He was the greatest star of the Nouvelle Vague: On the death of the incomparable Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Anyone who reinvents the cinema, especially with modest means, needs actors who fill the screen. When the film critic Jean-Luc Godard hired Jean-Paul Belmondo for his first film “Out of Breath”, the young filmmaker had already brought in half the harvest. You couldn’t take your eyes off the 26-year-old with the already a bit worn-out face. And so it was to stay until his last film, “A Man and His Dog”, in 2008, and whenever his films were shown: You admired his mixture of energy and lethargy, of daring and nonchalance and watched him in amazement like you did rare animal.
It was not only incomparable in French cinema. There were many who emulated him or occupied his role in other countries – Adriano Celentano in Italy, Marquard Bohm in Germany – but the credibility he brought to his roles was of a different caliber. Belmondo was the embodiment of a new kind of coolness, closer to modern jazz than the notions of film star qualities of the time. “I never thought of becoming famous one day,” Belmondo later recalled. “With my face I had nothing of a seducer about me, and at that time the appearance still played a big role.”
In fact, the French studio cinema at the time could not complain about a lack of attractive “leading men”. There was Gérard Philippe, Yves Montand and Alain Delon, but Belmondo represented a less glamorous masculinity. And his adventurism in no contradiction to intellectuality, or to put it the other way round: Even students who smoke Gitanes could identify with him in the aftermath of existentialism. This paved the way for a new ideal of masculinity that would not set the tone until the late 1960s and 1970s.
As the son of the neoclassical sculptor Paul Belmondo, who was friends with the writer Albert Camus, among others, he was anything but a child of the street. His father supported the artistic ambitions of his son, who trained at the Paris Conservatory. He later defended his father, who had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, against hostility from the sculptor César. He rejected the French film award of the same name designed by him when he was awarded it in 1989 for the role of an aging individualist in “The Lion”.
He combined art and genre
In the sixties Belmondo contributed significantly to the popularization of the auteur film; not only with friends of the Nouvelle Vague, but wherever art and genre came together. Claude Sautet cast him in “The Panther is Chased”, Peter Brook in “Hours of Tenderness”. He played with Vittorio De Sica (“And yet they live”), Jean-Pierre Melville (“Eve and the Priest”, “The Devil in the White Vest”), François Truffaut (“The Secret of the False Bride”) and always again at Godard (most impressively in “Elf Uhr nachts”, “Pierrot le fou”).
At the same time, however, he also conquered something like his very own genre, the Belmondo film: a modern variety of adventure film that was tailored entirely to his athletic presence. Famous for performing risky stunts himself, he kept French cinema full even in difficult times.
Philippe de Broca recognized these qualities early with his wonderful spectacles “Cartouche, the Bandit” (1960) and the unforgettable “Adventure in Rio” (1964). How much Belmondo’s later successes were tailored to their main actor, one read from their German titles, which seemed to describe his star image in slogans: “A crazy guy”; “The Greyhound”; “The professional”; “The ace of aces”; “The outsider”. In the eighties Belmondo returned to the theater stage, in his own house he enjoyed countering his screen image with demanding roles, starting with Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Kean” based on a model by Alexandre Dumas. Between these poles, intellectuality and adventurism, plays the work of the unique Jean-Paul Belmondo. At the age of 88, he died on Monday in Paris.
