Jean-Louis Trintignant makes a withdrawn man's effort to care visible without making him easy to like. We value his restraint most when it leaves another actor room to answer back, as Irène Jacob does in Three Colours: Red.
Fi1m perspective
In Three Colours: Red (1994), Trintignant lets the judge's severity remain even when we begin to understand his hurt. The man does not become pleasant simply because someone has taken an interest in him. We were moved by the effort it takes him to care about another person's life, because Trintignant makes that difficulty apparent without asking us to excuse his behaviour. It is an unusually persuasive performance of someone who gives us little encouragement to like him.
Romantic stardom came with A Man and a Woman (1966), though his appeal often rested on shyness or repression. He could suggest conflict without much outward expression, a useful quality for the intimate, morally complicated work of Éric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's (1969). The attraction is the sense that something matters to him before he is prepared to explain it. From the 1980s he took fewer film roles and concentrated more on theatre.
Krzysztof Kieślowski gives him a crucial partner in Red: Irène Jacob, whose model has concerns of her own. She is not there just to make the judge feel better. Piotr Sobociński uses colour and camera movement to keep us looking beyond the person who happens to be speaking. That suits an actor whose minimal outward expression can conceal a good deal of conflict. The attention can pass between Jacob and Trintignant without either having to force it.
The film does occasionally work too hard around them. Its coincidences can look overarranged, and Claude Lenoir's production design sometimes has us inspecting the surroundings for meanings that the performances do not need help supplying. We still believe in the friendship, but there are passages when a less insistent setting would let us pay better attention to the actors.
His return in Amour (2012), followed by Happy End (2017), came after those years of fewer film roles. In his later work, the distinctive voice and weathered face suited troubled patriarchs. Begin with Three Colours: Red, and give the judge longer than he seems to deserve.
Biography
Jean-Louis Trintignant (1930–2022) was a French actor. He made his theatrical debut in 1951 and appeared in his first film in 1955. His early screen roles included And God Created Woman (1956).
He gained wider recognition for A Man and a Woman (1966). Subsequent films include Z (1969), My Night at Maud's (1969), The Conformist (1971), Three Colors: Red (1994) and Amour (2012). He provided the voice of L'oncle Irvin in The City of Lost Children (1995).
Trintignant received the Silver Bear for Best Actor in 1968 for The Man Who Lies and the Best Actor award at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival for Z. He won the César Award for Best Actor in 2013 for Amour.
