Most fans of recent French cinema will know the actor Vincent Macaigne, if not by name than from his distinctive look: balding, often a little unkempt, with a face that can appear soulful or foolish or both.
Now in his late 30s, he's worked prolifically for the last decade or so, his more prominent recent roles including a club promoter in Mia Hansen-Love's Eden and a Red Cross doctor in Anne Fontaine's The Innocents.
Macaigne's latest film to be released in Australia is one of his highest-profile to date: the new comedy from the directing team of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, who scored a huge hit in 2012 with The Intouchables. Known in the English-speaking world as C'est la Vie! – the original French title means something like The Point of the Party – it's the story of a wedding planner and caterer played by the veteran actor Jean-Pierre Bacri, and the trials he experiences while staging an elaborate ceremony and reception at a 17th-century castle. Macaigne plays Julien, a mopey teacher turned waiter who turns out to have a history with the bride (Judith Chernia).
C’est la Vie! tells the story of a wedding planner as he stages an elaborate ceremony and reception at a 17th-century castle.
In person, Macaigne is friendly and unassuming, yet seems to vibrate at a slightly unusual frequency: he giggles often, whether from nerves or private amusement. While C'est la vie! might seem like a departure from the art films he's best-known for, he argues otherwise, maintaining that Nakache and Toledano are artists in their own right. “For me it's not an industry movie,” he says.
His own approach to acting is down to earth: while C'est la vie! gradually fills us in on the details of Julien's past, Macaigne isn't personally inclined to develop elaborate biographies for the people he plays. “It's more simple. It's maybe French. I'm not so serious.” The more important thing, he says, is to locate “the energy and the rhythm” of the director. “So I'm listening to how he feels and how he thinks, and trying to be the same way.”
In this case, of course, there were two directors, although Macaigne says that Nakache and Toledano function smoothly as a directing team. “They never fight, they laugh a lot, and they're very funny.” For Macaigne, their easygoing attitude defined the experience of making C'est la vie!, which was shot at a real castle just outside Paris. “What you feel when you see the movie is the two of them – they have the same mood.”
C'est la vie! feels like a tightly constructed farce, but Macaigne says that there was a lot of room for improvisation – for him and for Nakache and Toledano, who would call out new lines of dialogue in the midst of shooting. “They write a script, but when they shoot, they are very free. And afterwards, in the editing, they find new ideas. It's like embroidery, almost.”
In some ways, I suggest, the film is really about showbusiness: the event being staged happens to be a wedding, but from a behind-the-scenes perspective it could be any kind of spectacle. Macaigne agrees, suggesting this was quite conscious on Nakache and Toledano's part. “When you direct a movie, you have to direct people, and people hate you or love you. And so I think they do a metaphor of their own life.”
Working on the film, he adds, was very much a “group experience”, with its own moments of behind-the-scenes chaos. “There were a lot of storms and bad weather – trees were coming down, like boom, boom! But nobody was injured.” Bacri, by Macaigne's account, stood a little apart from the rest of the filmmaking group, although he was far less grumpy than his character Max, the “director” figure within the film. “He's an old man, but very nice,” Macaigne says of his co-star. “He's got his own life, and maybe he doesn't mingle that much.”
At the end of the film, many of the characters go their separate ways, with no certainty about the future. “This is good, because it's like life,” Macaigne says. “We don't know what will become of people.” In this sense, he suggests, a certain melancholy underlies the film's humour. “This is a strange movie,” he says. “It's interesting, because you have a lot of laughs, there's a lot of jokes, but there's something in the back which is a bit sad.”
The C'est la vie! shoot was around two years ago: Macaigne himself has long since moved on to other projects. Has working on a film like this – which seems destined to be more widely seen internationally than much of his output – so far changed the course of his career? “Not so much,” he says. “Because I do my own activity, and I have my own friends.”
C'est la vie! is in cinemas from August 16.
Jake Wilson travelled to France courtesy of the Alliance Francaise.
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