This sounds good too:
For Bernard Rapp, a Fruitful Choice of Now
Over Never
By ALAN RIDING
ARIS -- Bernard Rapp is a familiar
enough figure on camera, at least for
French television viewers, who over the past
20 years have variously seen him as a
London-based foreign correspondent, as
anchor of the nightly news on a major
network and as presenter of several
long-running cultural programs. Then, six
years ago, this affable, youthful- looking
Parisian decided to try his luck behind the
camera. Not quite out of the blue, he
became a movie director.
"You could say that I waited 50 years to
make my first film because I always knew I
wanted to make movies," he said in an
interview in his office at France-3, one of
two government-owned television channels.
"When I reached the age of 50, I said: `The
moment has arrived. It's now or never.' So I
stopped doing lots of other things and began
preparing myself for cinema."
His first film, "Limited Edition," starring
Terence Stamp, Maria de Medeiros and
Daniel Mesguish, did only modestly when it
was released here in 1997. His second has
fared far better. "A Matter of Taste" ("Une
Affaire de Goût"), a psychological thriller
that opens in New York on Friday, won five
César nominations, as the French Academy
Award is known, drew a half-million
viewers in France and has been sold in 17
countries. Mr. Rapp's new career, it seems,
is off the ground.
The new movie, which Mr. Rapp and Gilles
Taurand adapted from Philippe Balland's
1992 novel by the same name, tells the
bizarre tale of Frédéric Delamont (Bernard
Giraudeau), an eccentric industrialist who
hires a handsome young waiter, Nicolas Rivière (Jean-Pierre Lorit), as his
personal food taster. What might be the climax of a different film, however, is
revealed immediately: Nicolas is in jail for murdering Frédéric. Here it is their
relationship that provides the drama.
Told in long flashbacks as the prisoner is questioned by a judge, a doctor
and a psychologist, the story begins with the hiring of Nicolas as the rich
man's overpaid food taster. (Nicolas prefers to tell his down-to- earth
girlfriend, Béatrice (Florence Thomassin), that he is Frédéric's personal
assistant.) His first duty is to ensure that Frédéric's food contains no cheese
or fish. Soon, however, Frédéric starts turning Nicolas into his younger
mirror image, not only in his food tastes but also in his clothes, manners and
thinking.
Alarmed by her boyfriend's ever stranger behavior, Béatrice confronts him,
but the result is to push him even closer to Frédéric.
If homoerotic tensions are suggested, the relationship between the men is
never sexual. Far more powerful — and dangerous — is their growing
psychological interdependence. Frédéric, the obsessive manipulator, seems
to be in control, until he, too, becomes captive to his own machinations. And
in this dark dance of mental infatuation, seeds of hate and violence take root.
Central to the film is Mr. Giraudeau's disturbing portrayal of Frédéric. A man
with a naturally somber mien, Mr. Giraudeau played the not dissimilar role of
Léopold in François Ozon's recent "Water Drops on Burning Rocks," a
sexual thriller based on a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mr. Rapp,
though, had not seen this film when he cast Mr. Giraudeau as Frédéric.
Rather, the actor was one of several who were sent the screenplay. The day
after receiving it, Mr. Giraudeau called the director and virtually claimed the
role.
"We took Giraudeau because we wanted a character who was seductive
and predatory, but above all someone who was suffering, who has internal
violence, a real psychopath in a mental sense," Mr. Rapp explained.
"Giraudeau has all that. He is a bit noir too. He has a masculine sporty side,
but he also constantly questions himself. He is a true melancholic."
Mr. Giraudeau readily admits that he likes playing predators.
"What I liked about Frédéric is his despair," Mr. Giraudeau said in a
telephone interview. "He is a man who has everything who realizes that he
lacks the essential, which could be love or it could be a son. I think he sees
Nicolas as a son, but the father-son relationship disintegrates into perversity.
Frédéric is very different from Léopold in `Water Drops.' Léopold is totally
insincere, but Frédéric is genuinely troubled. His character is profoundly
ambiguous."
Mr. Rapp said he was amused by the different audience responses to "A
Matter of Taste."
"Some people said it was about homosexuality, some about gastronomy,
some about alienation; others said it was about sadomasochism," he said.
"Everyone brought their own perspective. My own view is that it is not about
homosexuality. I don't think Frédéric can have a sex life because he has too
much love for himself, but I know the ambiguity is there. We developed it."
In adapting Mr. Balland's book, which presents the Frédéric-Nicolas
relationship as a straightforward narrative that does not end in murder, Mr.
Rapp had the asset of a writing partner with a background as a
psychoanalyst and a track record in movie thrillers. Mr. Taurand's screen
credits include Anne Fontaine's "Dry Cleaning" and several of André
Téchiné's movies, among them the award-winning "Wild Reeds" (1994).
For Mr. Giraudeau, Mr. Rapp's inexperience as a director was never an
issue. "With Bernard, there's an immediate complicity between the actor and
the director," he said. "It's easy to understand. He is subtle, funny, both
lighthearted but also thoughtful. When you have someone like him, someone
who is cultivated, who reads, who knows what's happening in the arts, you
can't go wrong."
Mr. Rapp himself is hardly a stranger to cinema. Not only has he presented
two weekly movie programs on France-3 in recent years; he has also edited
Larousse's best- selling "Dictionary of Film," which includes 11,000 entries.
This fall he will also begin a new France-3 program resembling James
Lipton's "Inside the Actors Studio," which is shown here in English (with
subtitles) on a cable channel. Much like Mr. Lipton, Mr. Rapp will interview
actors in front of an audience of students, actors and directors, in this case at
the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Paris.
French television viewers have identified Mr. Rapp more with literature than
film. Having presented two book programs, "Characters" and "Never
Without a Book," in the early 1990's, he has just completed the tour de force
of producing and presenting "A Century of Writers," a six-year series
comprising 50-minute profiles of no fewer than 257 of the 20th century's
greatest writers (123 of them French).
For his broad interest in culture, Mr. Rapp thanks his father, an antiquarian
who first awakened his curiosity in the arts by taking him to the great
museums of Paris at an early age.
"I actually came to journalism through culture because reading Rimbaud,
Conrad, Hemingway and Paul Morand made me dream," he recalled. "If I
hadn't read Joseph Kessel, I would not have become a foreign
correspondent. People like him made me who I am. And if you talk about
cinema, it's the same. If I hadn't seen the films of John Huston, Joseph
Mankiewicz and Bob Rafelson, I would not be here now. In that sense, I'm a
kind of purse snatcher."
For his own films, though, Mr. Rapp has also found inspiration closer by.
"I have made two films about manipulation because that suits my character,"
he said. "I love scratching where it hurts a bit. I have heard my films criticized
because they are set among the bourgeoisie, but what I like about good
social circles is what is not good about them. That's why I love Claude
Chabrol's films: they are elegantly noir."
His third film, a television movie called "The Heiress," to be broadcast here
this fall, is a comedy about a hotel maid who inherits a milk factory from a
father she never knew. He has also just completed his first original
screenplay, a coming of age comedy provisionally called "The Purple Virgin,"
which he hopes to start filming next spring.
Now, as he surrenders to what he calls "the desire and pleasure" of cinema,
his other two "mistresses," books and music, risk neglect. But who can deny
the excitement of novelty?
"What I really like is the game of construction," he said. "I knew I could
survive technically because many people could help me, but the real test was
whether I could guide the work of the actors. That's why it feels like an
adventure. I have discovered that you really `write' a film four times — the
screenplay, during production, during editing and now, when you talk about
it after it comes out. And each one is different." |
