GUILLAUME DEPARDIEU IN A REAL LIFE

Shifty eyes, smooth performance

Sarah Leonor's first feature A Real Life (its French title is Au voleur, "Thief!") has an agreeably peculiar first half that centers upon a run down complex of workshops, garages, and housing where three generations of thieves are to be found. Senior is Manu (iconic gay filmmaker Jacques Nolot), just out after a sentence for bank robbery. Junior is Ali (rapper Rabah Naït Oufella of The Class), an Arab youth who handles a soccer ball smoothly and moves stolen goods. In the middle, shambling around on screen most of the time is the tall, skinny Bruno (Guillaume Depardieu), with his expressive eyes and bum leg, nicking a wrist watch off a woman knocked down by a car, and later stealing another car. The woman, a part-time German teacher, Isabelle (a relaxed Florence Loiret-Caille), views him as her savior, since he was the first over her semi-conscious body, and she is looking for him and drawn to him.

They become lovers. When the cops come looking for Bruno because of the stolen car Isabelle tips him off and flees with him, and the second half of the film is their flight, a Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde love-on-the-run tale French style, which, unfortunately, means a limited and tame version of what has so much energy and excitement in the Penn and Malick versions. Some French critics have felt this risky change of mode works; others, that the film has admirable ambition it doesn't quite live up to. It hardly matters because Guillaume Depardieu is increasingly fascinating in the last films of his tragically short career. Awarded the César for Most Promising Actor at 25 in 1996, he was dead at 37 in 2008, and this was his penultimate screen appearance. Stella and Versailles (the latter gaining him a Best Actor César nomination) were other notable late efforts.

Depardieu led a life that brought him close to the scruffy, doomed figures of his final roles. He was overshadowed by his famous father but Gérard often brought him on set when he was very young and gave him small roles. So much for the acting silver spoon: he was imprisoned in his teens for heroin trafficking. But he still had his first great role at 20 opposite his father in Alain Corneau's All the Mornings of the World, the costume biopic of a great 17th-century French composer. In 1995, at 24, he suffered a serious knee injury in a motorcycle accident and contracted an infection in the hospital that led to the amputation of his leg eight years later and his death of pneumonia 13 years later. Guillaume established a foundation to battle hospital-acquired illnesses. His ravaged face is also youthful. His manner is both haunted and playful. Guillaume Depardieu is arresting as Bruno, furtive and alive. The camera loves his face, though not for the usual reasons.

In Sylvie Verheyde's excellent 2008 Stella, the portrait of a working class restaurant girl who goes to a prestigious Paris school, Guillaume, a denizen of the bar Stella's parents run, is a mentor for her. It's a small but key role in which he's convincing and appealing. In Versailles, he fits equally well into the role of a homeless man who's saddled with a harried young woman's small child. The actor is also remembered for Pierre Salvadori's 1995 black comedy Les apprentis, Leos Carax's 1999 Pola X, in which he stars; and, of course, the Balzac adaptation,The Duchess of Langeais. Rivette's 2007 film was much admired by art house filmgoers in the US. Guillaume is cast in it as the would-be lover, Armand de Montriveau, a role he plays with a kind of stiffness that fits the slow, ceremonial pace of the film. His Montriveau is full of noble hopelessness. But he seems more at home as a fugitive or lost soul.

Sarah Leonor's debut is promising for the way it breathes, and for its unexpected rhythms, its use of actors' bodies and faces. Depardieu's shambling walk defines him as a defiant misfit. It is a pleasure to watch Jacque Nolot's sensual and elegant handling of a cigarette (you get to see him constantly doing it in his semi-autobiographical 2007 Avant que j'oublie). When Nolot smokes, it's an ironic microcosm of French culture, smooth, rueful, knowing. Watch Depardieu's eyes as he stands beside a bourgeois BMW owner in an elevator and very delicately steals his car keys. Or Rabah Oufella's sullen stare as he waits in the police station for his comrades to spill the beans. "Assured debut" is a festival blurb cliché, but moments like this justify it for Au voleur.

Sarah Leonor was formerly known as Sarah Petit, the credit name for her short films. A Real Life/Au voleur opened theatrically in France September 7, 2009 to limited but favorable reviews. It has been shown at many festivals internationally. Seen and reviewed as part of the French Cinema Now series of the San Francisco Film Society, showing Oct. 30 and Nov. 2, 2010.

Guillaume Depardieu, Florence Loiret-Caille

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.