My first encounter with Jean-Louis Trintignant, one of the greatest actors ever, was seeing The Conformist at The Music Box in Chicago, circa mid-90s. I hadn’t seen any of his other work and was completely unfamiliar with him. Even just the look of his face pinned me to the spot, let alone all of the OTHER things going on in that film (visually, mostly) that riveted and intrigued me. The entryway is his face. And WHAT a face.
It would take a long time for me to piece together the rest of his extraordinary career. He worked with everyone. He was different. Special. Remote, eloquent, sharp, withheld. With that FACE.
He was so handsome that his face is practically come-hither in its beauty and sculpting. You lean in. You are drawn to it. The full lips, the sharp angles. But the face was closed-off too, like a smooth marble mask. It was such a perfect face for the movies.
Here he is in Costa-Gravas’ masterpiece Z, as the magistrate who is, surprisingly (considering the environment), incorruptible. He’s indomitable. Tenacious. Dead-serious. Not a man to be placated or fooled with. A thorn in everyone’s side. Trintignant doesn’t come into Z until the second half, but once he enters, everything changes. He won’t budge. Army generals quake. Panic ensues. A government falls.
For a full overview of Trintigant’s career, the piece you need to read is my friend Dan Callahan’s. Here’s Dan on The Conformist:
No one who has seen this film can forget the gloating yet uncertain look on Trintignant’s face in the back of the car at the end, when Dominique Sanda is crying for him to help her. We can see that he knows he is damned, yet there is a part of him that is frozen, too, unable to respond. His character is missing that component of empathy for others, or it was destroyed or taken from him (this point can be argued). He seems to be thinking, “Does it matter?” And the answer is: yes and no, or perhaps. Alas! Like many of the major screen actors who were only at their best for certain directors, Trintignant is on the fence emotionally and intellectually, and the process of watching him sort that out will always be exciting, sexy, chilling, and dismaying.
This was a major career. He worked almost until the very end.
