Cinema

No ordinary entertainer
Charisma and derision

Jean Dujardin is no ordinary entertainer. It has taken him time and almost a dozen roles to prove it. He is nonetheless an undeniably gifted comic. It was by making people laugh that Dujardin, now aged thirty four, made his name with French audiences in the 1990s; first on stage in various small Parisian cabarets, then as a member of a company which produced a highly successful television programme called "Fiesta".

Three times winner in the "comedians" category of the TV talent programme, "Graines de stars" between 1997 and 1998, he literally burst into the limelight in 1999 in the comedy mini-series Un gars, une fille [One guy, one girl], alongside his girlfriend, Alexandra Lamy, in a huge television hit that attracted more than five million viewers every evening for four years.

The doors of the film world then opened for him. But he was expected to keep on making the audience laugh. Neither of his first films, Ah ! si j’étais riche [Oh, if I were rich!] and Toutes les filles sont folles [All girls are crazy], in 2002, was an overwhelming success. It was with Mariages! in 2003, in which he played an endearing yet disenchanted young newlywed, and especially with Brice de Nice, in 2004, that he established his reputation at the box office with more than four million admissions. His role as Brice, a moronic surfer and king of the jibe that "bombs", has become a cult.

Happily his success, rather than pushing him into accepting easy roles, has given him the opportunity to play richer and more subtle characters. Having previously acted with Carole Bouquet, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Mathilde Seigner, with Le Convoyeur [Cash Truck] (2003) he has proved that he can also be disquieting. In this urban thriller he plays a friendly, sympathetic, but totally mad security guard ...

In 2005, in Il ne faut jurer de rien!, a loose adaptation of a play by Alfred de Musset with Gérard Jugnot and Mélanie Doutey, Jean Dujardin ventures into period comedy, where he exercises his seducer-stuntman skills very much in the style of Jean-Paul Belmondo, an actor he admires.

In 2006, with OSS 117 (released in April), the actor has finally been acclaimed by the critics and has found a wide audience, with almost two million cinema admissions. He plays the magnificent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS 117, a French secret agent in the post-war period [1], uncouth, chauvinist and smug, but frankly irresistible. It’s a meticulous and off-beat pastiche of 1950s adventure and spy films, packed with references - from Tintin to Hitchcock - which gleefully pokes fun at a completely ridiculous colonial and navel-gazing France.

"Every actor dreams of playing a secret agent at least once in his career", says Jean Dujardin about this film. "I loved the idea of acting like Sean Connery in James Bond - but wearing a very French vest underneath!" With this most recent feature film, in which he sings, dances and fights, Jean Dujardin proves that he is, as his director Michel Hazanavicius says, "a very hard worker with an excellent sense of timing and a fabulous actor who can do anything." Alternately attractive and funny, going from "Sean to Connery" [2], in the words of a journalist on the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, he walks the unstable high wire of derision with charisma and assurance, sometimes even brilliantly managing to play the ham actor ...

But there is no question of his becoming bigheaded. "I am still naive enough to think that this job is about having fun", he explains. "I go where I want to go. I’d rather choose a good thriller than a bad comedy. I go with the story. If it inspires me, I do the film."

After a time on the Paris stage, between January and June 2006, where he shares the bill in Deux sur la balançoire [Two for the Seesaw], by American playwright William Gibson, he will return to the cinema in an adaptation of Frédéric Beigbeder’s bestseller, 14,99 Euros [14.99 euro].

Pierre Langlais
journalist