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 Monsieur Pignon, I Presume Taking a comic ride with "The Valet"'s Francis Veber
The Swiss make cuckoo clocks, Francis Veber makes clockwork comedies.
And that is a very good thing. As perhaps the leading practitioner of
filmed farce, Veber, whose successes include "The Dinner Party" (Le
diner des cons, 1997), as well as writing the original "La cage aux
folles" in 1978, constructs edifices of human folly that can only be
marveled at (once you've stopped laughing a day or so later, that is.)
Veber's put-upon Everyman leads are usually named "François
Pignon," now played in "The Valet" (Le doublure) by a third actor
(after Jacques Brel and Gerard Depardieu), the baleful, large-eyed Gad
Elmaleh. A parking attendant at a (fictional) restaurant directly across
a park from the Eiffel Tower, François has been in love since childhood
with Émilie (Virginie LeDoyen), the owner of an overextended bookstore.
He just happens to walk down the street when CEO Levasseur (Daniel
Auteuil) and his mistress, a six-foot-plus model named Elena (Alice
Taglioni), are having a fight out-of-doors and are caught by paparazzi.
Pictures published, Levasseur's wife and controlling business partner
(Kristin Scott Thomas, fluent in French) must be convinced that it's a
mistake. Enter lawyer Maître Foix (Richard Berry), who convinces
Levasseur they'll find the man in the picture and set he and Elena up
for thirty days as if they were a couple. (Once this elaborate
set-up--which I've simplified--is dispensed with, the complications
tickle and gratify.)
Thirty minutes into this sleek, under-ninety-minute movie, Pignon
voices the central theme, the reigning metaphor of the movie: "It's
like when I park a great car, it's beautiful, but it's not mine." This
spoken while in his customary café where you know at any moment Émilie
will arrive, also with a different partner, as Elena has just piled her
tangled blonde tresses atop his shoulder. "Yes, you're right," the
69-year-old writer-director tells me. "In this line you have the whole
film. He brings this beautiful girl into his house and she's perfect.
But it's not his."
It seems so obvious when it's said that you should roll your eyes,
yet it's not obvious until he speaks it aloud, "woe is me," he doesn't
even have self-knowledge, let alone self-pity. "Yes. It's very precise
what you are saying. When you write it, you know that he has to say that
but it's after that, that you understand how many things you summarize
in this line. After. When you're writing, you know it, I'm sure, you're
lost, you're always naked when you're writing."
Why does comedy need to be brightly lit or brightly colored to work?
It seems right to ask the director of this crisp bauble. "I don't know,
but I know it's a real need. It's part of why it [takes] longer to shoot
a comedy. In a suspense movie, in a gory movie, in a drama, you can have
shadows and you don't have to be bright like that. So when you ask your
cinematography to make the light for that kind of film, comedies, it
takes a lot of time." He comes to his point. "But the eyes of
the people. You need to see their eyes, you see."
He continues: "It's very special to shoot a comedy. If you're not a
comedy director, no way you will succeed. I had this experience with my
remakes here in America. For instance, they gave a film I wrote when I
was younger, `The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe,' and Stan Dragoti,
an American director, remade it with Tom Hanks. It was no good. It was
no good because the man is not a comedy director. I had the same
experience with a film that was called in France, `Le chevre,' which
means `The Goat,' and they made a remake here that was a piece of shit,
y'know? The director was an Australian woman, Nadia Tass. She didn't
know how to shoot a comedy. It's special. You have it or you don't have
it."
A podiatrist doesn't do heart surgery. "Yes. Exactly right."
How did the story of "The Valet" start? "I hate billionaires,"
Veber says. The idea of Pignon as an Everyman seems consistent in
Veber's work. Pignon is shy but he's not self-pitying, he's tinder
waiting for a spark. He's the raw material ready to be transformed. "I
tell you something, I would prefer you to be in front of journalists
because you know that so much better than I do!" he says with a smile
of self-aware flattery. "First, your English is so much better and what
you are saying is what I think. I think that Pignon doesn't know who he
is at the beginning of a film, that's why I don't think he's
self-pitying. He doesn't know that he's mediocre! At the beginning of
most of the films, he's just a little man in the crowd. And then because
he meets this situation, he starts to grow up, but otherwise he would
have stayed the same. We say in France that if Robespierre, the most
cruel of the Revolution, a lot of people had their head cut because of
him, but first he was an attorney, a lawyer in a small town in the north
of France. If he didn't have a revolution, he would have remained a
little attorney in this little town. But he met his event. And someone
said that an exceptional man is the meeting between a quality and an
event. You have the quality inside of yourself, and you don't know it,
and suddenly you meet your moment and you become what you have to
become. It's what I like to write. In all my movies, at the beginning,
all those people are nobodies. All the Pignons."
"The Valet" opens Friday at Landmark Century.
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Moving Pictures
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