I enjoyed Olivier Babinet’s film, Normal, coming out this week, to meet the man who, in 1992, wanting to look older in the film that was to launch his prodigious acting career, had slept for months with pieces of wet blotting paper stuck under his nose, a magic recipe supposed to grow mustache. In vain, and so much the worse, so much the better: the grandmother’s killer would have that adolescent air which would multiply both fear and laughter. it was thirty years ago. I didn’t dare tell him that it was hard to believe that It happened close to you was shot in black and white, by default with a mustache. Not dared because I was a little nervous. I would have liked to see you there. It’s not every day you come across your favorite old lady killer.
As luck would have it, I had a fit of vertigo in the middle of the night (the crystals breaking off the lining of the inner ear; everything swirling around me and throwing me off balance as I was in bed). As it wasn’t the first time, I didn’t panic too much, especially since I acquired a method of regluing the crystals, not much more effective than the blow of the pieces of blotter, but which puts in confidence, it is a matter of sitting down and rocking, quite quickly, to the right side, then to the left side. It picks them up, it seems. There’s also Tanganil, something against seasickness. In short, two hours before the meeting, I wasn’t sure I could stand up.
I was heroic, stoic, smiling. I don’t think he realized anything. I had prepared my questions on a little blue notebook. Questions about the nature of this acting profession by which I myself began in life. And failed. Which allows me not to be jealous of actors as I can be of too good writers. I like actors. I have my favorites. The readers of this magazine know how much I admire Christian Hecq, from the Comédie-Française, now they know about Benoît Poelvoorde. My dream would be to see a film that would bring them together. Because an actor is never good alone.
Praise of Mr. Manatane
When I asked him which character was the most like what he is in real life, he didn’t hesitate for long: Monsieur Manatane. Remember: four years after becoming the funniest serial killer in the history of cinema, he was hired by Canal+ for a series of 48 sketches of three to four minutes, indescribably funny, finesse competing with him. eccentricity, zaniness to subtlety, tenderness to subversion.
Why Monsieur Manatane and not Bernard Frédéric, the double of Claude François in Yann Moix’s Podium: “Because Mr. Manatane invented everything, he gives his opinion on everything, he doesn’t give a damn about what we think of him. He has no doubts. He talks, he holds forth. You don’t know who he is, what his sexuality is, one day it’s there, the other day it’s there, he doesn’t genre, he’s a writer when it suits him: he writes charades, he publishes in the Pléiade, he’s a chess champion trying to beat Deep Blue… In any case, he’s the one who makes me laugh the most. Does he look like me?… When I was a kid, I had ready-made sentences, like: ‘There are no children in New York, you don’t see children in the streets. – Where did you get that from? – Just look, you’ll never see children on the streets in New York. – But why did you get that? – Because I saw it, that’s it!’ I am capable of this kind of enormity.”
In Normal, he plays the role of a father, widowed, sick, half-blind then completely blind. Social services want to separate him from his minor daughter. You can’t get much sadder, and he’s having a blast playing blind. Incorrigible.