty of getting there seems a bit beyond me.”

In the mid-1980s, after various non-acting jobs, his film career improved and at the same time a theatre manager invited him to give a reading on stage at 6.30 p.m.—aperitif time. The eight-day season has run on and on, and he has made these readings of great texts his own personal art form. The authors may change, but Luchini remains the same. The theatrical voice, the facial tics, are a vocabulary of pleasure for initiates.

His impressions of his audiences are acutely sensitive and he responds, on good nights, to their movement. The feeling that he is losing their attention he describes as facing a retreating tide. Some compliments rise above the banal. Sharing an after-show drink with the playwright Yasmina Reza he is touched by her words, “In listening to your performance, I said to myself: this is why I feel French, it’s for this.” I know what she means. In the good, and violent, French television series Braquo there is a villainous Russian Mafia boss who lives in Paris. Asked why he lives in France he recites a litany of writers such as Colette, Cocteau, Proust—a ticket to a Luchini reading would have made him happy. Shortly afterwards he dies very violently.

Luchini is not an academic expert. He approaches the texts he uses as a speaker and interpreter. When he discusses specific works it is less like a scholarly discussion and more like being taken backstage in the works of the writers he loves. Rimbaud’s poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) fascinates him and the idea of preparing a theatrical spectacle based on it came to him after reciting it in a taxi. As his cab threaded through the choked boulevards he had declaimed the poem from the back seat:

When I finished, he [the Moroccan driver] stopped, turned around to me and said: “Could you do it again? It’s magnificent, but I didn’t understand anything.” “Don’t worry, I don’t either,” I said to him, “but that isn’t important.”

In his own way the interpreter-performer represents a living traditional theatre, bringing to life the best of the past, and making it part of the present. This is an offensive against the pathetic adaptations of classical works thrown up by mediocre Australian directors and theatre companies whose assault on classical texts has abandoned their richness for showy directorial flourishes. Luchini returns his audiences, with elegance and urgency, to the conversation between the present and the past which has been abandoned by the disability culture of our deaf-and-dumb cultural elites.