Bernadette Lafont(1938-2013)
- Actress
- Director
- Writer
Bernadette Lafont was born at the Protestant Health Home of Nîmes in
Gard, the only child of a pharmacist and a housewife from the Cévennes.
Her mother always wanted a boy to name Bernard and, once she gave birth
to a girl, she enjoyed to hold this against all the catholics she knew
as the proof that their God either was blind or didn't exist. Often
dressed as a boy and nicknamed Bernard, Bernadette nevertheless had a
great relationship with her parents. Having spent part of her childhood
in Saint-Geniès-de-Malgoirès, she returned to Nîmes where she took
ballet lessons at the local Opera House. She proved to be a gifted
student and she did three little tours and about twenty galas there. An
extroverted girl with a fervent imagination, she used to spend her
holidays at the Cévennes family mansion playing dress-up with her
friend Annie, along whom she used to pretend to be an actress from an
imaginary West End Club, working in Italian cinema: doing this started
to win her a lot of male attention. She also began to develop a passion
for film from an early age, adopting
Brigitte Bardot and
Marina Vlady as role models.
On the summer of 1955, the "Arènes" of Nîmes hosted a Festival of
Dramatic Arts for the second time: 40 actors came from Paris while 50
regional aspiring thespians and 30 dancing students were recruited on
the place. The main attraction was a production of "La Tragédie des
Albigeois", a new play which featured music by
Georges Delerue and starred, in the
leading roles, the acclaimed stage veteran
Jean Deschamps and a talented young actor
called Jean-Louis Trintignant,
who would go a long way from there. The play also offered bit parts to
future directing genius Maurice Pialat,
Trintignant's then wife Colette Dacheville (the future
Stéphane Audran), and the skilled
Gérard Blain, who, by then, had already
appeared in a handful of movies, although usually in uncredited roles.
Having seen Gérard on his way to a rehearsal at the "Arènes",
Bernadette was immediately won over by his "bad boy" charm and decided
to walk around the place (which had ironically been the spot of her
parents' first encounter) to catch his attention: she did. Already
separated from wife Estella Blain, Gérard
immediately developed a great interest in Bernadette, stating that he
was willing to bring her to Paris to introduce her to certain people at
the Opera House and stating how glad he was that she didn't have any
interest in pursuing an acting career, something he regarded, in a
woman's case, as a road to perdition. After she finished her studies,
Bernadette's parents gave her permission to marry Gérard and she did so
in 1957.
Blain found his first relevant film role in
Julien Duvivier's brilliant thriller
Deadlier Than the Male (1956)
and Bernadette spent a lot of time with him on the movie's set,
something that made her fascination with cinema grow even bigger. The
film opened to positive reviews and was also lauded (quite an oddity
for a Duvivier feature) by the ruthless "Cahiers du Cinéma" critics,
including the young François Truffaut,
who called Blain "the French
James Dean". Gérard decided to give
the critic a phone call to thank him for the kind words and, after the
two had a couple lunches together, Truffaut ended up making him a work
offer. It's always been very hard for film critics to point at a
specific work as the undisputed start of the French New Wave: for many
people it's Agnès Varda's
La Pointe Courte (1955) , but
the director herself never wanted to be bestowed this honor and prefers
to be considered a godmother to the movement. Others think that the
roots of this new school of cinema can be found in the early shorts of
Jacques Rivette,
Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut. The
latter's The Mischief Makers (1957) is
certainly one of the most significant of these ground-breaking works
and happens to be the project for which Blain was recruited. Truffaut
wanted to shoot the short in Nîmes and, with the exception of Gérard,
he hired only non-professional actors: this included several local
children and, of course, Bernadette. The mini-feature is centered
around two lovers, Gérard (Blain) and Bernadette Jouve (Lafont), who
are spied on by a group of children and are separated forever once he
leaves for a mountain excursion from which he will never return. The
character of Bernadette, a head-turner who becomes a great object of
attention wherever she goes, was very much based on the real-life
Lafont, just like her relationship with her beau Gérard (who has to
leave Nîmes for three months, promising to marry her at his return) was
very much reminiscent of her engagement to Blain. The two actors stayed
at the house of Bernadette's parents for the entire shooting of the
short. She chose to act in bare feet the whole time to make a homage to
Ava Gardner in
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
and, at the same time, a favour to Blain, not exactly a man of
exceptional height. When he had married Bernadette, Gérard had sworn to
himself that his new wife would have never stolen the spotlight from
him like Estella had previously done: unfortunately for his plans, he
was soon going to be sorely disappointed. Truffaut managed to get the
best out of the young actress through rather unorthodox methods at
times (like threatening to slap her hadn't she cried convincingly), but
they established a great chemistry in the end and he taught her not to
look at someone like Bardot as a source of inspiration, since the big
star didn't possess any gift Bernadette should have been jealous of.
"Les Mistons" turned out to be a little gem which already contained all
the best elements of the great director's cinema. During the shooting,
Bernadette got to know many other key figures of the upcoming French
New Wave, including Rivette, Paul Gégauff
and Claude Chabrol. The latter had
already asked her to appear in his debut feature film by the time
Truffaut had proposed her to star in "Les Mistons": she had accepted
both offers simultaneously and, once the shooting of the short movie
was over, she immediately embarked on another adventure.
Chabrol's atmospheric
Le Beau Serge (1958) is now
officially considered the movie that kickstarted the French New Wave:
it was shot in Sardent, where the director had spent many of his
childhood years. The main cast was formed by Bernadette, Gérard and
another young actor called
Jean-Claude Brialy, who would soon
become a cornerstone of French cinema in general and an assiduous
presence in New Wave movies in particular. The movie takes place in a
community of drunkards and is centered around the relationship between
the rebellious Serge (Blain) and his better balanced friend François
(Brialy). Bernadette got the juicy role of Serge's slutty sister-in-law
and lover, Marie. This role of a very impudent and provocative woman of
slightly vulgar charms allowed her to introduce the French audience to
a new female image that was very much different from the ones usually
found in the cinema of the period and worked as a prototype to the
unforgettable gallery of "bad girl" types her cinematic work will
forever be strictly associated to. The movie was very much praised
along with the great performances of its actors. Bernadette was
immediately featured on the cover of a recent edition of "The Cahiers
du Cinéma" along with Brialy. Her rise in popularity had predictably an
immediate negative impact on her relationship with Blain. The two male
stars of "Le Beau Serge" were paired again in Chabrol's subsequent
feature, the least interesting
The Cousins (1959), but, this time,
the leading female role was given to an absolutely unremarkable
Juliette Mayniel. Bernadette started to
grow more and more bored as Gérard was away from home to shoot the
movie and even tried to contact him on the set asking for a divorce.
Bernadette teamed up again with Chabrol in the director's third
released feature ,
Web of Passion (1959), which didn't
work as well as a thriller rather than as an ironic spoof on the
clichés of the genre and actor piece. The film's acting laurels go
undoubtedly to Bernadette as a saucy waitress,
Jean-Paul Belmondo as a cheeky young
man with an alcohol problem and the glorious
Madeleine Robinson (rightly
awarded with a Volpi Cup at Venice Film Festival) as a troubled wife
and mother. By the end of the year, Bernadette had eventually divorced
from Blain and gotten into a relationship with a Hungarian sculptor she
had known on her 20th birthday,
Diourka Medveczky. 1960 was a turning
point for her, as the work she did helped cementing her status as the
female face of the New Wave.
