Marie Trintignant would have been 60 on January 21. Eighteen years after his death under the blows of the singer Bertrand Cantat, his mother Nadine pays tribute to him in a poignant documentary on Arte. From the first images, the film Your shattered dreams – broadcast live on January 26 on the channel and between January 19 and April 25 online – evokes the tragic end of the actress.
“I don’t want her to get old (…). I don’t think she should ever die”, launches his father Jean-Louis, sacred monster of the cinema, looking at the camera. “But I will die and grow old”, says Marie, smiling. “Alas Marie no, you haven’t had time to grow old”, Nadine retorts in voiceover. She addresses her child as in a love letter: “Like so many battered women, you received a first blow. When you wanted to leave this man, he persisted in destroying you, erasing your beautiful face, tearing you away from life”.
The 87-year-old director never filmed again after her daughter’s disappearance. “I regret it today“, she confided to AFP, “I loved making movies”. “The last five films I made, I wrote and shot them with Marie”, she says. After, “I said, I’m only going to write, I’m not going to shoot”.
His documentary is devoted almost exclusively to his daughter’s career, which began at age 17 in Black sequence of Alain Corneau, his father-in-law, alongside Patrick Dewaere.
Nadine Trintignant explains that she did not want her daughter to be kept as the only image of a battered woman, who died at the age of 41 in Vilnius (Lithuania) in August 2003. “It’s a very happy documentary and only about the profession, because she didn’t want any intrusions into her private life”, she describes. The four sons of Marie, born of four different fathers, are hardly mentioned.
On the other hand, we see a lot of directors, actors like Guillaume Depardieu, also deceased, with whom Marie shot three films, including As she breathes. He throws that“She’s not boring like all the other actresses and what’s more, she smells good”.
Make this documentary “brought me to see the laughing Marie”, says Nadine. “I had not seen her for a very long time, even in film”.
The director also addresses the death of her daughter Pauline at only nine months old when Marie was eight years old. “You liked to hold her in your arms, you liked to laugh with her. And then one dark day in Rome, impossible to tell you, your sister died”, she said, in a voiceover.
“I would take a long time to understand that in a couple, when you lose a child, you no longer expect much from life”, writes Nadine in a book devoted to her first husband, Jean-Louis, entitled C’est pour la vie ou pour un moment, published in November 2021. But, she assures us: “You can live with an open wound.”
She does not want to hear about Bertrand Cantat, the singer of Noir Désir, sentenced to eight years in prison in Lithuania in 2003 for having dealt fatal blows to Marie, and released in 2007. “It’s out of the question for me to forgive him. True forgiveness is forgetting what you’ve been wronged. I’ll never forget, I can’t, so I won’t forgive never”, says Nadine Trintignant. “I had never hated anyone in my life, I did not know hate. And hate is something excruciating to feel, which destroys you, which hurts you. Now I know it”.
Contacted by AFP, Universal (which owns the Noir Désir catalog and had released Love Fati, Cantat’s 2017 solo album whose final concert dates had been cancelled) declined to comment.