The timepieces of Jean-Loup Dabadie

Posted on october 12, 2016 AT 11AM

© Institut Lumière / Photo Jean-Luc Meige

"Hold on…I can't hear this bullshit all my life! Schooled by idiots until the end of time! Listen to a writer who writes nothing, a boxer who doesn't want to box, women who'll sleep with anything… Shit! … And when we're gone, that guy will be here with his dancer with the mechanical leg! What the fuck do I care? Fuck all of you, with your dumb-ass "leg of lamb" Sundays, shit!" You've just read the now-famous "leg of lamb tirade." In the tradition of, "You break my heart!" (Marius by Pagnol) or "Does this face look like atmosphere?!" (Hotel du Nord by Carné), the rant has entered the Hall of Fame of classic lines of French film heritage. Forever and ever.
 

With the difference that its author himself is alive, and wildly cheered when Thierry Frémaux invites him to take the stage at the Comédie Odéon for a master class with savvy moderator, Jean Ollé-Laprune. With his natural elegance and velvety Mediterranean eloquence, Jean-Loup Dabadie takes questions, responding to them with warmth, thoroughness and clarity, and without forgetting to slip in a few anecdotes. His former "colleagues" (Romy Schneider, Yves Montand, Michel Piccoli...), actors who have become legendary, projected on the festival screens, came alive again thanks to the energy in the theater, just like Guy Bedos, who was also warmly applauded.

What exactly do we learn from a master class? Well, for example, that behind the famous leg-of-lamb tirade that seems to spontaneously erupt from the throat of a hopping mad Piccoli, lies a script of extreme precision, where everything is down to last comma; staging notes on expressions included. Know that behind that smooth voice and disarming smile of a singing gondolier, lies an intensely hard worker, to whom Paul Guimard, author of novel The Things of Life, could ask, each evening on vacation, back from his peaceful promenade at sea, "So, pal. Where are we?" This would not prevent him from co-signing the script!

Finally when we ask Dabadie if he was aware of giving his first song (written for Serge Reggiani, Le petit Garçon) the visual dimension of a short film, he reveals that, constrained by time - like going to press - he remembered the journalistic approach to the transcript of the facts he had learned from the eminent Pierre Lazareff, and he plunged back into one of his scripts he had kept on the side, searching for an idea...

Pierre Collier