L'eau à la bouche (1960) was
the first and most famous feature of
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, another
critic of the Cahiers who wanted to follow the same path of his
colleagues turned directors and decided to call Bernadette after seeing
"Le Beau Serge". The superb
The Good Time Girls (1960) was
Chabrol's fourth movie and remains one of his masterworks. The film
follows four girls (Bernadette, Stéphane Audran,
Clotilde Joano and
Lucile Saint-Simon) who are bored
with their lives and waiting for a positive change to arrive, whether
it's the coming of true love or the fulfillment of a dream. With many
scenes set in the shop where the four characters work (a surreal place
where time seems to have stopped), Chabrol was able to create something
that seemed to come out of Sartre, managing to perfectly spread to the
viewer the sense of loneliness and boredom weighing down the girls,
seemingly trapped in the antechamber of hell. One of the film's
strongest assets were three performances: tragic actress Joano gave a
delicate and poetic portrayal of the ill-fated Jacqueline, Italian
veteran Ave Ninchi added a lot of authority
to her Madame Louise and, of course, Bernadette did the usual splendid
job lending her energetic screen persona to Jane, the obvious haywire
of the group, but, at the same time, a character more vulnerable and
less gutsy than her usual creations. The movie allowed the actress to
stretch her range and gave her a lot of good memories, such as pushing
journalists on a swimming pool (which is at the heart of a key scene)
along with Stéphane, somehow managing to galvanize the normally
extremely shy girl. To appear in the movie, Bernadette had to decline
the role of prostitute Clarisse (eventually played by
Michèle Mercier) in Truffaut's
masterpiece
Shoot the Piano Player (1960),
but it was a worthy sacrifice. The same year she gave birth to her
first daughter with her now husband Diourka, the future actress
Élisabeth Lafont, in the same health
house where she was born. Bernadette's next collaboration with Chabrol
was the remarkable
Wise Guys (1961), where she
got her most memorable role so far as Ambroisine, a girl who gets
recruited by Jean-Claude Brialy's Ronald to create trouble in an
old-fashioned environment with her modern, liberated persona, but
eventually becomes impossible for him to control because of her
mean-spirited nature. Her anarchic side was used to full potential for
the first time, something that lead to one of the best portrayals of
dark lady in a New Wave movie. But, like the other characters in the
film weren't ready for a new type of woman such as Ambroisine, the
movie-goers of the period seemed unwilling to fall for the charms of
this revolutionary type of woman Bernadette was bringing to the screen
and "Les godelureaux" was a box office flop, just like "Les Bonnes
Femmes" had been. The latter, now regarded as one of Chabrol's best,
was also a critical disaster, although Bernadette got positive reviews
for her performance. Watched today, it's clear that both movies
outclass several entries from the director's most celebrated noir cycle
from the late 60's to the early 70's. But considering the tepid impact
that her movies used to have with the big public, Bernadette was seen
just as a half-star and icon of niche cinema exclusively and her agent
used to have much trouble in finding her roles at the time. Producer
Carlo Ponti once offered her to come to
Italy to do some movies: now that his wife
Sophia Loren was moving to Hollywood (not
exactly to electrifying results), he thought there was a void in
Italian cinema that needed to be filled by a feisty, curvaceous
actress. This proposal lead to nothing. A project with Godard never saw
the light of the day. Rivette never bothered to answer a letter by
Bernadette where she had asked him to cast her in his debut feature
film,
Paris Belongs to Us (1961).
She was offered her ticket to major stardom with
Jacques Demy's
Lola (1961), but she had to decline the
title role in the movie because she was pregnant with her second child,
David. The part eventually went to the limited
Anouk Aimée, who gave the best acting she
could ever be capable of, but it goes without saying that, had
Bernadette played the part, she would have elevated the movie to
entirely new levels.
The 60s, for most of the time, didn't prove to be a very happy decade
for Bernadette as she got to face both a personal and professional
crisis. Immediately after "Les Godelureaux", her talents were wasted in
several obscure movies and shorts. In 1962 she appeared in
And Satan Calls the Turns (1962),
which boosted a high-profile cast, but was scripted by
Roger Vadim, something that predictably
sealed the movie's fate. Although officially directed by one-shot
filmmaker Grisha Dabat, the film contained
all the worst elements of Vadim's cinema and Bernadette was given such
a thankless role that not even she could elevate it. One year later she
was without an agent and took a break from acting, also to give birth
to her third daughter, the future actress
Pauline Lafont. The passion between her
and Diourka had cooled down by now and the main reason they stayed
together for a few years more was their common love for cinema: he was
indeed planning to make his directorial debut. For the time being, they
tried to make it work by opting for an open marriage where both enjoyed
plenty of extra-conjugal affairs. Bernadette's friends Truffaut and
Chabrol couldn't really come to her rescue either. The first sent her a
letter which read: "You chose life. I chose cinema. I don' think our
paths will ever cross again". The second was now engaged to Audran and
was soon to enter a second phase of his career, one where he regularly
did films whose central female characters weren't witty, animated
provincial girls, but frozen, humourless bourgeoisie ladies that were
tailor-made for Stéphane. In 1964, Bernadette had a rather unhappy
"rentrée" with
Male Hunt (1964) ,
a very disappointing comedy made by the talented
Édouard Molinaro on an utterly unfunny
script by Michel Audiard. Her role as a
prostitute was hardly one minute long, but she had little money and a
ton of debts at the time, so she had to accept everything she was
offered. During the decade, she found work in a few more resonant
projects such as Louis Malle's
The Thief of Paris (1967),
Costa-Gavras's
The Sleeping Car Murder (1965)
and Jean Aurel's
Lamiel (1967), but she was given very
indifferent roles in all of them. Once again, going after unusual
projects by new, alternative auteurs was the decisive factor that
helped her putting her career back on track. In Diourka's remarkable
first work, the short
Marie et le curé (1967), she
shined as a provocative young woman who seduces a priest to nefarious
consequences for both. Shortly after, she appeared in the silent movie
Le révélateur (1968), which was
directed by her love interest of the time,
Philippe Garrel, and co-starred
Laurent Terzieff, opposite whom she had
always dearly desired to act. The film was shot in Spain and Bernadette
helped funding it thanks to a loan from Chabrol. At around the same
time, she also shot the "conjoined" shorts
Prologue (1970) and
Piège (1970), which were written and
directed by Jacques Baratier and
co-starred the great Bulle Ogier. Having
seen Bulle in her most acclaimed film role in Rivette's titanic
achievement Mad Love (1969),
Bernadette had been astonished by the actress' monstrous amount of
talent and was a bit scared by the thought of having to cross blades
with her. As two thieves locked in a mysterious house by a vampiresque
entity, the two actresses went on to gave a great lesson in
metaphysical acting. Closer to an example of visual arts or Noh theatre
than a cinematic work, Barratier's double short may feel too extreme
even to some New Wave purists, but is nevertheless a fascinating watch
and a must-see for the fans of the two ladies, equally impressive in
the acting department and perfectly suited to create the needed
physical contrast, with the taller brunette adding an earthy element
and the petite blonde providing an ethereal quality. Bernadette and
Bulle developed a beautiful friendship which lead to several other
collaborations. In 1969, Diourka made his first feature film,
Paul (1969).
Jean-Pierre Léaud, a cult actor if
there ever was one, had loved the Hungarian sculptor's previous shorts
and sent him a letter asking to work with him, so that he would add
another unique title to his genial filmography. He so earned the honour
to play title character in Diourka's (only) film, as a little bourgeois
who escapes from his family, joins a group of sages and meets
temptation in Bernadette's form. None of these works really gave the
actress a major popularity boost, however. Unlike fellow female
standouts of the New Wave such as Ogier,
Edith Scob,
Delphine Seyrig,
Jeanne Moreau and
Emmanuelle Riva, Bernadette didn't have
theatrical roots, but this didn't prevent her from appearing in stage
productions of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" and Picasso's
surrealist play "Le désir attrapé par la queue" in this period. The
official start of her career renaissance came, however, at the end of
the decade with Nelly Kaplan's
A Very Curious Girl (1969),
a retelling of sorts of Michelet's "La Sorcière". Conceived as a
monument to her talents, the transgressive movie stars Bernadette as
Marie, a village girl who becomes a prostitute to settle a score with
society (winning male and female hearts alike) and eventually gets
revenge on all her men clients. The vendetta bit had been inspired by
an off-screen feud between director Kaplan (an angry feminist) and
actor Michael Constantin, who had
refused to recite the line 'they were very happy and didn't have
children" because he was a family man and opted for a more prudish
"they were very happy and had children" instead. Bernadette's fearless
performance had such a huge impact that, after the film's release, she
got offers to star in porn features along with obscene proposals from
the more misguided moviegoers. Once again, the public had proved not to
have understood what kind of woman she represented, but auteur cinema
was now going to welcome her back to a fuller extent.
