“Framboise”, sweet nickname of Françoise Dorléac and title of the passionate book by Aurélien Ferenczi. The review of “Sud Ouest”

Late, always late

Of course, there is his death. It is undoubtedly this which first established her as an icon and incarnation of an era. Let us recall the facts: June 26, 1967, a small rental Renault drove much too fast on the road to Nice airport. The actress is late (she apparently was, constantly). The accident – ​​also a rhetorical figure of this time, as with Godard or Ballard – is terrible. Burned alive. She was twenty-five years old. What does she leave behind? Movies, first. Surprisingly numerous and beautiful, shot in a hurry in just four or five years. Like a prescience that the young woman would have had that she would have to act quickly… All the same, “The Man from Rio” by Philippe de Broca, “La Peau Douce” by François Truffaut, “Cul-de-sac” by Roman Polanski and of course “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort”, it’s really not nothing. What does she also leave behind… A sister, forever bereaved alter equal, Catherine Deneuve. And a grace, a character, a sensuality (even Bardot, perhaps, did not dance as well as her…), which never managed to be forgotten.

Chinese portrait

At least not by one of the most brilliant film enthusiasts of this time, that of Aurélien Ferenczi. The journalist and author offers with “Framboise”, a tomb as much as an exercise in admiration, the book that all the fervent communicants of the “Dorléac cult” did not know how to expect. Ferenczi starts from the principle, which will prove relevant, that the actress’s films, the good ones as well as the most dispensable, constitute a sort of Chinese portrait of the woman she was. Here the movement that moves the lines, there the gentleness and doubt. Always speed. Nightclubs and lovers pass by.

Many (a few faces emerge, Truffaut again, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Guy Bedos, Michael Caine), because to live is to exhaust oneself with fatigue and desire and each shoot is a blank page open to boredom and the ideal . And since the girl is a forever unanswered question, the subtitle of the book is “Some hypotheses about Françoise Dorléac”. Well seen. Ferenczi writes: “We must take seriously the idea that there was a light in her, a presence both joyful and feverish, which immediately distinguished her. » This light will never go out again.