From "Revoir Paris" to the competition, a Magimel moment in Cannes

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 quiet river", cult comedy by Etienne Chatiliez.

In February, he won the César for best actor for "In his lifetime", with a very strong role as a patient at the end of his life - after a César in a supporting role for "La tête haute" (2016) and a prize of male interpretation at Cannes for "La pianiste" (2001).

And at 48, he is in the running again on Saturday for the prestigious prize, this time for "Pacification - Torment on the Islands", by 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 rush 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 is no dialogues, there are situations that evolve, which are created as he thinks about it and what we shoot. So there is a freedom for an actor that is quite exceptional," Magimel told AFP. .

In a completely different register, the actor had moved the Croisette at the start of the festival by playing, in Alice Winocour's "Revoir Paris" (Directors' Fortnight), the victim of an attack, in which he told the AFP to have found itself.

"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.

© 2022 AFP