The 70's were definitely a more successful decade for Bernadette. She
was still seen as an alternative actress and was hardly ever offered
traditional roles in conventional movies, but she didn't care about it,
since she felt more at home in unique experiments such as
La ville-bidon (1971),
Valparaiso, Valparaiso (1971)
or Sex-Power (1970).
Moshé Mizrahi's feminist dramedy
Sophie's Ways (1971)
offered her one of her best parts as the rebellious wife of an
excellent Michel Duchaussoy in one of
his least charming roles. Jean Renoir
himself was knocked out by her performance. In 1971, Bernadette finally
got to work with Rivette for the first time in the director's epic
Out 1 (1971),
originally conceived as an 8 part mini-series to sell to French TV. The
movie is centered around 12 main characters that work as pieces of an
intricate puzzle and Bernadette was teamed up with several acting
heavyweights such as
Michael Lonsdale,
Françoise Fabian,
Juliet Berto and her former co-stars Léaud
and Ogier. She played the role of Lonsdale's ex-girlfriend, a writer he
tries to recruit for his mysterious dancing group. The actress, unlike
other cast members, wasn't used to Rivette's working method, which
involved little explanations and a lot of room for improvisation. Since
it took her a lot of time to adapt to this style, she was reproached by
the director, who harshly accused her of having chosen not to do
anything, therefore hurting her feelings. Eventually these words helped
Bernadette to find a way to incorporate her "handicap" into the
character, imagining that Marie was experimenting writer's block like
she had found herself unable to act. A scene where she and Léaud kept
just staring at each other because they didn't know what to say was
kept by Rivette because he liked the authentic feeling about it.
Eventually French TV never bought "Out 1". Rivette also cut it down to
4 hours in the form of
Out 1: Spectre (1972), but both
versions were hardly released outside of festival circuits. One year
later, Bernadette got to play her best remembered and most iconic role:
Camille Bliss in Truffaut's underrated black comedy
A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972).
As a girl who's released from prison so that she can be analyzed by a
student of criminology, the actress got to play a role that exemplified
her career (being 'one of a kind') and felt like the summation and
sublimation of all the naughty ladies she had played before: of coarse
manners and vulgar laughter, indomitable, unstoppable, irreverent,
incandescent and more of a destructive force that she had ever been in
any of her previous movies, including "Marie et le Curé" , "La fiancée
du pirate" and "Les godelureaux". Her performance won her the "Triomphe
du Cinéma Français" and was stellarly received in the US, with
"Newsweek" and the "New York Magazine" giving it such phenomenal praise
that a French journalist wrote this comment: "Bernadette Lafont,
historical monument to the U.S.A.". After bringing the female type she
so often personified to its definitive cinematic form, Bernadette
gradually started her image makeover. The first example was in
Jean Eustache's supreme masterpiece
The Mother and the Whore (1973),
where she would have been the logical choice to play the title "whore"
Veronika, but was actually given the touching role of the title
"mother" Marie. Eustache, another former critic of the Cahiers had
known her for about ten years and given her the script in 1971. After
reading a couple pages she had been immediately won over and realized
how much she desired to do it. The director's towering 4 hour
achievement is centered around a love triangle formed of Eustache's
screen alter-ego Alexandre (Léaud in his very best performance), slutty
nurse Veronika (non-professional actress
Françoise Lebrun, whose angelic
appearance provided the perfect contrast with the nature of the
character) and Bernadette's Marie, Alexandre's patient girlfriend who
enjoys a very open relationship with him. Managing to convey an entire
era in the characters' long, sublime dialogues, Eustache easily made
one of the greatest and most significant movies of the French New Wave.
Bernadette's portrayal of Marie showed a vibrant, affecting sensitivity
that she had hardly done before, giving further demonstration of her
talent and versatility. The film was shown in competition at the 1973
Cannes film festival, where it predictably got a mixed reception: some,
including Jury President
Ingrid Bergman, hated it, while
others worshiped it as the future of cinema. In the end, Eustache was
given the Grand Prize of the Jury. The same year, Bernadette also
appeared in Nadine Trintignant's
Défense de savoir (1973), which
was no great shakes, but also starred two of the nation's top actors,
Jean-Louis Trintignant and
Michel Bouquet, both of which she greatly
admired. She teamed up with the two again, respectively in
The Probability Factor (1976)
and
Vincent mit l'âne dans un pré (et s'en vint dans l'autre) (1975).
She was particularly entertaining in the second as an eccentric rich
lady, proving that she could be also very convincing at playing very
chic and sophisticated characters. The movie ends on a high note with
the actress giving an unforgettable, sexy laugh. Daughters Élisabeth
and Pauline were also given roles in the movie. The final great role
Bernadette played in this period was in Rivette's misunderstood
masterpiece Noroît (une vengeance) (1976): Giulia,
daughter of the Sun. Centred, like many of the director's works, on the
dichotomy between light and shadow and day and night, the movie sees
Geraldine Chaplin's Morag ending up on
a mysterious island ruled by an Amazon-like society where males are
either enslaved or, like in her brother's case, murdered. A great
revenge tale not without its 'steampunk' element, the film is certainly
highlighted by the transforming performance of Bernadette as a
ruthless, modern day Pirate queen, cutting one of her female minions'
throat with one of the most frighteningly icy expressions ever recorded
by a camera and eventually facing Chaplin in a climatic knife duel on
the ramparts. Unfortunately, Rivette's previous feature
Duelle (1976)
had been so unsuccessful that "Noroît " wasn't even released and, to
this day, it remains the director's least popular work, which means
that many people aren't familiar with Bernadette's sinister, against
type performance, which ranks with her very best and is undoubtedly one
of the great villainous turns in New Wave cinema. By 1978 there had
been another change of muse in Chabrol's movies, as an astounding 24
years old Isabelle Huppert headlined
the cast of one of his best works,
Violette (1978), the
first of a series of successful collaborations which included the
director's number one masterpiece,
La Cérémonie (1995). Bernadette was
given a brief, but memorable cameo as Violette's cellmate. This
1969-1978 period easily represents the zenith of her career. After
that, it was a bit difficult for her to deal with the changing times.
