This Monday, April 10, Gérard Depardieu has an appointment at Intertalent, the artistic agency directed by François Samuelson. From his Parisian mansion, rue du Cherche-Midi, to the agent’s offices, rue Gay-Lussac, there is no more than two kilometers, almost in a straight line along the Luxembourg garden. He travels through them on a scooter. How many neighborhood neighbors come across this imposing figure every day, without daring to approach it? With its 130 kilos under this funny little helmet whose strap it never attaches, even the powerful Yamaha TMax looks like a simple “petroleum”, as we said in the 1950s in Châteauroux, the city of its childhood. The actor sometimes goes up the street in the wrong direction. At the same time known to all, inaccessible, associated with a thousand cinema memories. And out of the nails.
The reason for his visit to François Samuelson can be summed up in a short sentence: “Michel Houellebecq is not well”, warned the historical agent of the writer. After several best-sellers acclaimed by critics, the novelist’s reputation gradually cracked under his provocations. Crisp attacks against Islam, immigrants and feminists, a porn film shot with his wife broadcast without his permission… Houellebecq, who loved controversy, can no longer bear his tarnished image.
Depardieu and him have not seen each other since Thalassotherapy (2019), Guillaume Nicloux’s film in which they play two spa guests in Cabourg (Calvados), but the actor knows the pain of falling out of love by heart. He, too, went from being a beloved freak to a man whose even friends gave up on running off the road.
That day, at Intertalent, he grabbed one of his three cell phones and called Houellebecq. At the end of the conversation, he immediately decides to visit her. As he heads for the door and puts on his helmet, Francois Samuelson stops him. For the sake of conscience, he wants to make sure of one thing: “Tell me Gérard, are you aware of the publication, tomorrow, on Mediapart, of an investigation where several women accuse you of sexual violence on your shoots? » A grunt, a shrug, he’s off again.
“Rabelaisian” behavior
For several years, the scandal accompanies him and, for years, it does not occur. Does he think this can still continue? That the dozens of masterpieces that have made him the greatest French actor of the last fifty years will forever erase the injuries caused by his motorcycle accidents while intoxicated, the hands on the buttocks of make-up artists and technicians, the scenes of alcoholic violence on set where a doctor was rushed to give him a shot of tranquilizer, his thunderous support for Vladimir Putin and the images showing him flushed and laughing alongside the planet’s dictators?
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