Born on April 13, 1931 in Boulogne-Billancourt in the western suburbs of Paris, Michel Deville died on February 16, 2023. He was 91 years old. The son of a garden pottery manufacturer, Deville had fiddled about with cameras since his childhood. He dreamed of getting into cinema when the filmmaker Henri Decoin came to buy flower pots from his father. First a student in literature at the Sorbonne university in Paris, Deville jumped on the opportunity of meeting Decoin to whom he offered his services as an intern, then as an assistant to the director of La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (The Truth About Bebe Donge, 1951) and Razzia sur la Chnouf ("Raid on the Drugs," 1955) for 12 movies.
When he decided to become a director, he asked Eric Rohmer, whose articles he appreciated, to co-write his first film with him. Flattered, Rohmer replied he was already working on his own feature, Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo), which was due to be released in 1962. Deville worked hand in hand with editor Nina Companeez, who became a co-writer by default by dint of giving him ideas – and being particularly gifted in dialogue. Deville and Companeez collaborated on 12 films. Deville then found another accomplice, costume designer, assistant, producer, and co-writer Rosalinde Damamme, whom he married.
His relationship with Rohmer, who appreciated his first feature film, Ce Soir ou Jamais (Tonight or Never, 1961), earned him the favor of the Cahiers du Cinéma. "A test shot, a master stroke," wrote Jean Douchet, for whom, in Ce Soir ou Jamais, Deville "succeeded in this reputedly impossible alliance: a typically French comedy in an American comedy style."
About the third opus, Adorable Menteuse (Adorable Liar, 1962), where lies are celebrated as life morals (a theme that haunts his entire body of work), Luc Moullet underlines this "seasoned" filmmaker's audacity and unusual character as well as the accuracy of his dialogues. The compliments ceased when Jacques Rivette replaced Rohmer as the magazine's editor-in-chief.
'Nothing happened on purpose'
This anecdote (the missing association with Rohmer) illustrates the peculiar situation that Deville was in the French cinema world. Although he was a contemporary of the New Wave, he never belonged to the movement. He was nevertheless a part of it, in that he dared to film stories in an unusual way. For example, Ce soir ou Jamais (1961) takes place in a single set and was shot in a studio, which the people of the Cahiers abhorred. But its originality, as he recounted in Positif (n° 699), is that, in this type of film, "the characters used to tear each other apart, everything was violent, dramatic and confrontational, we used to tell each other the truth. In my film, nothing happened on purpose." Deville decided that he would make a different kind of cinema than the one he had known as an assistant.
Following the commercial failure of A Cause, A Cause d'une Femme (Because, Because of a Woman, 1962), a chase tail comedy, in which the actor Jacques Charrier swings from one woman to another, Deville directed a number of films to repay part of his debts, including Lucky Jo (1964), with Eddie Constantine, a parody of fashionable thrillers, a meditation on the passage of time, and Martin Soldat (Soldier Martin, 1966), in which Robert Hirsch is a stage actor who has to play a German officer on D-Day, with twists and turns à la Lubitsch's To be or not to be. He returned to his original inspiration (the initiation of love) with Benjamin ou les Mémoires d'un Puceau (Benjamin, or the Diary of an Innocent Young Boy, 1968), set in the 18th century, where a young man (Pierre Clémenti) is surrounded by women in a countryside castle.
Inspired by Marivaux, in the spirit of paintings by Fragonard and Watteau, it is an ode to libertinism, games of love and chance, gallant parties, parades of maids and marchionesses, bored Don Juans and pastoral damsels for a festival of false confidences and stolen kisses. Companeez's dialogues are carefully crafted, but Deville also teaches the art of silence, illustrating his devotion to caresses, the art of speaking with your hands. "Put your hand on my cheek, go down slowly on my neck, now let your hand go down, again," said Francine Bergé to the young man about to lose his virginity.
The same inspiration was used 10 years later, in Le Voyage en Douce ("The Sweet Journey," 1980), where two women tell each other their fantasies and help each other realize them: "Your lips caress the lady's lips, you caress, you caress, the lady half-opens her lips," Dominique Sanda whispers to a shy teenager. The coherence of Deville's work, whose elegant image, refined tempo, and charming interpretation have been highly praised, can be measured in the course of these sentimental educations, as in a playful thriller with an incestuous impulse, Bye Bye, Barbara (1969), a wild piece, L'Ours et la Poupée (The Bear and the Doll), in which Brigitte Bardot, a capricious socialite in a Rolls-Royce, pursues Jean-Pierre Cassel, a short-sighted bohemian with a 2CV (1970), and a costume drama, Raphaël ou le Débauché (Raphael or the Debauched One, 1971), the evocation of an impossible passion, during the romantic century with Musset lace ruffles, between a disenchanted dandy, who is a fan of alcohol and ill-famed places (Maurice Ronet), and a young widow that is still beautiful enough to be desired (Françoise Fabian).
