A goldsmith of games of love and chance, Michel Deville had explored all genres (comedies, police, behind closed doors, social films) and experimented with daring narrative modes. Born on April 13, 1931, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), the director died on February 16, at the age of 91, we learned from sources close to his entourage.
Son of a garden pottery manufacturer, Michel Deville has been playing with cameras since childhood and began studying literature at the Sorbonne. He dreams of interfering in the seventh art when the filmmaker Henri Decoin comes to buy flowerpots from his father. Michel Deville jumped at the chance and found himself a trainee, then assistant, for twelve films, of the author of La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1951) and Razzia sur la chnouf (1955). Determined to become a director, he offers Eric Rohmer, whose articles he appreciates, to co-write his first film with him. Flattered, the latter replies that he himself is preparing his own prototype, The Sign of the Lion, which will be released in 1962. Deville will do business with an editor, Nina Companeez, who, by dint of giving him ideas , finds himself a co-screenwriter, particularly gifted for dialogue. Deville and Companeez will collaborate for twelve films. Deville will then find another accomplice, costume designer, assistant, producer and co-writer: Rosalinde Damamme, whom he will marry.
The complicity with Eric Rohmer, who appreciated his first feature film, Tonight or Never (1961), earned him good treatment in the Cahiers du cinema. “A first attempt, a masterstroke,” writes Jean Douchet, for whom, in Tonight or Never, Deville “succeeds in this alliance deemed impossible: a typically French comedy in an American comedy style”. About the third opus, Adorable menteuse (1962), where lying is celebrated as a morality of life (a theme that haunts the whole work), Luc Moullet underlines the audacity, the unusual character, the accuracy of the dialogues of this filmmaker with “golden work”. The compliments will cease when Jacques Rivette replaces Rohmer as editor-in-chief of the magazine.
A special situation
This anecdote (the failed association with Rohmer) illustrates the particular position occupied by Michel Deville in French cinema. Contemporary of the New Wave, he never belonged to the movement. He was nevertheless a bit without being, in that he dared to film stories in a different way from the usual. Story of an evening with friends, Tonight or Never (1961), for example, takes place in a single setting and is shot in the studio, which the people of the Cahiers abhorred. But his originality, as he recounted in Positif (no. 699), is that, in this type of film, before, “the characters gutted each other, everything was violent, dramatic and conflictual, we sent our four face truths. In my film, nothing happened on purpose.” Deville decided that he would make a cinema different from the one he had known as an assistant.
Following the commercial failure of A cause, because of a woman (1962), a comedy about pursuits and spinners, where the actor Jacques Charrier twirls from one woman to another, Michel Deville signs a certain number films to repay part of his debts, including Lucky Jo (1964), with Eddie Constantine, a parody of popular thrillers, a meditation on the passage of time. And Martin soldier (1966), where Robert Hirsch is a theater actor having to play a German officer on the day of the Landing, with twists in the To be or not to be, of Lubitsch. He finds his first inspiration (romantic initiation) with Benjamin or the memories of a virgin (1968), set in the 18th century, where a young man (Pierre Clémenti) is surrounded by women in a castle in the countryside. Very inspired by Marivaux, in the spirit of the paintings of Fragonard and Watteau, this ode to licentiousness, to the games of love and chance, to gallant parties, parades maids and marquises, blasé juans and wenches of pastoral for a festival of false confidences, stolen kisses. Nina Companeez’s dialogues are chiseled, but Deville also teaches the art of keeping quiet, illustrating her devotion to caresses, the art of talking with her hands. “Put your hand on my cheek, slowly go down my neck, now let your hand go down, again…” explains Francine Bergé to the young man to be fooled.
The same inspiration ten years later, in The Gentle Journey (1980), where two women tell each other their fantasies and help each other realize them: “Your lips caress the lady’s lips, you caress, you caress, the lady opens her lips…”, whispers Dominique Sanda to a shy teenager. The coherence of Michel Deville’s work, of which the elegance of the image, the refinement of the tempo, the charm of the interpretation has been much praised, is measured over these sentimental educations, as in a playful thriller, Bye bye, Barbara (1969), a frenzied entertainment, The Bear and the Doll, where Brigitte Bardot, a capricious socialite in a Rolls, pursues Jean-Pierre Cassel, a short-sighted and grumpy bohemian in a 2CV (1970). And a costume film, Raphaël ou le Débauché (1971), an evocation of an impossible passion, during the romantic century with the lace jabots of Musset, between a disenchanted dandy, a fan of alcohol and disreputable places (Maurice Ronet ) and a desirable young widow (Françoise Fabian).
