How can we tell Patrice Chéreau in ninety minutes without betraying the stature of an artist who shook up theater, opera and cinema? The documentary broadcast on Arte achieves the feat. From the director’s birth on November 2, 1944, to his death on October 7, 2013, Marion Stalens fluidly articulates the essentials of his life and work.
Without compiling the facts in a vain desire for completeness, the narration adopts a sustained rhythm which restores the dynamism of the man. Chéreau was a being in motion, who never stopped bouncing from one project to another. His existence begins on “Day of the Dead,” he says in voiceover. Raised near a church, he was passionate about mass. The ritual fascinates the child who, from primary school, makes his little friends repeat it. His vocation comes from afar. A designer mother, a painter father, with whom he frequented the Louvre (“He taught me to direct my gaze”) and with whom he made the mainstay of his film Those Who Love Me Will Take the Train, in 1998.
Archive images, extracts from shows, dives into rehearsals, filming, testimonies from loved ones, the material collected by Marion Stalens is dizzying. Masterfully knit, his film lays bare the threads that connect the works, while connecting them to the interiority of an artist who is rarely satisfied. “I was hunchbacked, with my hair in a crew cut, my feet in,” we hear him say with a sigh. “When I knew him, he hated himself,” adds actor Pascal Greggory.
Incredible softness
In the flood of photos, most of them unpublished, we see him transforming. A sullen and serious twenty-something, he matures beautifully as he flourishes in his work. Cigarette on his lips, disheveled hair, unkempt beard, he gives the actors a look of incredible gentleness. Going as far as physical contact, he gets the best: “No one after him has directed us like that,” maintains Dominique Blanc.
Success or failure: everything stimulates him. He created a shock in 1966 with an expressionist representation of L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine, by Labiche. Shakes up the Théâtre de Sartrouville (Yvelines), of which he took charge at the age of 22, and which he left bankrupt (he repaid the debt for twelve years). He joined his master Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997) in Milan, only returning to France at the request of Roger Planchon (1931-2009), who wanted him at his side at the TNP in Villeurbanne (Rhône).
In 1973, he had a decisive meeting with a scenographer. Richard Peduzzi smiles: “We both made it up. » Their first collaboration was a bolt from the blue: La Dispute, by Marivaux, a show of great sensuality, opened the doors of opera to Chéreau. He was asked to Bayreuth (Germany) to produce Wagner’s Ring. A titanic work, which has required him for five seasons in a row, begins with boos and ends with ovations (an hour and a half of applause during the last performance!).
“Towards almost nothing”
Everything is permitted to the prodigy who revolutionizes aesthetics. Culture rolls out the red carpet for it. In 1981, Jack Lang entrusted him with the management of the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. Chéreau agrees: “I would never have taken a theater in the center of Paris. » He created, in quick succession, three pieces by a then unknown author, Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-1989). Founded, with Pierre Romans (1951-1990), a theater school. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is one of the students: “He had a peasant side, he got started, he didn’t wait for inspiration. »
Hyperactive, he runs on cocaine. “In the 1980s, he went to the shallows,” remembers Pascal Greggory. AIDS is decimating the landscape. In two years, Koltès, Guibert, Romans died. Aged 45, Chéreau is losing his grip: “There’s nothing natural about theater,” he confides. He leaves Nanterre. Here he is setting off for the adventure of La Reine Margot (1994). Twenty years after directing Marlowe’s Massacre in Paris, he returns to the horror of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. The film is excessive.
He continues with a refined gesture. Play, once again, In the solitude of the cotton fields, by Koltès. His work aims for the intimate. As if he was tracking down the essence of his art, far from the tumult and noise. Choreographer Thierry Thieû Niang notes his evolution: “In 2008, creating La Douleur, by Duras, he moved towards almost nothing. He understood that bodies did not have to cling to each other to meet. »
Was Patrice Chéreau already ill when he filmed, with His Brother (2003), the reunion between two brothers, one of whom is going to die? In 2010, he came full circle, taking over the Louvre with the creation of Rêve d’Automne, by Jon Fosse. “On the first day of rehearsals, he told us that he was starting chemotherapy,” recalls Pascal Greggory. Cancer did not give him time to stage As You Like It, by Shakespeare. The film ends with the image of a tree drawn by Richard Peduzzi. A dense, fleshy tree, irresistibly alive. The one that Patrice Chéreau had chosen as the sole decoration of the room.
