Director Michel Deville, who died at the age of 91, directed the greatest French actresses of the XXe century in light comedies then black and strange stories.
Author of around thirty feature films, he received two Césars, the French Oscars, for File 51 (1979, best screenplay) and for Peril in the house (1986, best director).
He also twice won the Louis-Delluc prize (considered the Goncourt of cinema) for Benjamin or the memoirs of a virgin (1967) and The Reader (1988).
“All my films, comedies like other more serious, even serious, have been games for me, with rules”, said this man with a bony face and steely blue eyes who loved above all to treat human beings against their instincts.
If he played, among others, actors of the caliber of Michel Piccoli, Jacques Dutronc or Jean-Louis Trintignant, he claimed not to like “the company of men”.
On the other hand, he directed actresses like Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Fabian, Fanny Ardant, Mathilda May, Marina Vlady, Marlène Jobert or Miou-Miou.
Michel Deville, who claimed to be solitary and asocial, was a meticulous filmmaker, gifted in capturing “a moment, a sentence, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful face”. “It’s not enough for me to see them, I need to retain them. I keep them in my notebooks,” he explained.
Also a poet
For him, writing, in all its forms, was essential. Most of his films were taken from literary works that he adapted.
So he will film The readeradapted from the novel by Raymond Jean, or even File 51 based on the book by Gilles Perrault.
He also practiced poetry, his “relaxation”, publishing several collections, whimsical and irreverent, close to the spirit of a Prévert or a Queneau: “In the hallucinated dawn / Of a vague and badly faded garden / lamented a gardener […]/ The feet buried in the compost in place and instead of two leeks […]/ Heartbreaking failure, atrocity / The gardener had screwed up”.
Michel Deville was born on April 13, 1931 in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine).
His parents have neighbor friends whose apartment overlooks the roof of a cinema. Thanks to a catwalk, the boy often goes to the projection booth. Thus begins a vocation.
He spent ten years learning the trade, notably from his mentor, Henri Decoin. Then he made his first film Tonight or never, a dramatic comedy. It will be followed by comedies, like lovely liar (1962) or Because, because of a woman. He is successful with Benjamin or the memoirs of a virgin, performed by Michèle Morgan, Michel Piccoli and Pierre Clémenti. In 1970, he directed Brigitte Bardot in the comedy The bear and the doll.
After Raphael or the Debauchee (1971), Michel Deville opens up to more serious subjects, between police intrigues and intimate, sensual behind closed doors, sometimes against a backdrop of manipulation and troubled relationships between men and women.
It was this same year 1971 that his collaboration with Nina Companeez, at the same time scriptwriter, dialogue writer and editor of most of his films, ended, who decided to become a director herself.
“We were growing old together, it was good, but we were always in the same groove, our number was too well established”, he then said.
From the 1980s, it was his wife, Rosalinde, who wrote and produced his films: “she writes what I dream of seeing in the cinema”, said this unclassifiable artist who had no children. He then made films like Peril in the house (1985), The Paltoquet (1986) or Sachs diseaseadapted from Martin Winckler.
He had adapted Feydeau for his last film A strings attached in 2005, with Emmanuelle Béart and Charles Berling.