The tone of Deville’s films without Nina Companeez becomes more serious, gritty, a bit disillusioned. He is more formal. Le Mouton enragé (1974) inaugurates a reflection on the art of its characters in staging their lives. Here it is a cripple who manipulates a malleable being and lives through him, by proxy. The frustrated seducer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is the orchestrator of the seductions of his friend, who is his puppet (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an actor, a substitute hero. The same transfer of libido in La Lectrice (1988), where, paid to read erotic stories, a woman (Miou-Miou) bends to the fantasies of those who hire her, changing roles as she reads. In Le Paltoquet (1986), we are immersed in the theatrical decor of the unconscious of a bistro owner, between dream and reality.
These variations are so many demonstrations that life is a game. This was already illustrated by L’Apprenti salaud (1977), where Robert Lamoureux, with a rascal banter, is a crook with panache. What brilliantly illustrates again Péril en la maison (1985), adapted from René Belletto, where the guitar teacher played by Christophe Malavoy believes he has mastered his destiny, but is manipulated by everyone, the mother of his pupil, the tyrannical husband, the voyeur neighbor, a contract killer, game of fools… The filmmaker himself made this playful philosophy his rule: “Cinema, for me, is always a game, a game of images, words, of music, of actors”, he said in 1978 (Cinema 78, n° 236-237). Each of his films is a formal challenge: subjective camera in this clinical study of the universe of intelligence services whose spies remain invisible that is Le Dossier 51, adapted from Gilles Perrault (1978), and where everyone is an object records, computerized reports; without dialogue in La Petite Bande (1982), in which one of the children is deaf-mute; full of erotic scenes without images in The Secret Journey (1980); behind closed doors in real time in Nuit d’été en ville (1990); soundtrack echoing the thoughts of the protagonists, doctor and patients, in La Maladie de Sachs (1999).
Stylist and virtuoso
Stylist and virtuoso, Deville’s cinema was full of camera movements, ellipses and subtle sequences. In Deep Waters, adapted by Patricia Highsmith, in 1981, the camera slips from a red apron thrown on a chair to a glass of tomato juice, black and white clothes of a woman at the keyboard of a piano. Licentious symbols in Peril in the House: from the reflection of Anemone’s buttocks looking at herself in a mirror, we pass to the shot of a glass of cognac, then, some time later, it is a glass of eau-de- life shared by two lovers in bed. Michel Deville’s cinema was also a cinema of gazes, those that the director cast on men and women who constantly observed each other, spied on each other, manipulated each other. It was a cinema exploring the art of lies, of pretense. And mirrors, in front of which Deville planted Anna Karina to repeat the questions she wanted to ask her lover in Tonight or never, and which abound in All sorrows combined (1992). Deville scattered them everywhere, he loved three-sided mirrors, rear-view mirrors or walls lined with mirrors to surprise someone’s privacy, flatter narcissists, avoid shots and reverse shots.
Games of seduction, board games (the Trintignant of Deep Waters is a fan of chess and croquet), games even though his verbal pranks: follower of Oulipo, author of collections of playful poems (Poems zinopinated, Poems zinadvertants, Poems zimpromptus, Poèmes zimprobables…), Deville used double meaning (naughty replies, or the name of the hero of Peril in the Home, Aurphet, which is pronounced like Orpheus…). In the same film, Nicole Garcia asks Christophe Malavoy why he had a striped O embroidered on his pillow. Answer: “On a bolster you always put a pillow, didn’t you know? A music lover and very attached to the rhythm of his films, Deville accompanied them with classical works chosen for their harmony with the times, moods, tempos: Beethoven for La Lectrice, Bizet for L’Apprenti bastard, Schubert and Bartok for The Woman in Blue, Saint-Saëns for The Enraged Sheep, Brahms, Granados and Schubert for Peril in the Residence…
Michel Deville had been awarded four Césars: two Césars for best film (in 1967 for Benjamin, in 1988 for La Lectrice), the César for best screenplay adapted from a novel for Le Dossier 51 in 1979, and the César for best director in 1986 for Peril in the home.