"For me, cinema is always a game; a game of images, words, music, and actors"
The tone of Deville's films without Companeez became more serious, grating, and a little disillusioned. He showed himself to be more conventional. Le Mouton Enragé (Love at the Top, 1974) inaugurates a reflection on his characters' art to stage their lives. Here a cripple manipulates a malleable person and lives through him, by proxy. The frustrated seducer (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is the orchestrator of his friend's seductions, who is his puppet (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an actor, and a substitute hero.
There is the same transfer of libido in La Lectrice (The Reader, 1988), where a woman (Miou-Miou), who is paid to read erotic stories, bends to the fantasies of those who hire her, changing roles as she reads. In Le Paltoquet (The Nonentity, 1986), we are plunged into the theatrical setting of a barkeeper's subconscious, between dream and reality.
All these variations demonstrate how life is only a game. This was already illustrated in L'Apprenti Salaud (The Apprentice Heel, 1977), in which Robert Lamoureux, with his scurrilous manner, plays a swindler with panache. This is still brilliantly illustrated by Péril en la demeure (Death in a French Garden, 1985), adapted from René Belletto, where the guitar teacher played by Christophe Malavoy believes he masters his destiny but is manipulated by everyone, including his student's mother, the tyrannical husband, the voyeuristic neighbor and a hitman in a game of fools. The filmmaker made this playful philosophy his rule: "For me, cinema is always a game; a game of images, words, music, and actors," he said in 1978 (Cinéma 78, No. 236-237).
Each of his films is a formal challenge: In Le Dossier 51 (The 51 File), adapted from Gilles Perrault (1978), there is the subjective camera in the clinical study of the world of intelligence services whose spies remain invisible and where everyone is the object of records and computerized reports; in La Petite Bande ("The Little Gang," 1982), in which one of the children is deaf-mute, there is the challenge of having no dialogue; Le Voyage en Douce ("The Sweet Journey," 1980) is full of erotic scenes without images; Nuit d'été en Ville (Summer Night in Town, 1990) shows behind closed doors in real time; and La Maladie de Sachs (Sachs' Disease, 1999) has the soundtrack echoing the thoughts of the protagonists, doctor, and patients.
Stylist and virtuoso
Deville's cinema was full of camera movements, ellipses, and subtle sequences. In Eaux Profondes ("Deep Water"), adapted from Patricia Highsmith, in 1981, the camera moves from a red apron thrown on a chair to a glass of tomato juice, from a woman's black and white clothes to a piano keyboard. In Péril en la Demeure there are licentious symbols: from the reflection of Anémone's buttocks looking at herself in a mirror, we move to a shot of a glass of cognac, then, sometime later, we see two lovers passing a glass of brandy in bed.
Deville's cinema is also a cinema of glances, those that the director poses on men and women who are constantly observing, spying on, and manipulating each other. It is a cinema that explores the art of lies, pretenses, and mirrors, in front of which Deville plants Anna Karina for her to repeat the questions she wanted to ask her lover in Ce Soir ou Jamais, and which are everywhere in Toutes Peines Confondues (Sweetheart, 1992). Deville sowed them everywhere, he loved three-sided mirrors, rear-view mirrors, and walls lined with mirrors to surprise someone's intimacy, flatter the narcissists and avoid shot/countershots.
Seduction games, board games (Trintignant's character in Eaux Profondes plays chess and croquet), games through verbal jokes: as a follower of the Oulipo, author of collections of playful poems (Poèmes zinopinés, Poèmes zinadvertants, Poèmes zimpromptus and Poèmes zimprobables), Deville used double meanings (such as naughty comebacks or the name of the protagonist in Péril en la Demeure, Aurphet, which is pronounced like Orphée). As a music lover very attached to his films' rhythm, Deville accompanied them with classical works chosen for their harmony with the era, moods, and tempos: Beethoven for La Lectrice; Bizet for L’Apprenti Salaud; Schubert and Bartok for La Femme en Bleu (The Woman in Blue); Saint-Saëns for Le Mouton Enragé; and Brahms, Granados, and Schubert for Péril en la Demeure.
Deville was awarded four Césars: two for best film (in 1967 for Benjamin, in 1988 for La Lectrice), one for best screenplay adapted from a novel for Le Dossier 51 in 1979, and one for best director in 1986 for Péril en la Demeure.