By the end of the 70's, most of the New Wave auteurs had moved on to
more conventional projects and French cinema was entering a far less
creative phase. Bernadette's desire to constantly challenge herself and
look for different, ground-breaking projects often lead her to be part
of totally unremarkable movies. Her nadir was probably represented by
her two collaborations with Michel Caputo,
arguably the worst French director to ever work with name actors
(before he exclusively moved on to do porn under several aliases):
Qu'il est joli garçon l'assassin de papa (1979)
and
Si ma gueule vous plaît... (1981),
two supposed comic works that would make Michel Audiard's comedies look
like Bringing Up Baby (1938) in
comparison. But, although the modern viewer can hardly believe the
existence of such detrimental works, they actually weren't unusual
products of their time, but clear evidence of a scary change of taste
on the public's part. Actresses like Bernadette, who used to mainly
work for an audience of intellectuals, had to struggle hard to keep
afloat after this change of tide and, in the early
80's, she had to
lend her talents to a dozen of movies that weren't worth it. The Lee Marvin
vehicle Dog Day (1984) was the second
occasion she found herself working with a mega-star in an international
production since her cameo opposite the legendary
Kirk Douglas in
Dick Clement's Swinging London abomination
Catch Me a Spy (1971). Although
she was given a bit more to do this time around, this title didn't add
anything to her filmography either. Luckily, this wasn't the case of
Claude Miller's
L'effrontée (1985) a.k.a. "Impudent
Girl". It's very ironic -and certainly not coincidental - that a movie
going by this title and starring a 14 years old
Charlotte Gainsbourg as a gutsy
rebel would also feature Bernadette, who had, by all means, every
maternity right on this type of character which had grown more and more
diffused on the French screen thanks to her work. But the film had a
much different flavour from the actress' vehicles from the 60's-70's:
Gainsbourg's stubborn but ultimately good-hearted Charlotte is actually
nothing like "Les Godelureaux"'s Ambroisine or "Une belle fille comme
moi"'s Camille Bliss and Bernadette's Léone, the new love interest of
Charlotte's father and mother of an asthmatic girl, is a very likable
and moving character. Having moved on to more accessible projects,
Bernadette naturally started to receive more award consideration as
well, and her sweet, beautiful performance in Miller's movie was
honored with a Best Supporting Actress César, one of the best and most
inspired choices ever in the category. Her next project was
Inspector Lavardin (1986),
the second and best movie centered around
Jean Poiret's unconventional police inspector
and her first collaboration with Chabrol since "Violette". Wearing the
most recurring name of the director's heroines, Hélène, she also dyed
her hair blond for the first time on his wishes, so that she would have
taken a step further in changing her screen persona. She liked the idea
and would keep blond hair for the rest of her life. She worked with
Chabrol for a seventh (and last) time only one year later in one of the
director's most gothic-like works, the underrated
Masks (1987), which stars the great
Philippe Noiret as a villainous TV
presenter worthy of the pen of
Ann Radcliffe, Christian Legagneur, who
keeps an innocent Anne Brochet imprisoned
in his imposing manor and wishes to kill her to get his hands on her
fortune. The juicy role of Legagneur's masseuse won Bernadette a second
nomination for the Supporting Actress César.
In 1988, Bernadette's life was sadly affected by a horrible personal
tragedy. In August, she was spending a holiday in the Cévennes family
mansion, La Serre du Pomaret, along with son David, daughter Pauline
and painter Pierre De Chevilly, her new life mate. On the 11th day of
the month, Pauline left the house early in the morning to have a long
walk to lose weight. By midday she hadn't come back yet. The family
began to worry and David started to look for her. Bernadette was
unfortunately committed to appear in a TV show in Nice and she left
with her heart in her throat, hoping that, in the mean time, David or
Pierre would have found Pauline. That wasn't to be. The family lived
many weeks in a state of anguish, using the TV show "Avis de Recherche"
to diffuse some photos of Pauline in the hope that someone could have
shed some light on the mystery. There were several false reports from
people who claimed to have seen her and Bernadette kept fooling herself
for a long time, wanting to believe that the quest would have been
greeted with success. Tragically, on the 21st November, Pauline's body
was found in a ravine. Her death was officially called a hiking
accident, although its circumstances are still mysterious to this day
and some people considered the suicide theory. Bernadette dealt with
her devastating grief by throwing herself into her job: always an
extremely prolific actress, she got to work more and more and, as a
result, she added a lot of unremarkable titles to her resume. She would
still find a few good parts in the following decades.
Between 1990 and 2013, the actress added over 70 titles to her film and
TV resume. Her talents were rather wasted in
Raúl Ruiz's uneven
Genealogies of a Crime (1997)
and in Pascal Bonitzer's delightfully
cynical Nothing About Robert (1999).
She shined much more as an alcoholic mother in
Personne ne m'aime (1994)
(where she teamed up with Ogier and Léaud once more), a former teacher
who almost ends up abducting her grandchildren in
Les petites vacances (2006),
an antique shop dealer who still has a great ascendancy over younger
men in Bazar (2009) and a family matriarch
in the comedy
Prête-moi ta main (2006)
opposite Alain Chabat and successor
Gainsbourg. Her performance in this movie won her a third nomination
for the Best Supporting Actress César. Her massive body of TV work from
this period was highlighted by her performances in
La très excellente et divertissante histoire de François Rabelais (2010)
and
La femme du boulanger (2010).
She also did more stage work than ever in the 2000s. Starting from
2010, she was again employed for a few projects that had a bigger
impact. First she borrowed her wonderful, husky voice to a treacherous
nanny in the lovely animated feature
A Cat in Paris (2010), which was
Oscar-nominated. This nasty lady role felt like a homage to the
characters that had made her famous. The following year, Bernadette and
fellow New Wave legend Emmanuelle Riva were unfortunately the latest
victims of Julie Delpy's game of playing
director, as they were cast in the actress' catastrophic vanity project
Skylab (2011). Delpy's latest
directorial feature contained all the typical elements that she thinks
are enough to make a movie: a seemingly endless family reunion,
characters talking about hot hair around a table and a few off-colour
gags here and there. The two glorious veterans, sadistically mortified
by the granny look they had to sport, did the best they could with the
material they were given, but it was just too little to begin with and,
consequently, they can't possibly be considered a real redeeming factor
of the terribly written, lacklusterly directed and otherwise insipidly
acted film. In 2012, Bernadette got her best role in years as the title
character in Jérôme Enrico's black comedy
Paulette (2012). Enrico's pensioner
version of Breaking Bad (2008)
sees Bernadette's Paulette, a penniless, xenophobic widow, finding
herself in a Walter White type of situation as she gets into drug
dealing to make a living and begins to smuggle hashish right under the
nose of her son-in-law, a coloured cop. The actress was immediately won
over by the script, finding it modern and socially significant and
decided to give a strong characterization to her character. Getting
inspiration from Charles Chaplin's
heroes and Giulietta Masina's
performance in La strada (1954), she
provided Paulette with a clown side which came complete with a funny
walk and her leading turn proved absolutely irresistible. The film
opened to positive reviews and got more visibility outside France than
Bernadette's latest vehicles and many were foreseeing another career
renaissance for her. Sadly, it wasn't to be.
In early July 2013, Bernadette was on her way to her family mansion in
Saint-André-de-Valborgne (Gard) when she was the victim of a stroke.
Forced to stay in Grau-du-Roi for a while, she had a second one on the
22nd and was quickly moved to the University Hospital centre of Nîmes,
where she tragically died three days later. Her funeral took place at
the Protestant temple of Saint-André-de-Valborgne on the 29th. Her
passing was a cause of great grief for an enormous number of people, as
she had gradually become a huge favourite of the French audience and a
cornerstone of their cinema, and her colleagues had always adored her
on both a professional and personal level. The admiration she had
earned through the years had been repeatedly proved by several career
tributes, including an Honorary César, the title of Officer of the
French Legion of Honour and medals from the "National Order of Merit"
and the "Order of Arts and Letters".
Bernadette's legacy could never be extinguished, but, in addition to
everything she had already bequeathed to cinema, she graced the silver
screen for a last time even after her death through her final completed
movie, Sylvain Chomet's
Attila Marcel (2013). The movie,
recently showed at Toronto film festival and released in French
theatres, was greeted with positive reviews where big kudos were
reserved to Bernadette's portrayal of the eccentric adoptive aunt of
Guillaume Gouix's protagonist. With the
film's upcoming release in many more countries, plenty of others will
have the bitter honour to see her eventually taking leave. Since the
25th October 2013, the Municipal Theatre of Nîmes has been renamed the
Bernadette Lafont Theatre to honour the memory of the great actress. A
once unforeseeable and absolutely logical reaching point for the
barefoot girl biking in the city's streets in "Les Mistons".
