Jean-Pierre Darroussin

In The Bureau (2015) Henri Duflot runs the French service's undercover section from a desk, and Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays him as a man who has read every file and would rather you thought he had not. Éric Rochant shoots the office as grey partitions, strip lighting and badge readers, where the drama is a meeting about whether to spend money, and Darroussin makes those meetings matter by doing almost nothing in them. He listens. He looks tired. He lets Mathieu Kassovitz's Malotru and Florence Loiret Caille's Marie-Jeanne do the talking, and when he speaks it is usually to protect somebody who has not noticed they are being protected. Over fifty hours we came to worry about Duflot more than about the agents in the field, which is odd for a man behind a desk, and it happened because Darroussin never once asks us to.

He has been doing this since the early 1980s, when he moved from the theatre into small parts in comedies. The turn came with Robert Guédiguian, whose Marseilles-based company he joined on Ki lo sa ? (1985) and has stayed with for nineteen films. Marius et Jeannette (1997), with Ariane Ascaride, is the one to know, with Darroussin as Dédé in a working-class corner of the city. At the same time he fell in with Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui, playing in Cuisine et dépendances (1993) and, for Cédric Klapisch, Un air de famille (1996), where he is Denis. Le Poulpe (1998) gave him his first lead, as Gabriel Lecouvreur, and Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) put him in front of a Finnish director without his leaving France. He has directed features of his own.

What he does is hard to point at, which is why it is undervalued. He is nearly always the ordinary middle-aged man in a group, and the group settles around him. Warmth, melancholy and a dry line delivered as if he were not sure it was a joke: that is the kit, and he has carried it between broad comedy and quiet drama for forty years. The one reservation anyone raises is that he stays close to a familiar everyman register, and it is fair as far as it goes. He has said himself, 'Le cinéma s’est industrialisé. Et moi, je suis toujours un petit peu du côté de l’artisanat', and the craft is in the small things: the pause, the glance at the wrong person, the shoulders. You do not notice them, which is the idea.

Start with The Bureau, where the method is on display for fifty hours and repays every one of them, then go to Guédiguian. Darroussin is not a small talent. He only plays one.