The Beauty of the Real by LaSalle Mick;

Author:LaSalle, Mick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Agnès Jaoui as the bartender in The Taste of Others (Canal Plus), 2000. The film was also directed by Jaoui.

10

Agnès Jaoui

THERE COMES A MOMENT IN MANY, perhaps most, of Agnès Jaoui’s films in which she looks at someone as though gazing into their depths . . . and then smiles as though, having taken their measure, she has found them worthy of attention. These are always warm moments, because in those seconds, she is also looking, in a sense, at us, and we feel the glow of her approval.

Yet these are ever-so-slightly disconcerting moments, too, in that we register that the objects of her gaze have been on trial at every moment leading up to that smile. And we see in the sureness of Jaoui’s expression someone who does not doubt her opinions. Not necessarily someone who can’t be wrong, but someone who really cannot entertain that as a possibility.

Such decisiveness, also found in the actress herself, no doubt serves Agnès Jaoui well as a director. It also makes her a pleasure to talk to, in that you don’t feel she is putting on any kind of an act—that she couldn’t be bothered—and it makes her highly quotable. She is confident and voluble and—not that this is important, but it’s something to notice—she looks exactly as she does on screen. Not shorter or taller, not fatter or thinner, and not even older (despite the fact that, whenever you meet people, you are meeting them, by definition, at the oldest point in their lives so far). Jaoui is inescapably Jaoui, and it doesn’t seem she wants to escape, nor does it seem that she should.

Karin Viard spoke of working with her as a nightmare, though she also said, with a laugh, that when I met Jaoui, “she will be very smiling. And when you speak with her about me, she will say, ‘Oh, Karin is very nice, I liked her very much in this movie.’” So I went in prepared to be charmed and determined not to be fooled. This was in 2009. Three days later, I arrived to meet Jaoui at a cafe on the Île de la Cité and stood outside the place for two hours. She never showed up.

Flash forward one day less than a year later, same café, on a gorgeous warm afternoon with white clouds suspended in a blue sky—one of those days that make you think that every day you don’t spend in Paris is a day wasted—and there was Jaoui breezing into the café, all scarves and energy, apologizing for the year before and carrying with her an atmosphere of things-getting-done.

Impossible not to like her. Impossible, also, not to realize very quickly that you would not want to get in this woman’s way and you would not ever want to give her any reason to decide that you’re an idiot. Because once she did, the odds of your being able to reverse that opinion on appeal would be hopeless.

Jaoui is a writer and a director, in addition to being an actress.

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