Gard, the only child of a pharmacist and a housewife from the Cévennes.
Her mother always wanted a boy to name Bernard and, once she gave birth
to a girl, she enjoyed to hold this against all the catholics she knew
as the proof that their God either was blind or didn't exist. Often
dressed as a boy and nicknamed Bernard, Bernadette nevertheless had a
great relationship with her parents. Having spent part of her childhood
in Saint-Geniès-de-Malgoirès, she returned to Nîmes where she took
ballet lessons at the local Opera House. She proved to be a gifted
student and she did three little tours and about twenty galas there. An
extroverted girl with a fervent imagination, she used to spend her
holidays at the Cévennes family mansion playing dress-up with her
friend Annie, along whom she used to pretend to be an actress from an
imaginary West End Club, working in Italian cinema: doing this started
to win her a lot of male attention. She also began to develop a passion
for film from an early age, adopting
Brigitte Bardot and
Marina Vlady as role models.
On the summer of 1955, the "Arènes" of Nîmes hosted a Festival of
Dramatic Arts for the second time: 40 actors came from Paris while 50
regional aspiring thespians and 30 dancing students were recruited on
the place. The main attraction was a production of "La Tragédie des
Albigeois", a new play which featured music by
Georges Delerue and starred, in the
leading roles, the acclaimed stage veteran
Jean Deschamps and a talented young actor
called Jean-Louis Trintignant,
who would go a long way from there. The play also offered bit parts to
future directing genius Maurice Pialat,
Trintignant's then wife Colette Dacheville (the future
Stéphane Audran), and the skilled
Gérard Blain, who, by then, had already
appeared in a handful of movies, although usually in uncredited roles.
Having seen Gérard on his way to a rehearsal at the "Arènes",
Bernadette was immediately won over by his "bad boy" charm and decided
to walk around the place (which had ironically been the spot of her
parents' first encounter) to catch his attention: she did. Already
separated from wife Estella Blain, Gérard
immediately developed a great interest in Bernadette, stating that he
was willing to bring her to Paris to introduce her to certain people at
the Opera House and stating how glad he was that she didn't have any
interest in pursuing an acting career, something he regarded, in a
woman's case, as a road to perdition. After she finished her studies,
Bernadette's parents gave her permission to marry Gérard and she did so
in 1957.
Blain found his first relevant film role in
Julien Duvivier's brilliant thriller
Deadlier Than the Male (1956)
and Bernadette spent a lot of time with him on the movie's set,
something that made her fascination with cinema grow even bigger. The
film opened to positive reviews and was also lauded (quite an oddity
for a Duvivier feature) by the ruthless "Cahiers du Cinéma" critics,
including the young François Truffaut,
who called Blain "the French
James Dean". Gérard decided to give
the critic a phone call to thank him for the kind words and, after the
two had a couple lunches together, Truffaut ended up making him a work
offer. It's always been very hard for film critics to point at a
specific work as the undisputed start of the French New Wave: for many
people it's Agnès Varda's
La Pointe Courte (1955) , but
the director herself never wanted to be bestowed this honor and prefers
to be considered a godmother to the movement. Others think that the
roots of this new school of cinema can be found in the early shorts of
Jacques Rivette,
Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut. The
latter's The Mischief Makers (1957) is
certainly one of the most significant of these ground-breaking works
and happens to be the project for which Blain was recruited. Truffaut
wanted to shoot the short in Nîmes and, with the exception of Gérard,
he hired only non-professional actors: this included several local
children and, of course, Bernadette. The mini-feature is centered
around two lovers, Gérard (Blain) and Bernadette Jouve (Lafont), who
are spied on by a group of children and are separated forever once he
leaves for a mountain excursion from which he will never return. The
character of Bernadette, a head-turner who becomes a great object of
attention wherever she goes, was very much based on the real-life
Lafont, just like her relationship with her beau Gérard (who has to
leave Nîmes for three months, promising to marry her at his return) was
very much reminiscent of her engagement to Blain. The two actors stayed
at the house of Bernadette's parents for the entire shooting of the
short. She chose to act in bare feet the whole time to make a homage to
Ava Gardner in
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
and, at the same time, a favour to Blain, not exactly a man of
exceptional height. When he had married Bernadette, Gérard had sworn to
himself that his new wife would have never stolen the spotlight from
him like Estella had previously done: unfortunately for his plans, he
was soon going to be sorely disappointed. Truffaut managed to get the
best out of the young actress through rather unorthodox methods at
times (like threatening to slap her hadn't she cried convincingly), but
they established a great chemistry in the end and he taught her not to
look at someone like Bardot as a source of inspiration, since the big
star didn't possess any gift Bernadette should have been jealous of.
"Les Mistons" turned out to be a little gem which already contained all
the best elements of the great director's cinema. During the shooting,
Bernadette got to know many other key figures of the upcoming French
New Wave, including Rivette, Paul Gégauff
and Claude Chabrol. The latter had
already asked her to appear in his debut feature film by the time
Truffaut had proposed her to star in "Les Mistons": she had accepted
both offers simultaneously and, once the shooting of the short movie
was over, she immediately embarked on another adventure.
Chabrol's atmospheric
Le Beau Serge (1958) is now
officially considered the movie that kickstarted the French New Wave:
it was shot in Sardent, where the director had spent many of his
childhood years. The main cast was formed by Bernadette, Gérard and
another young actor called
Jean-Claude Brialy, who would soon
become a cornerstone of French cinema in general and an assiduous
presence in New Wave movies in particular. The movie takes place in a
community of drunkards and is centered around the relationship between
the rebellious Serge (Blain) and his better balanced friend François
(Brialy). Bernadette got the juicy role of Serge's slutty sister-in-law
and lover, Marie. This role of a very impudent and provocative woman of
slightly vulgar charms allowed her to introduce the French audience to
a new female image that was very much different from the ones usually
found in the cinema of the period and worked as a prototype to the
unforgettable gallery of "bad girl" types her cinematic work will
forever be strictly associated to. The movie was very much praised
along with the great performances of its actors. Bernadette was
immediately featured on the cover of a recent edition of "The Cahiers
du Cinéma" along with Brialy. Her rise in popularity had predictably an
immediate negative impact on her relationship with Blain. The two male
stars of "Le Beau Serge" were paired again in Chabrol's subsequent
feature, the least interesting
The Cousins (1959), but, this time,
the leading female role was given to an absolutely unremarkable
Juliette Mayniel. Bernadette started to
grow more and more bored as Gérard was away from home to shoot the
movie and even tried to contact him on the set asking for a divorce.
Bernadette teamed up again with Chabrol in the director's third
released feature ,
Web of Passion (1959), which didn't
work as well as a thriller rather than as an ironic spoof on the
clichés of the genre and actor piece. The film's acting laurels go
undoubtedly to Bernadette as a saucy waitress,
Jean-Paul Belmondo as a cheeky young
man with an alcohol problem and the glorious
Madeleine Robinson (rightly
awarded with a Volpi Cup at Venice Film Festival) as a troubled wife
and mother. By the end of the year, Bernadette had eventually divorced
from Blain and gotten into a relationship with a Hungarian sculptor she
had known on her 20th birthday,
Diourka Medveczky. 1960 was a turning
point for her, as the work she did helped cementing her status as the
female face of the New Wave.
