“The heroism of everyday life fascinates me”: Edouard Baer walks his “lucubrations of a man suddenly struck by grace” in Antibes, Nice and Monaco
The actor-director, who brought together a host of actors at The Lilac Closerie in his last film, Farewell Paris released in January, is still surrounded by a band of sacred characters.
This time, it is not in this famous Parisian address but in an imaginary bistro that we invite Édouard Baer. In The Lucubrations of a Man Suddenly Struck by Grace, which he created in April 2019 with Isabelle Nanty directing, who has several times hosted the Césars or opened the Cannes Film Festival, calls on his own prize list. Jean-Pierre Marielle, Boris Vian or Romain Gary…
The piece, which also became a book at Seuil last year, has evolved since then. “Obviously. But it reassures me, the book has not frozen anything”underlines the 55-year-old comedian on the phone. “We lose spontaneity but we gain in depth, accuracybelieves Baer. Yes, I think the show is better. It’s like a good wine!”
You pay tribute to those who have marked you. What did you find in them?
I believe these are identification dreams. Like when you’re a child and you dream of being the hero of your series. I was asked why it was only men too: precisely, because it’s identification not admiration, men that I would have liked to be. People who, in their lives, have a commitment. Boris Vian is still a free way of living, not anarchist but, so free, with his wife, with music. In Malraux, there is a form of heroism… In everyone, there is something that integrated me as a teenager. We are always under construction in life but these are things that touched me between fifteen and twenty years, when we could escape from our family and our social or cultural environment, by reading, cinema.
You question the figure of the hero…
Absoutely. A hero is daily choices, not an image. It’s not just in wartime, it’s also, as they say, the father or the mother of the family, the adventurer in the supermarket… The heroism of everyday life has fascinated me for a long time. We see it in certain professions, we saw it during the Covid. Heroes, there, we did not expect it. Lots of people tell me: ”Oh me, my job is not interesting”… I don’t know why society explained this to them because, in those who make the wheels work, in the fact of going back there every day, there is heroism.
There is one thing in common among the men who populate this show: this mixture of despair and joy…
Yes, because the strength of joy comes when you know that everything is disaster, that life is sickness, aging and death, once you have accepted that, you can have a lot of fun. We must not deny it, otherwise it is stupidity. And then when we gain height, we see the daily disaster too, we are disappointed every day. That’s Bukowski whom I quote on stage and who is a specialist, his life is a succession of disasters and he laughs about it, it’s magnificent. Humor is first of all self-mockery, we have to laugh at our failures, but that doesn’t mean not to fight, huh! This is how the sentence already, from Beckett I believe… Yes: ”Fail again, miss better” !
All of them also have in common a taste for alcohol, for sea bass. Bar that serves as the decor of the room?
Ah ah, but it’s not just alcohol, the bar! The café, the bar, it’s horizontal, it’s a place that allows people who have different lives to find themselves on an equal footing. In the cities they are miraculous places, in the United States, in the countryside, suddenly you have a harbor with written Open, and a guy in it, we don’t know if he’s been there for twenty years or a quarter of an hour… It’s a place where you can take the language, from scratch, it’s the surface in a good way . Out of sympathy, it is a listening and speaking valve. It annoys me when someone says to me: ”There are good cocktails”I don’t care, you should say to myself: ”There is good listening”! And then we are not in front of a screen, as we are in the cinema or in front of a show at the theatre, we are there, in front of nothing… I like it.
The starting point is an actor fleeing from something. The opportunity to make concrete the anxieties of actors? Not convincing, failing…
Yes, it’s a sham. But this feeling goes beyond the job of an actor, it’s a general feeling, imposture. It is only in the technical professions that we can escape it. As soon as it is a question of inspiration, we are afraid that everything will disappear. We can see the number of artists who run all their life after something they have lost. Craftsmen have a know-how that saves them!
In the book, you wonder why you put this piece down on paper: if you have become ”worried or megalomaniac”. So ?
Yes, do we take ourselves for a writer? Do we no longer believe in the moment? Because wanting to fix things is suspicious, because we believe in posterity. And posterity is as vulgar as money, it’s megalomania. Want to score, why? Ok, I paint ugly things but there are also beautiful things. Doing all this also means wanting to share. I do my Lucchini, I do quotes, but it’s this magnificent sentence from Sacha Guitry: ”When you have the honor of being a relaxation for these contemporaries, you have to devote most of your time to it”.