(Canes) From See Paris againon reconstruction after the attacks, to a cutting-edge film by Albert Serra that he is carrying on his shoulders, Benoît Magimel took on a new dimension during the 75e Cannes Film Festival which ends on Saturday.
Posted at 2:36 p.m.
The year 2022 definitely brings luck to the former precocious child of French cinema, who, 70 films later, has never completely lost the flame that lit up his eyes from Life is a long calm rivera cult comedy by Étienne Chatiliez.
In February, he won the César for best actor for In his lifetimewith a very strong role of end-of-life patient — after a César in a supporting role for Heads up (2016) and a best actor award at Cannes for The pianist (2001).
And at 48, he is in the running again on Saturday for the prestigious prize, this time for Pacification-Torment on the Islesby Spanish director Albert Serra.
“I am at a magnificent age and for a man, quarantine is magnificent,” Benoît Magimel told AFP. “There are a lot of possibilities and working with filmmakers like him… I’m delighted, it’s wonderful”.
In this atmospheric film, entirely carried by his performance as a freewheeling actor, he embodies a High Commissioner of the Republic in Tahiti, who navigates with haughtiness and elegance from high society to underworld circles, from separatists to the military. .
An epic shoot: 580 hours of rushes and thousands of pages of dialogue, according to the usual method of the director, which leaves unparalleled freedom to the actors.
“He’s the only one to work like that. He doesn’t watch what he’s doing, he prepares a situation, he sets up the cameras (but) he has no text. There are no dialogues, there are situations that evolve, that are created as you reflect and shoot. So there is quite an exceptional freedom for an actor,” Magimel told AFP.
In a completely different register, the actor moved the Croisette at the start of the festival by embodying, in See Paris again by Alice Winocour (Directors’ Fortnight), the victim of an attack, in which he told AFP that he had found himself.
“Over time, I like to find roles that resonate with things that I may have experienced, there I found things that I understood, like repairing several people, and then (the character) does not victimize himself not “, testified the actor, who fought in the past addictions to drugs.