L'eau à la bouche (1960) was
the first and most famous feature of
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, another
critic of the Cahiers who wanted to follow the same path of his
colleagues turned directors and decided to call Bernadette after seeing
"Le Beau Serge". The superb
The Good Time Girls (1960) was
Chabrol's fourth movie and remains one of his masterworks. The film
follows four girls (Bernadette, Stéphane Audran,
Clotilde Joano and
Lucile Saint-Simon) who are bored
with their lives and waiting for a positive change to arrive, whether
it's the coming of true love or the fulfillment of a dream. With many
scenes set in the shop where the four characters work (a surreal place
where time seems to have stopped), Chabrol was able to create something
that seemed to come out of Sartre, managing to perfectly spread to the
viewer the sense of loneliness and boredom weighing down the girls,
seemingly trapped in the antechamber of hell. One of the film's
strongest assets were three performances: tragic actress Joano gave a
delicate and poetic portrayal of the ill-fated Jacqueline, Italian
veteran Ave Ninchi added a lot of authority
to her Madame Louise and, of course, Bernadette did the usual splendid
job lending her energetic screen persona to Jane, the obvious haywire
of the group, but, at the same time, a character more vulnerable and
less gutsy than her usual creations. The movie allowed the actress to
stretch her range and gave her a lot of good memories, such as pushing
journalists on a swimming pool (which is at the heart of a key scene)
along with Stéphane, somehow managing to galvanize the normally
extremely shy girl. To appear in the movie, Bernadette had to decline
the role of prostitute Clarisse (eventually played by
Michèle Mercier) in Truffaut's
masterpiece
Shoot the Piano Player (1960),
but it was a worthy sacrifice. The same year she gave birth to her
first daughter with her now husband Diourka, the future actress
Élisabeth Lafont, in the same health
house where she was born. Bernadette's next collaboration with Chabrol
was the remarkable
Wise Guys (1961), where she
got her most memorable role so far as Ambroisine, a girl who gets
recruited by Jean-Claude Brialy's Ronald to create trouble in an
old-fashioned environment with her modern, liberated persona, but
eventually becomes impossible for him to control because of her
mean-spirited nature. Her anarchic side was used to full potential for
the first time, something that lead to one of the best portrayals of
dark lady in a New Wave movie. But, like the other characters in the
film weren't ready for a new type of woman such as Ambroisine, the
movie-goers of the period seemed unwilling to fall for the charms of
this revolutionary type of woman Bernadette was bringing to the screen
and "Les godelureaux" was a box office flop, just like "Les Bonnes
Femmes" had been. The latter, now regarded as one of Chabrol's best,
was also a critical disaster, although Bernadette got positive reviews
for her performance. Watched today, it's clear that both movies
outclass several entries from the director's most celebrated noir cycle
from the late 60's to the early 70's. But considering the tepid impact
that her movies used to have with the big public, Bernadette was seen
just as a half-star and icon of niche cinema exclusively and her agent
used to have much trouble in finding her roles at the time. Producer
Carlo Ponti once offered her to come to
Italy to do some movies: now that his wife
Sophia Loren was moving to Hollywood (not
exactly to electrifying results), he thought there was a void in
Italian cinema that needed to be filled by a feisty, curvaceous
actress. This proposal lead to nothing. A project with Godard never saw
the light of the day. Rivette never bothered to answer a letter by
Bernadette where she had asked him to cast her in his debut feature
film,
Paris Belongs to Us (1961).
She was offered her ticket to major stardom with
Jacques Demy's
Lola (1961), but she had to decline the
title role in the movie because she was pregnant with her second child,
David. The part eventually went to the limited
Anouk Aimée, who gave the best acting she
could ever be capable of, but it goes without saying that, had
Bernadette played the part, she would have elevated the movie to
entirely new levels.
The 60s, for most of the time, didn't prove to be a very happy decade
for Bernadette as she got to face both a personal and professional
crisis. Immediately after "Les Godelureaux", her talents were wasted in
several obscure movies and shorts. In 1962 she appeared in
And Satan Calls the Turns (1962),
which boosted a high-profile cast, but was scripted by
Roger Vadim, something that predictably
sealed the movie's fate. Although officially directed by one-shot
filmmaker Grisha Dabat, the film contained
all the worst elements of Vadim's cinema and Bernadette was given such
a thankless role that not even she could elevate it. One year later she
was without an agent and took a break from acting, also to give birth
to her third daughter, the future actress
Pauline Lafont. The passion between her
and Diourka had cooled down by now and the main reason they stayed
together for a few years more was their common love for cinema: he was
indeed planning to make his directorial debut. For the time being, they
tried to make it work by opting for an open marriage where both enjoyed
plenty of extra-conjugal affairs. Bernadette's friends Truffaut and
Chabrol couldn't really come to her rescue either. The first sent her a
letter which read: "You chose life. I chose cinema. I don' think our
paths will ever cross again". The second was now engaged to Audran and
was soon to enter a second phase of his career, one where he regularly
did films whose central female characters weren't witty, animated
provincial girls, but frozen, humourless bourgeoisie ladies that were
tailor-made for Stéphane. In 1964, Bernadette had a rather unhappy
"rentrée" with
Male Hunt (1964) ,
a very disappointing comedy made by the talented
Édouard Molinaro on an utterly unfunny
script by Michel Audiard. Her role as a
prostitute was hardly one minute long, but she had little money and a
ton of debts at the time, so she had to accept everything she was
offered. During the decade, she found work in a few more resonant
projects such as Louis Malle's
The Thief of Paris (1967),
Costa-Gavras's
The Sleeping Car Murder (1965)
and Jean Aurel's
Lamiel (1967), but she was given very
indifferent roles in all of them. Once again, going after unusual
projects by new, alternative auteurs was the decisive factor that
helped her putting her career back on track. In Diourka's remarkable
first work, the short
Marie et le curé (1967), she
shined as a provocative young woman who seduces a priest to nefarious
consequences for both. Shortly after, she appeared in the silent movie
Le révélateur (1968), which was
directed by her love interest of the time,
Philippe Garrel, and co-starred
Laurent Terzieff, opposite whom she had
always dearly desired to act. The film was shot in Spain and Bernadette
helped funding it thanks to a loan from Chabrol. At around the same
time, she also shot the "conjoined" shorts
Prologue (1970) and
Piège (1970), which were written and
directed by Jacques Baratier and
co-starred the great Bulle Ogier. Having
seen Bulle in her most acclaimed film role in Rivette's titanic
achievement Mad Love (1969),
Bernadette had been astonished by the actress' monstrous amount of
talent and was a bit scared by the thought of having to cross blades
with her. As two thieves locked in a mysterious house by a vampiresque
entity, the two actresses went on to gave a great lesson in
metaphysical acting. Closer to an example of visual arts or Noh theatre
than a cinematic work, Barratier's double short may feel too extreme
even to some New Wave purists, but is nevertheless a fascinating watch
and a must-see for the fans of the two ladies, equally impressive in
the acting department and perfectly suited to create the needed
physical contrast, with the taller brunette adding an earthy element
and the petite blonde providing an ethereal quality. Bernadette and
Bulle developed a beautiful friendship which lead to several other
collaborations. In 1969, Diourka made his first feature film,
Paul (1969).
Jean-Pierre Léaud, a cult actor if
there ever was one, had loved the Hungarian sculptor's previous shorts
and sent him a letter asking to work with him, so that he would add
another unique title to his genial filmography. He so earned the honour
to play title character in Diourka's (only) film, as a little bourgeois
who escapes from his family, joins a group of sages and meets
temptation in Bernadette's form. None of these works really gave the
actress a major popularity boost, however. Unlike fellow female
standouts of the New Wave such as Ogier,
Edith Scob,
Delphine Seyrig,
Jeanne Moreau and
Emmanuelle Riva, Bernadette didn't have
theatrical roots, but this didn't prevent her from appearing in stage
productions of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" and Picasso's
surrealist play "Le désir attrapé par la queue" in this period. The
official start of her career renaissance came, however, at the end of
the decade with Nelly Kaplan's
A Very Curious Girl (1969),
a retelling of sorts of Michelet's "La Sorcière". Conceived as a
monument to her talents, the transgressive movie stars Bernadette as
Marie, a village girl who becomes a prostitute to settle a score with
society (winning male and female hearts alike) and eventually gets
revenge on all her men clients. The vendetta bit had been inspired by
an off-screen feud between director Kaplan (an angry feminist) and
actor Michael Constantin, who had
refused to recite the line 'they were very happy and didn't have
children" because he was a family man and opted for a more prudish
"they were very happy and had children" instead. Bernadette's fearless
performance had such a huge impact that, after the film's release, she
got offers to star in porn features along with obscene proposals from
the more misguided moviegoers. Once again, the public had proved not to
have understood what kind of woman she represented, but auteur cinema
was now going to welcome her back to a fuller extent.
