Bertrand Tavernier

Bertrand Tavernier came into the world on April 25, 1941, in Lyon, during the Nazi occupation of France. His father, the publicist and writer René Tavernier, collaborated clandestinely in a newspaper that tried to keep the morale of the Resistance high. Tavernier was impressed by his father’s firm conviction that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

After World War II ended, Tavernier became more and more fond of cinema, to the point that when he was 13 years old it was already quite clear that he wanted to be a director. He was especially passionate about American filmmakers, especially John Ford , Joseph Losey , Samuel Fuller and William A. Wellman , although he also cites his compatriots Jean Vigo , Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker as his favorites .

He studied Law at the Sorbonne, but left the classroom as soon as he had the opportunity to work as an assistant to Jean-Pierre Melville at Léon Morin, prêtre . That first contact with the film industry did not turn out as he expected, because the director even told him that he was not worth the task and that he should dedicate himself to working as press officer.

In this way, Tavernier carried out this task for the producer Georges de Beauregard for a long time. At the same time, he began to work as a film critic for such prestigious publications as Positif and Cahiers du Cinéma. He wrote a book, such as “50 Years of American Cinema”, where he spoke only of his favorite films and directors in two volumes, which was enormously successful.

Thanks to his contacts in the world of cinema as he was within the industry, he had the opportunity to debut as a director of two shorts for the collective films Les baisers and La chance et l’amour . This time the results are convincing.

However, it would take 10 years for him to be able to make his feature film debut, with The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul , an adaptation of a crime novel by Georges Simenon . He co-wrote the script himself, which takes the action to his native Lyon. With it he managed to interest Phillippe Noiret, by then established as a great figure of national cinema for titles such as La gran comilona , ​​Topaz , and above all the unforgettable Zazie in the subway .

Noiret was passionate about the title role and gave the director his word that he would support him until the end. After the death of the actor in 2006, Tavernier wrote an emotional letter in which he explained that he owed the interpreter and his loyalty for having been able to dedicate himself to the cinema. For 18 months, Tavernier took the script to all the production companies that operated in France, obtaining chained refusals, some of them insulting. “For more than eighteen months, while they rejected and humiliated me, he supported me, he was in my corner, without denying his commitment,” he commented. “I, however, had never made a movie before, and if he had jumped ship, he wouldn’t be here today.”

In The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul Noiret stands out at a high level as a man trying to understand the motivation of his son, whom he has raised alone, and who has been implicated in a political assassination. Jean Rochefort also shines , in the role of the policeman in charge of the case. It can be said that The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul goes so far against the current that it seems to vindicate the great tradition of French crime films that François Truffaut denounced so much in his famous article “A certain tendency”. Tavernier already focused his cinema on the portrait of the reality of the moment, specifically the political positions of post-May 1968 France.

He repeats with both actors, Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort , in Let the Party Begin , a historical film about the relationship between the libertine Philippe d’Orleans (Noiret), Regent of France in 1719, and his adviser, Father Dubois (Rochefort), an atheist priest. He also seems to look to the present in his description of the excesses of the court that influenced the genesis of the French Revolution. “Historical films must be seen as current. If we understand the past, we understand the present,” Tavernier commented in an interview.

It also belongs to the genre The Judge and the Murderer , which has as main characters a crazed 19th century anarchist ( Michel Galabru ) and the magistrate who tries him. In The Tenants , with Michel Piccoli , the residents of a building rebel against the abusive landlord.

Tavernier had developed his own style in his first works, but one that clearly draws on the classics of Gallic cinema, which earned him both supporters and detractors. But he changed his register in a certain way with Death Live , technically more risky and innovative due to the numerous tracking shots of him, and which develops a science fiction story. In addition, it seems ahead of its time with the story of a young reporter (Harvey Keitel) who agrees to implant a camera in his brain to film the death of a writer from illness. In his claim to put limits on trash TV, he has not lost relevance.

Throughout the 1980s, Tavernier managed to move people with A Sunday in the Countryside , about a painter and his children, with which he won the best director award at Cannes, and he paid a heartfelt homage to jazz music with the excellent Around . at Midnight , for which Herbie Hancock won the Oscar for Best Original Score.

