“Then good luck above all” before having a hearty meal made by mountain dwellers who are fans of shallot liqueur seasoned with garlic juice. Michel Blanc was one of those actors who carve four-word lines into stone.
He was 72 years old, the actor died in hospital, leaving his Splendid troupe in deep sadness. “Damn Michel, what did you do…”, wrote Gérard Jugnot on social networks.
The two men met at the Pasteur high school in Neuilly-sur-Seine, they were teenagers. Christian Clavier and Marie-Anne Chazel are in the same establishment.
A few years later, joined by Thierry Lhermitte, Josiane Balasko and Bruno Moynot, they formed the Splendid troupe in connection with the café-theater in the 10th arrondissement in which they performed under the protection of a mentor like the others, a certain Coluche. Other young actors join them like Anémone and Martin Lamotte.
This troupe will write, edit and produce plays, which have become films, which today belong to the Cultural Pantheon of France: “Santa Claus is trash”, “Papy makes the resistance” but also cult films like the “Bronzés” saga.
A saga in which Michel Blanc, a puny, mustachioed, bald, falsely melancholic man, takes on the features of Jean-Claude Dusse, this awkward bachelor who, “on a misunderstanding”, hopes to find a soul mate.
Awarded at Cannes for “Evening Wear”
There is inspiration taken from the cinema of Woody Allen in the construction of the Jean-Claude Dusse myth. In the troupe, everyone makes us laugh in their own way, with their strengths, so Michel Blanc uses his neuroses, self-deprecation is his key to unlocking our zygomatics.
After the pharaonic successes of the Splendid films in the early 1980s, Blanc felt he needed to stand on his own two feet. The only son that he is begins to no longer flourish in this artistic collegiality that is The Splendid. He needs something else, to laugh at something else, to go see something else.
It is no coincidence that in 1986, he received an Interpretation Prize at Cannes for his role as a homosexual in “Tenue de soir” by Bertrand Blier, a role written for Bernard Giraudeau, who refused it.
Blanc, for his part, embarks on this challenge with fear stuck to his body. He sublimates the role, like that of a chief of staff in “The Exercise of the State” by Pierre Schoeller released in 2011. When the role is the opposite of him, Blanc is exceptional. Accurate. Touching.
Roles like these, he will collect: “Monsieur Hire”, “Uranus”, “Grosse fatigue”, “Kiss whoever you want”, “La fille du RER”, “Doctor?”. A 180-degree cinema that goes from the Dominici affair to the French collaboration in 1944.
White knew how to do everything. Make people laugh. Scare. Make you cry. Make you think. Director of five films including the iconic “Marche à l’ombre” released in 1984 and “Grosse fatigue” awarded at Cannes in 1994 in which he plays his own role and has to deal with a double who behaves like a cad, Michel Blanc leaves a unique mark in our collective memories.
It’s a part of our childhood. Of our carelessness which goes away, too. He is also a man of cult replicas but rather than listing the most legendary we prefer to end by paraphrasing Michel Blanc himself, in an interview given to Monde in 2018, in which he quoted Léo Ferré: “When you’re ugly, you get used to it, you tell yourself that you’re pretty screwed.”
The departure of Michel Blanc will leave a big void. Because Jean-Claude Dusse, deep down, is a bit of each of us. So on this Friday in October, here we are, on our chairlift of melancholy. Alone. In the cold. It makes you wonder when we will see this wonderful country again, where those who love each other live together…