The 70's were definitely a more successful decade for Bernadette. She
was still seen as an alternative actress and was hardly ever offered
traditional roles in conventional movies, but she didn't care about it,
since she felt more at home in unique experiments such as
La ville-bidon (1971),
Valparaiso, Valparaiso (1971)
or Sex-Power (1970).
Moshé Mizrahi's feminist dramedy
Sophie's Ways (1971)
offered her one of her best parts as the rebellious wife of an
excellent Michel Duchaussoy in one of
his least charming roles. Jean Renoir
himself was knocked out by her performance. In 1971, Bernadette finally
got to work with Rivette for the first time in the director's epic
Out 1 (1971),
originally conceived as an 8 part mini-series to sell to French TV. The
movie is centered around 12 main characters that work as pieces of an
intricate puzzle and Bernadette was teamed up with several acting
heavyweights such as
Michael Lonsdale,
Françoise Fabian,
Juliet Berto and her former co-stars Léaud
and Ogier. She played the role of Lonsdale's ex-girlfriend, a writer he
tries to recruit for his mysterious dancing group. The actress, unlike
other cast members, wasn't used to Rivette's working method, which
involved little explanations and a lot of room for improvisation. Since
it took her a lot of time to adapt to this style, she was reproached by
the director, who harshly accused her of having chosen not to do
anything, therefore hurting her feelings. Eventually these words helped
Bernadette to find a way to incorporate her "handicap" into the
character, imagining that Marie was experimenting writer's block like
she had found herself unable to act. A scene where she and Léaud kept
just staring at each other because they didn't know what to say was
kept by Rivette because he liked the authentic feeling about it.
Eventually French TV never bought "Out 1". Rivette also cut it down to
4 hours in the form of
Out 1: Spectre (1972), but both
versions were hardly released outside of festival circuits. One year
later, Bernadette got to play her best remembered and most iconic role:
Camille Bliss in Truffaut's underrated black comedy
A Gorgeous Girl Like Me (1972).
As a girl who's released from prison so that she can be analyzed by a
student of criminology, the actress got to play a role that exemplified
her career (being 'one of a kind') and felt like the summation and
sublimation of all the naughty ladies she had played before: of coarse
manners and vulgar laughter, indomitable, unstoppable, irreverent,
incandescent and more of a destructive force that she had ever been in
any of her previous movies, including "Marie et le Curé" , "La fiancée
du pirate" and "Les godelureaux". Her performance won her the "Triomphe
du Cinéma Français" and was stellarly received in the US, with
"Newsweek" and the "New York Magazine" giving it such phenomenal praise
that a French journalist wrote this comment: "Bernadette Lafont,
historical monument to the U.S.A.". After bringing the female type she
so often personified to its definitive cinematic form, Bernadette
gradually started her image makeover. The first example was in
Jean Eustache's supreme masterpiece
The Mother and the Whore (1973),
where she would have been the logical choice to play the title "whore"
Veronika, but was actually given the touching role of the title
"mother" Marie. Eustache, another former critic of the Cahiers had
known her for about ten years and given her the script in 1971. After
reading a couple pages she had been immediately won over and realized
how much she desired to do it. The director's towering 4 hour
achievement is centered around a love triangle formed of Eustache's
screen alter-ego Alexandre (Léaud in his very best performance), slutty
nurse Veronika (non-professional actress
Françoise Lebrun, whose angelic
appearance provided the perfect contrast with the nature of the
character) and Bernadette's Marie, Alexandre's patient girlfriend who
enjoys a very open relationship with him. Managing to convey an entire
era in the characters' long, sublime dialogues, Eustache easily made
one of the greatest and most significant movies of the French New Wave.
Bernadette's portrayal of Marie showed a vibrant, affecting sensitivity
that she had hardly done before, giving further demonstration of her
talent and versatility. The film was shown in competition at the 1973
Cannes film festival, where it predictably got a mixed reception: some,
including Jury President
Ingrid Bergman, hated it, while
others worshiped it as the future of cinema. In the end, Eustache was
given the Grand Prize of the Jury. The same year, Bernadette also
appeared in Nadine Trintignant's
Défense de savoir (1973), which
was no great shakes, but also starred two of the nation's top actors,
Jean-Louis Trintignant and
Michel Bouquet, both of which she greatly
admired. She teamed up with the two again, respectively in
The Probability Factor (1976)
and
Vincent mit l'âne dans un pré (et s'en vint dans l'autre) (1975).
She was particularly entertaining in the second as an eccentric rich
lady, proving that she could be also very convincing at playing very
chic and sophisticated characters. The movie ends on a high note with
the actress giving an unforgettable, sexy laugh. Daughters Élisabeth
and Pauline were also given roles in the movie. The final great role
Bernadette played in this period was in Rivette's misunderstood
masterpiece Noroît (une vengeance) (1976): Giulia,
daughter of the Sun. Centred, like many of the director's works, on the
dichotomy between light and shadow and day and night, the movie sees
Geraldine Chaplin's Morag ending up on
a mysterious island ruled by an Amazon-like society where males are
either enslaved or, like in her brother's case, murdered. A great
revenge tale not without its 'steampunk' element, the film is certainly
highlighted by the transforming performance of Bernadette as a
ruthless, modern day Pirate queen, cutting one of her female minions'
throat with one of the most frighteningly icy expressions ever recorded
by a camera and eventually facing Chaplin in a climatic knife duel on
the ramparts. Unfortunately, Rivette's previous feature
Duelle (1976)
had been so unsuccessful that "Noroît " wasn't even released and, to
this day, it remains the director's least popular work, which means
that many people aren't familiar with Bernadette's sinister, against
type performance, which ranks with her very best and is undoubtedly one
of the great villainous turns in New Wave cinema. By 1978 there had
been another change of muse in Chabrol's movies, as an astounding 24
years old Isabelle Huppert headlined
the cast of one of his best works,
Violette (1978), the
first of a series of successful collaborations which included the
director's number one masterpiece,
La Cérémonie (1995). Bernadette was
given a brief, but memorable cameo as Violette's cellmate. This
1969-1978 period easily represents the zenith of her career. After
that, it was a bit difficult for her to deal with the changing times.