Tavernier outdid himself in 1989 with the round Life and Nothing Else , which recovers Philippe Noiret as an army officer who, after the First World War, has before him the difficult task of gathering data on 350,000 French soldiers who disappeared during the war. . He reflects on death, but also on the cynicism of politicians, who put pressure on the protagonist based on his own interests.

He would return years later to the terrain of the Great War with Captain Conan , which is set in Bulgaria, near the end of the conflict. The story of the leader of a regiment of hand-to-hand combat experts raises the disturbing question of the problem of soldiers adjusting to civilian life once they are no longer relied on in combat.

After dabbling in adventure cinema with La hija de D’Artagnan , one of his most successful films, and in the police with a social conscience in Law 627 , about the ravages of drugs in youth, Bertrand Tavernier won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival with the overwhelming La carnaza. Based on a true case, it stars three teenagers who do not hesitate to kill single men to raise the money they need to open a clothing store in the United States. The filmmaker does not take a position, he limits himself to showing the terrible reality of unprincipled young people obsessed with buying brand name objects. “I think it was realistic, and that it showed that education in France was not going well,” recalls the director. “I was not trying to attack French youth, but certain kids who are unable to face reality, and when they do, they cause a disaster.”

The masterpiece of the French filmmaker is undoubtedly Hoy empieza todo , which started a whopping thirty minutes of ovations after its screening at the Berlin Festival in 1999, where it won the Fipresci Award, an Honorable Mention, and the of the Ecumenical Jury. Philippe Torreton , in his best work, plays the director of a school in a depressed area of ​​the French Auvergne, who tries to lend a hand to the families of his students despite clashing with the bureaucracy. Although he paints a terrible reality, Tavernier does not fall into the temptation of easy pessimism, and his film encourages involvement to improve things even in complex conditions. “It gave good results because I know of the cases of 18 people who decided to become teachers forToday everything starts . It’s a victory for me!”

In recent years, Tavernier has raised blisters in France, with Safe Conduct , for his defense and vindication of the directors who continued to make films during the Nazi occupation, traditionally accused of collaborationists. “I sincerely believe that the controversy was caused by those who did not understand anything about the film,” he explained. “A group of people made a completely stupid reading, as if attacking the Nouvelle Vague, when it recounted what happened in 1942.”

Little Lola documents the drama of couples who are forced to travel to an exotic country, Cambodia, to try to legally adopt a child despite the corruption of the authorities. Perhaps the least interesting film in the French director’s work is At the Center of the Storm , the Frenchman’s failed foray into Hollywood with Tommy Lee Jones as a policeman investigating the death of a prostitute in Louisiana after Katrina. Two productions were made, the director’s more personal one, which competed in Berlin, and the one cut for its premiere in commercial theaters. The princesse de Montpensier , about a 16th century aristocrat forced to marry a man she doesn’t knowexciteAt Quai d’Orsay, adapted from a comic by Christophe Blain and Abel Lanzac , once again attacks the bureaucracy by portraying a foreign minister very similar to the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, played by Thierry Lhermitte.

In 1965, the director married Claudine O’Hagen, a screenwriter on some of his titles, such as La carnaza and La pasión de Beatriz , who usually signs as Colo Tavernier . They divorced in 1980, after having two children, Nils Tavernier , an actor and filmmaker, and Tiffany Tavernier, a writer and screenwriter.

A lesser known aspect of Bertrand Tavernier is his facet as a director of documentaries, such as Mississippi Blues , La guerre sans nom and above all Histoires de vies brisées: les ‘double peine’ de Lyon , which criticized the French legislation for double punishment, which it consisted in that when an emigrant served a sentence for a crime, he was subsequently expelled from France. “Nicolas Sarkozy saw it when he was Minister of the Interior and he told me that before he saw my film he was in favor of the double penalty, but now he was against it and that he was going to abolish it.” In the end it will be true that the pen, and the clapperboard, have more power than weapons.