On 28th May 2014, the bundle of contradictions that is Jean-Pierre Léaud turned 70 years old. At the age of twenty two, in Godard’s MASCULIN FÉMININ, his pale, weak chin and svelte figure were overshadowed by eyes as dark as Marmite and ten times as intense. Slowly but surely, the little boy with homunculus eyes matured on-screen into a leviathan with a legacy, a formidable Honorary César winner with a puckish skip in his step.

Léaud blossomed into notoriety through his portrayal of François Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical character, Antoine Doinel – a Gallic Adrian Mole. His performance blurred factual and fictional adolescence in LES 400 COUPS, where the beaky baby blackbird Léaud depicted performer, puppet and playwright all at once. “Léaud is an anti-documentary actor,” Truffaut boasted of his favourite ingénu. “He has only to say ‘good morning’ and we find ourselves tipping over into fiction”.

“Léaud is an anti-documentary actor”

Truffaut had a deep respect for acting talent, for cinema and its auteurs, whereas his counterpart Jean-Luc Godard harboured an irrepressible contempt towards himself as well as his peers. Although the two friends diverged stylistically, they found a common muse in the young Léaud. For a time, the respect and alliance between the two greatest auteurs of the Nouvelle Vague flourished, despite their creative differences. Léaud was Catherine to Truffaut’s Jules and Godard’s Jim. This tempestuous triangular template would recur in many of Godard’s films, not just in the emotional dynamic between his characters but in political conflicts such as government/student/worker, or in competing voices which can only communicate by telling, or feeling, or showing. Godard’s mentor André Bazin had taught him to view realism as the essence of cinema. As Godard and Truffaut rose in popularity during the 60s, Godard’s artistic motivation became more radical and political, as demonstrated by his films MASCULIN FÉMININ and LA CHINOISE. The tendency to propaganda, well illustrated by the latter film, soon began to alienate the critics and colleagues whose respect he had earned over the years.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ_ubx37pkY

Godard was first drawn to Léaud by qualities he recognised in himself: the young actor’s rebellion and need to shock. Léaud brought this febrile, hungry quality to the screen, whether amusing the audience with his studied petulance or startling them with his unbridled arrogance. He grew into a lupine, louche young man whose critics found his performances, not just his characters, to be cynical and jaded. Some felt that he had lost the frank vigour that drove his performance in LES 400 COUPS, and replaced it with a tainted, sour and more introspective energy. Godard, however, still viewed Léaud with respect and affection as an emerging poster-boy for agit-pop; a herald of the May 1963 revolution. MASCULIN FÉMININ was a showcase for the dark side to Léaud’s passion, not least towards the deliberately nihilistic end of the film, which begins when Léaud’s character Paul tears through the hypocrisy of a ridiculous “public opinion” poll with raw intensity, disgusted at his own ignorance.

The fresh-faced monochrome of Willy Kurant’s cinematography creates an intimacy which is enhanced by subtle conceits such as the swinging spontaneity, the lingering and marked preference of the camera. The lens rests on the listener, not the speaker – on the watcher, not the watched, as the young adults earnestly chase the answers that are blowing in the wind. Godard fed the young performers provocative lines, igniting them with pertinent questions and valuing whatever response he was able to catch – however unguarded or self-conscious. Above all, his direction is warm, fascinated and generous, capturing the jejune wildfire in a way that may well cause a few nostalgic cringes.

 “We need sincerity AND VIOLENCE”

Godard describes himself as a scientist in his approach to film making. Of  LA CHINOISE he remarked, “it was a sort of scientific experiment. When you put little animals together to be studied under a microscope, it’s the same”. If Godard is a scientist, he has a willing, wild lab rat in Léaud. For LA CHINOISE Godard traps him in a bourgeois “huis clos”, isolating the cast in a shoebox of an apartment. Words become ammunition, riccocheting from the white walls or rattling from a radio. The printed word becomes a physical salient; a wall of “little red books”. The backdrop is as bold as the dialogue. Just as the colours of  MADE IN USA matched the star spangled banner, here the blank canvas is splashed with furious red, collar blue and Chinaman yellow. The Maoist text is conveyed throughout LA CHINOISE in ways which clash and combine like primary colours – using the contrasting tongues of the didact, the fanatic, the actor. The simple, powerful word “why?” is delivered with Socratic condescension by Guillaume’s character Francis, a professor and politician; with an extremist scream by Léaud’s student rebel. And which one holds more truth? Léaud takes his consistently physical and choreographed performance to its logical conclusion, miming the unveiling of a bandaged Chinese student whose contusions are illusions. Here the didact, fanatic and actor are brought together: Léaud’s dumb show crystallises the numb artifice of the lecturer and the wild demonstration of the student revolutionary: “We need sincerity AND VIOLENCE”.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiCHeIui690

After completing Antoine Doinel’s swan song L’AMOUR EN FUITE in 1979, Léaud did not make a film until Truffaut’s death in 1984. His role in the short film RUE FONTAINE, directed by Philippe Garrel, showed us a glimpse of what might have become of Doinel, driven to the depths of despair. For this part Léaud allowed his sharp edges to become blunted, his dynamic delivery to deteriorate into a damp unravelling of thought. In the eighties, this fatalistic feeling returned, now tinged with humour in Aki Kaurismäki’s I HIRED A CONTRACT KILLER. Léaud’s character Henri Boulanger might raise a wry smile to the lips of the recent new wave of job seekers: he is a French office worker who is made redundant from his dead end job after fifteen years, and trades his tie for a noose – but he can’t even kill himself properly.

Having extricated himself from type-casting as Truffaut’s Danone, Léaud’s acting career in later life was varied and prolific. His work with directors including Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean Eustache fermented his style and image, leaving a patina which proved irresistible to modern directors such as Aki Kaurismäki (with whom he worked on the recent Cambridge Film Festival favourite LE HAVRE) or Olivier Assayas. During the latter part of his career he has been cast as much for his baggage as for his talent – not least in Assayas’ IRMA VEP. Looking back on the films he made with Léaud, Godard literally defies analysis – he rejects questions as though they were the ridiculous poll questions from MASCULIN FÉMININ. Perhaps he was describing himself when he had his ventriloquist’s dummy, Léaud declare in the same film: “We control our thoughts which mean nothing, and not our emotions which mean everything.”

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hfdXIW73-M