Richard Bohringer

In Diva (1981), Richard Bohringer’s Gorodish has the calm of someone who sees no reason to hurry merely because he is in a thriller. Jean-Jacques Beineix gives romance and pursuit room to coexist, and this bohemian mentor fits the film’s more playful side. We warmed to him because his philosophical composure lets us relax inside a story busy keeping its plot moving. The broken voice helps: it gives the calm a roughness that keeps it from sounding prim. We are happy to stay with him even when the thriller has other business to attend to.

Diva was his breakthrough, and the leading and supporting parts that followed through the 1980s and 1990s made good use of his capacity to seem forbidding. The prison guard Lorca in L’Addition (1984) is ruthless; Pelo in Le Grand Chemin (1987) is gruff but affectionate, a father figure whose tenderness matters. Those parts suggest why casting him simply as a tough man would miss something: the rough manner need not tell us what he will do. Luc Besson used him as Le Fleuriste in Subway (1985), and Greenaway as the chef Richard Boarst in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Later, his film appearances became less frequent as he concentrated on television, writing, music and one-man shows.

Beineix is a good director to encounter him through, because Diva has pleasures beyond its eccentric characters. Philippe Rousselot’s camerawork and Vladimir Cosma’s music deserve much of the credit for its appeal, and Bohringer is good company alongside them. The elaborate plot sometimes seems to exist chiefly to keep the pictures coming, and Gorodish’s composure cannot make every complication necessary. We would not ask him to be busier simply because the story is. Start there, then try the more affectionate gruffness of Le Grand Chemin.