There are names that hook up with names like cherries entangle each other.
Unable to appear alone.
Jean-Pierre Bacri, who died on Monday of cancer at the age of 69,
represented and still represents like no other the character eternally angry with the world, grumpy and with a marked tendency to melancholy.
One would say condemned to be alone.
And yet, every time he gently pulled any of Bacri's characters very close to him, sooner or later the name of his partner for so many years, the actress and director
Agnès Jaoui, would appear.
The two staged like few others, even beyond their separation, a very French way of being in the world and therefore as intelligent as it is disappointed;
a way of living and suffering that one would say human too human.
Together they worked on '
For all tastes
' (2000).
What was her directorial debut was also the translation to the screen of a script as sharp as baroque written with four hands and performed with two bodies that perfectly defined the vicissitudes of isolation and love.
A look of disenchantment as bourgeois as it is charming.
They returned to their old ways with in
'Como una imagen'
(2004) and rarely the sick narcissism in which we live and by which we live lived such a sharp, precise and duly lewd dissection in the cinema.
More debatable was the verbose '
Talk to me about the rain
' (2008).
A simple accident that would be followed by the memorable '
A French tale
' (2013) and the vital and very sad
'Full of life
' (2018).
And in the middle of all of them, the two: Bacri and Jaoui.
Like two cherries condemned to the loneliness of living together.
In all of them, Bacri emerges as a giant as perfectly recognizable and unique as it is indistinguishable from any of us.
It is impossible not to wish to be at least once in your life
as delicate and perfectly angry
as Bacri probably always was.
He was not so much an actor as a symbol who grunted and made the caress of the grunt the most sincere way to love.
And hence the unanimous reaction from the French scene, culture and even politics.
"Great sadness, great love, fuck it!"
The actress Alexandra Lamy reacted angrily, making one of his phrases her own.
"Behind his funny and depressing characters, Bacri knew the taste of life ... The meaning of life ... The extreme dignity at the end of the road," wrote the president of the Cannes festival,
Pierre Lescure.
And so, one by one, all the directors he has come across since this man born in Algeria in 1951 arrived in Paris at the age of 23.
Bacri won the César, the highest prize in French cinema, five times, four of them precisely for the scripts he had written with Jaoui, and once for his supporting role in the film
'On connaît la chanson'
, by
Alain Resnais
.
Recently, Spanish viewers saw him organize a wedding near disaster in '
C'est la vie'
, by directors
Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
(the one from 'Intocable').
And much closer to us, just a couple of weeks ago,
'Family Photo'
, by Cecilia Rouaud, gave us back an image of him familiar and on the brink of all family cliffs.
And it was precisely there where he always found himself best and most comfortable: pissed off at the exact limit of his patience and everyone's.
Bacri, the actor with the most elegant anger in French cinematography.
Bacri and Jaoui.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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