Jacques Rozier, death of the islander of French cinema

His fierce, independent itinerary, unsuited to any form of obedience, has made him a perpetually out of step director. Jacques Rozier passed away on June 2, at the age of 96.

IIt will have been necessary for Jacques Rozier to die, this June 2 at the age of 96, so that perhaps, finally, we stop ignoring the one who, in just four feature films, was one of the greatest French filmmakers. An artist out of time or, on the contrary, so in the moment that each of his films passes for a suspended parenthesis, in perpetual jet lag, between land and sea.

His itinerary as a fierce independent, a runaway and, to be honest, unsuited to any form of obedience, begins in a rather classic way. Born in 1926, the young man, above all fascinated by the camera as an object, studied at Idhec in the 1950s. He graduated to direct short films that smack of the succession of Jean Vigo: Back to School (1956) where, as the first sign of an upcoming escape, a kid throws his satchel into the river and abandons his classmates to retrieve it by following the current. Then Blue Jeans (1958), an already iodized ode to flirting, and very New Wave before its time, which incidentally attracted the attention of a critic named Jean-Luc Godard.

Alas, from the first feature film, Farewell Filipina (1962), things go wrong: the film was to be released two years earlier, shortly after Breathlessbut its producer Georges de Beauregard disassociated himself from the project, explaining what he calls “the Rozier affair” in the pages of Cinema notebooks : “There are people who understand the problem of money, he doesn’t. You don’t make a film completely ignoring material issues. » Rosier, yes. Rozier with a “z” like heck, like a snub to the industry. Rozier goes at his own pace, and On the side of Orouet was released six years later, in 16 mm, thanks to some subsidies from the ORTF for which he had produced, in 1964, an issue of Filmmakers of our time on… John Vigo.

Farewell Filipina, On the side of Orouet : two holiday films, with or without s, which are unlike any other, between yé-yé marivaudage, sixty-eighth love utopia, not-so-serious sorrows, girls and wasps on the beach, giggles over a drink chamber, and the Z of Bernard Ménez in the second. Gently melancholy and farcical chronicles in which floats a funny air, as if the filmmaker had invented his own weather: a late summer when the blue, and the feelings, turn delicately to grey.

With him, there is the weather and the time it takes to film it. In 1976, it was the turn of other comedy zozos, more or less beginners (Pierre Richard, Maurice Risch, Jacques Villeret), to agree, out of friendship, to come and drift in the waters of Rozier: The Castaways of Turtle Island, which was only released in theaters thirty years after its filming, began in a travel agency, then the screenplay, which fits on a metro ticket, is improvised around an island, with the slogan “Robinson, get over it ! It’s not a film, it’s a sailboat, burlesque at the bow, existential angst at the stern, leaving for an island of cinema without comparison.

The hourglass is still running out and an adventurous producer is on the horizon: in 1986, thanks to Paolo Branco, Rozier sets sail for Maine Ocean, considered his masterpiece. How a Brazilian dancer who came see what the other side of the Atlantic looks like” but who has not stamped his 6:28 p.m. ticket to Saint-Nazaire, will transform an SNCF controller (still Ménez) into the king of samba on the island of Yeu… Impossible (since Jacques Tati?) find it as crazy and poetic as this burst of island cinema.

Between these few pearls, which all look towards the sea with the exception of the unpublished Fifi Martingale (2001), set behind the scenes of a theatrical tour, Rozier embarked in 1975 on Nono Nenesse, co-directed with Pascal Thomas. In this sketch inspired by Brats by Laurel and Hardy, Bernard Ménez, Jacques Villeret and Maurice Risch play babies, then little boys, in a setting built to scale. Nono Nenesse wanted to be the pilot of a series for television which, of course, will not succeed.

“If I wasn’t a filmmaker? I would have been a sailor. Sailor like the sailors of Pagnol, to cross the Old Port.”

From his beginnings, we will also remember a precious documentary in two parts (Paparazzi And The party of things), in which he filmed the hunt for Brigitte Bardot by image hunters and his relationship with Godard on the set of Contempt in Capri, in 1963. It took a movie buccaneer to understand how a girl of the wind and the pope of the New Wave sail together.

“If I weren’t a filmmaker? I would have been a sailor. Sailor like Pagnol’s sailors, to cross the Old Port. » At the microphone of Serge Le Péron and Guy Girard for the show Cinema, cinemas in 1986, the filmmaker told the truth in a light tone: fiction as a mini-getaway, as a beautiful escape, with a tender indocility as a standard, at the risk of seeing the earth tremble under his feet – in July 2021, on Facebook, a message from some of his latest supporters called for help for the great 94-year-old filmmaker, about to be evicted from his accommodation. This time, controllers of all kinds can go and learn the rumba, it’s for good that Rozier has cast off.