A funny S.O.B.

In « Indochine », Jean Yanne was a cynical, bad-tempered French police officer. Hard to think of a more pleonastic sentence : can a French police officer be anything but cynical and bad-tempered ? could Jean Yanne be anything but cynical and bad-tempered ?

But, even French police officers and Jean Yanne are not immune to falling in love with Catherine Deneuve. Fortunately, the actor and his character did so without any display of romantic foolishness and their sentimental restraint was a welcome relief from the soapiness of the film main plot.

In many ways, Jean Yanne embodied French heaviness. A heavy-set silhouette, a heavy-eyed face with a disgusted look, a gruff voice with a working class accent : the superlative foul-mouthed growling Frenchman.

He looked like Maigret -yes, a French police officer can be neither cynical, nor needlessly bad-tempered-, but with an undisguised contempt for mankind, or W.C. Fields’s Gallic natural son.

That was trademark Yanne : a catharsis for all the petty aggressions of daily life ; the more he grumbled, the more you laughed.

Fifteen years before « Indochine », he was hilarious in Godard’s « Weekend » (1967). The director had married him to blonde doll Mireille Darc and their couple was arguing its way one of the highlights of French middle class existence : driving away for the weekend.

The first two reels of the film are a surreal mix of very dark humour, stand up comedy lines and Godard’s touch, as the weekend turns to mayhem on the road.

Casting Yanne was vintage Godard ; rising to the bait was vintage Yanne.

The actor’s public image could not have been more alien to the director’s universe. Materialistic, selfish, anti-intellectual, he stood for all that Godard was about to massacre on screen and did not seem to give a damn about it.

Misanthropy and a common taste for destruction were probably the missing links between the right wing anarchist -faked or real- and the then Maoist filmmaker.

Better still from Godard’s deadpan perspective, Jean Yanne, a stand up comedian and familiar radio voice, had become famous for two acts set on the road.

In number one, he plays his heavy-self : a candidate for a driver’s licence who will not be bothered by administrative formalities or the examiner and bullies his way to the coveted piece of paper.

In number two, he is a truck driver on a night trip, who listens to high-brow radio channel France Culture and discusses Peguy and Bach with his gay companion.

The echo of both dialogues make Jean Yanne doubly hilarious in « Weekend », before the film takes a hairpin bend toward Maoist humour.

Not advisable for all audiences, but very close to Jean Yanne’s wit in its bad taste and possibly unconscious nonsensical vein, the Maoist idea of a good joke has Darc and Yanne hijacked by the Seine-et-Oise -a « département » near Paris- Liberation Front ; Yanne is killed, Darc and the long-haired freedom fighters feast on his barbecued remains.

No doubt an ending which the actor would have relished in real life, certain to have the last laugh as the reckless cannibals would have a hard, and maybe fatal, time trying to stomach him.

Jean Yanne died in 2003 of a banal heart attack. He was seventy years old. Obituary writers were shocked to discover that, despite his constant show of laziness, he had appeared in over seventy films.

Many of his roles were only vignettes, in which he played or caricatured himself ; they cost him a few days’ work against a welcome cheque : Yanne never got along well with French tax authorities -another reason for his popularity-, and spent most of his later years in Los Angeles, where he likely rooted for the « Dodgers ».

In addition to his « Indochine » and « Weekend » parts, he had some more memorable roles, like the murderous « Boucher »(1969) -butcher- he played for Chabrol or the unfaithful husband Pialat, whose temper and figure closely matched his, asked him to be in « Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble »(1972).

The latter film earned him a Best Actor Prize in Cannes, which he squarely refused.

Yanne’s talent was rediscovered in time by a younger generation of filmmakers and the actor was widely lauded for « Je règle mon pas sur le pas de mon père » (1998), in which he faced French cinema new boy wonder and baby shark, Guillaume Canet.

As Jean Yanne died, some vague and sobbing associates tried to pin on his corpse the weary « cliché » of the tender, affectionate man, hiding coyly behind a rough facade.

Whether they were motivated by pious reasons, the wish to tarnish his reputation, or excused by failing memory, remains unknown. Fortunately, nobody believed them : everybody knew that Jean Yanne was, at heart, a true son of a bitch.