The director who gave Spiral its grey, close, unglamorous Paris, and then spent his feature career on romantic comedies about mismatched couples. The television work is the part we can vouch for; the films were lighter, and by his own account were meant to be.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the opening of Spiral (2005) and you will see what Pascal Chaumeil could do with a camera and a room. A corpse whose face has been destroyed lies in a pathology lab while detectives talk over it about procedure, and the camera does not look away. We were horrified, and we were meant to be; the point is that these people look at this and then go to lunch. Chaumeil, with Philippe Triboit, directed the early episodes and set a look the series kept for eight runs: handheld, close on faces, a Paris of grey-green light, ring roads, estates and windowless offices, with music that stays out of the way. There is not a boulevard in it.
That is the work we can speak for, and it is the strongest case for him. He had come up the long way, as an assistant director from the 1980s, working for Pierre Tchernia and for Luc Besson on Léon (1994) and, on the second unit, The Fifth Element (1997), then directing television from the late 1990s. A man who has spent two decades watching other people direct tends to know exactly what he wants when the set is finally his, and Spiral looks like that: nothing decorative, everything at working distance.
Then, at nearly fifty, he made Heartbreaker (2010) and turned out to want something else entirely. His features are romantic comedies about mismatched couples, with ensemble casts, physical comedy and a fondness for pop-culture jokes, built on American models and set in France. He talked about wanting a film that moved like a musical in every part, camera and actors alike, and about letting a script loose once shooting began: "It's good to have a good script but then you must make a mess out of it, I think." That is a long way from a pathology lab. It explains the pleasure people took in the debut, which was liked for its tone and for how its two leads got on, and it explains the trouble that came later.
A Perfect Plan (2012) stayed in the same vein. A Long Way Down (2014), his English-language film from the Nick Hornby novel, was the one most critics turned on, for a tone that would not settle and for losing the weight of the book. We have not reviewed it and will not pretend to a verdict, but the complaint fits a director whose instinct was to loosen things when the material needed holding. He died in 2015; Odd Job (2016), with Romain Duris, his lead from Heartbreaker, came out afterwards.
Start with Spiral. It is the work that holds the camera on something hard and does not blink, and it is where his discipline shows. The comedies are for people who already like his company; watch Heartbreaker to see what he did once nobody was telling him where to point the camera.
Biography
Pascal Chaumeil (9 February 1961 – 27 August 2015) was a French director and screenwriter. He began his career as an assistant director in the 1980s, working with directors including Pierre Tchernia and Luc Besson.
He directed episodes of the television series Spiral (2005–2006) and Fais pas ci, fais pas ça (2007–2014), as well as the feature films Heartbreaker (2010), A Perfect Plan (2012) and A Long Way Down (2014). He received two César Award nominations for Heartbreaker.