By the end of the 70's, most of the New Wave auteurs had moved on to
more conventional projects and French cinema was entering a far less
creative phase. Bernadette's desire to constantly challenge herself and
look for different, ground-breaking projects often lead her to be part
of totally unremarkable movies. Her nadir was probably represented by
her two collaborations with Michel Caputo,
arguably the worst French director to ever work with name actors
(before he exclusively moved on to do porn under several aliases):
Qu'il est joli garçon l'assassin de papa (1979)
and
Si ma gueule vous plaît... (1981),
two supposed comic works that would make Michel Audiard's comedies look
like Bringing Up Baby (1938) in
comparison. But, although the modern viewer can hardly believe the
existence of such detrimental works, they actually weren't unusual
products of their time, but clear evidence of a scary change of taste
on the public's part. Actresses like Bernadette, who used to mainly
work for an audience of intellectuals, had to struggle hard to keep
afloat after this change of tide and, in the early
80's, she had to
lend her talents to a dozen of movies that weren't worth it. The Lee Marvin
vehicle Dog Day (1984) was the second
occasion she found herself working with a mega-star in an international
production since her cameo opposite the legendary
Kirk Douglas in
Dick Clement's Swinging London abomination
Catch Me a Spy (1971). Although
she was given a bit more to do this time around, this title didn't add
anything to her filmography either. Luckily, this wasn't the case of
Claude Miller's
L'effrontée (1985) a.k.a. "Impudent
Girl". It's very ironic -and certainly not coincidental - that a movie
going by this title and starring a 14 years old
Charlotte Gainsbourg as a gutsy
rebel would also feature Bernadette, who had, by all means, every
maternity right on this type of character which had grown more and more
diffused on the French screen thanks to her work. But the film had a
much different flavour from the actress' vehicles from the 60's-70's:
Gainsbourg's stubborn but ultimately good-hearted Charlotte is actually
nothing like "Les Godelureaux"'s Ambroisine or "Une belle fille comme
moi"'s Camille Bliss and Bernadette's Léone, the new love interest of
Charlotte's father and mother of an asthmatic girl, is a very likable
and moving character. Having moved on to more accessible projects,
Bernadette naturally started to receive more award consideration as
well, and her sweet, beautiful performance in Miller's movie was
honored with a Best Supporting Actress César, one of the best and most
inspired choices ever in the category. Her next project was
Inspector Lavardin (1986),
the second and best movie centered around
Jean Poiret's unconventional police inspector
and her first collaboration with Chabrol since "Violette". Wearing the
most recurring name of the director's heroines, Hélène, she also dyed
her hair blond for the first time on his wishes, so that she would have
taken a step further in changing her screen persona. She liked the idea
and would keep blond hair for the rest of her life. She worked with
Chabrol for a seventh (and last) time only one year later in one of the
director's most gothic-like works, the underrated
Masks (1987), which stars the great
Philippe Noiret as a villainous TV
presenter worthy of the pen of
Ann Radcliffe, Christian Legagneur, who
keeps an innocent Anne Brochet imprisoned
in his imposing manor and wishes to kill her to get his hands on her
fortune. The juicy role of Legagneur's masseuse won Bernadette a second
nomination for the Supporting Actress César.
In 1988, Bernadette's life was sadly affected by a horrible personal
tragedy. In August, she was spending a holiday in the Cévennes family
mansion, La Serre du Pomaret, along with son David, daughter Pauline
and painter Pierre De Chevilly, her new life mate. On the 11th day of
the month, Pauline left the house early in the morning to have a long
walk to lose weight. By midday she hadn't come back yet. The family
began to worry and David started to look for her. Bernadette was
unfortunately committed to appear in a TV show in Nice and she left
with her heart in her throat, hoping that, in the mean time, David or
Pierre would have found Pauline. That wasn't to be. The family lived
many weeks in a state of anguish, using the TV show "Avis de Recherche"
to diffuse some photos of Pauline in the hope that someone could have
shed some light on the mystery. There were several false reports from
people who claimed to have seen her and Bernadette kept fooling herself
for a long time, wanting to believe that the quest would have been
greeted with success. Tragically, on the 21st November, Pauline's body
was found in a ravine. Her death was officially called a hiking
accident, although its circumstances are still mysterious to this day
and some people considered the suicide theory. Bernadette dealt with
her devastating grief by throwing herself into her job: always an
extremely prolific actress, she got to work more and more and, as a
result, she added a lot of unremarkable titles to her resume. She would
still find a few good parts in the following decades.
Between 1990 and 2013, the actress added over 70 titles to her film and
TV resume. Her talents were rather wasted in
Raúl Ruiz's uneven
Genealogies of a Crime (1997)
and in Pascal Bonitzer's delightfully
cynical Nothing About Robert (1999).
She shined much more as an alcoholic mother in
Personne ne m'aime (1994)
(where she teamed up with Ogier and Léaud once more), a former teacher
who almost ends up abducting her grandchildren in
Les petites vacances (2006),
an antique shop dealer who still has a great ascendancy over younger
men in Bazar (2009) and a family matriarch
in the comedy
Prête-moi ta main (2006)
opposite Alain Chabat and successor
Gainsbourg. Her performance in this movie won her a third nomination
for the Best Supporting Actress César. Her massive body of TV work from
this period was highlighted by her performances in
La très excellente et divertissante histoire de François Rabelais (2010)
and
La femme du boulanger (2010).
She also did more stage work than ever in the 2000s. Starting from
2010, she was again employed for a few projects that had a bigger
impact. First she borrowed her wonderful, husky voice to a treacherous
nanny in the lovely animated feature
A Cat in Paris (2010), which was
Oscar-nominated. This nasty lady role felt like a homage to the
characters that had made her famous. The following year, Bernadette and
fellow New Wave legend Emmanuelle Riva were unfortunately the latest
victims of Julie Delpy's game of playing
director, as they were cast in the actress' catastrophic vanity project
Skylab (2011). Delpy's latest
directorial feature contained all the typical elements that she thinks
are enough to make a movie: a seemingly endless family reunion,
characters talking about hot hair around a table and a few off-colour
gags here and there. The two glorious veterans, sadistically mortified
by the granny look they had to sport, did the best they could with the
material they were given, but it was just too little to begin with and,
consequently, they can't possibly be considered a real redeeming factor
of the terribly written, lacklusterly directed and otherwise insipidly
acted film. In 2012, Bernadette got her best role in years as the title
character in Jérôme Enrico's black comedy
Paulette (2012). Enrico's pensioner
version of Breaking Bad (2008)
sees Bernadette's Paulette, a penniless, xenophobic widow, finding
herself in a Walter White type of situation as she gets into drug
dealing to make a living and begins to smuggle hashish right under the
nose of her son-in-law, a coloured cop. The actress was immediately won
over by the script, finding it modern and socially significant and
decided to give a strong characterization to her character. Getting
inspiration from Charles Chaplin's
heroes and Giulietta Masina's
performance in La strada (1954), she
provided Paulette with a clown side which came complete with a funny
walk and her leading turn proved absolutely irresistible. The film
opened to positive reviews and got more visibility outside France than
Bernadette's latest vehicles and many were foreseeing another career
renaissance for her. Sadly, it wasn't to be.
In early July 2013, Bernadette was on her way to her family mansion in
Saint-André-de-Valborgne (Gard) when she was the victim of a stroke.
Forced to stay in Grau-du-Roi for a while, she had a second one on the
22nd and was quickly moved to the University Hospital centre of Nîmes,
where she tragically died three days later. Her funeral took place at
the Protestant temple of Saint-André-de-Valborgne on the 29th. Her
passing was a cause of great grief for an enormous number of people, as
she had gradually become a huge favourite of the French audience and a
cornerstone of their cinema, and her colleagues had always adored her
on both a professional and personal level. The admiration she had
earned through the years had been repeatedly proved by several career
tributes, including an Honorary César, the title of Officer of the
French Legion of Honour and medals from the "National Order of Merit"
and the "Order of Arts and Letters".
Bernadette's legacy could never be extinguished, but, in addition to
everything she had already bequeathed to cinema, she graced the silver
screen for a last time even after her death through her final completed
movie, Sylvain Chomet's
Attila Marcel (2013). The movie,
recently showed at Toronto film festival and released in French
theatres, was greeted with positive reviews where big kudos were
reserved to Bernadette's portrayal of the eccentric adoptive aunt of
Guillaume Gouix's protagonist. With the
film's upcoming release in many more countries, plenty of others will
have the bitter honour to see her eventually taking leave. Since the
25th October 2013, the Municipal Theatre of Nîmes has been renamed the
Bernadette Lafont Theatre to honour the memory of the great actress. A
once unforeseeable and absolutely logical reaching point for the
barefoot girl biking in the city's streets in "Les Mistons".