DURING his brief but eye-catching career, the 24-year-old actor Louis
Garrel has been cast as a love interest for young girls, older women and
teenage boys, not to mention his own onscreen mother (“Ma Mère”)
and sister (“The Dreamers”).
“I’m a sexual object,” the tall, pale, dark-eyed Mr. Garrel said with
a smile, taking a drag on his fifth Marlboro at a cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
“It’s true that for me there’s something very sexual about the cinema.
Not in the sense of the act, but of creating desire.”
In his new film, “Love Songs,” directed by Christophe Honoré,
Mr. Garrel plays Ismaël, caught in a ménage à trois
with his girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier) and colleague (Clotilde Hesme) as
well as being the obsession of an ardent male student (Grégoire
Leprince-Ringuet). His third film with Mr. Honoré, “Love Songs”
is a modern musical about love and loss in which the characters break into
song to express their emotions. Nominated for a Palme d’Or at last year’s
Cannes Film Festival, it opens Friday in New York.
Mr. Garrel is the youngest member of an esteemed French cinema clan
that includes his grandfather, the actor Maurice Garrel, and his father,
the director Philippe Garrel (who cast him as a 5-year-old in the 1989
film “Emergency Kisses”). His mother is the actress Brigitte Sy, and the
actor Jean-Pierre Léaud is his godfather.
Despite his brief foray into child acting, Mr. Garrel said he didn’t
decide to become an actor until he was 15, inspired by François
Truffaut’s landmark films about the adolescent Antoine Doinel, played by
Mr. Léaud. “I wanted to have a life that resembled his,” he said
of Doinel. “Léaud didn’t obey any laws of acting. He sends signs
that are recognizable but that we’ve never seen. And that’s what I think
it means to be an actor.”
His first film role followed in Rodolphe Marconi’s “Ceci est mon corps”
(“This Is My Body,” 2001) and he studied drama in Paris. But his recent
work with Mr. Honoré has earned him a reputation as something of
a 21st-century Doinel.
“A lot of directors have a moment when they believe in an actor and
that actor could be the character in all of their films,” said Mr. Honoré,
who first cast him as the son of an incestuous mother (Isabelle Huppert)
in his 2004 film “Ma Mère.” “It was a dark role,” Mr. Honoré
said. “Off-camera he was lighter and more joyful, but with a certain melancholy,
and I wanted to offer him something that would better correspond to his
personality.”
A gentler turn in “Dans Paris” followed in 2006, with “Love Songs” last
year. “He has a very lyrical way of playing a role, like a character in
a novel,” Mr. Honoré said, referring not just to his appealing singing
style, demonstrated in “Love Songs.” “He seems to have escaped somehow
from the 1960s but is totally of his time.”
Mr. Honoré is now editing their fourth collaboration, “La Belle
Personne.” “Even in the editing room, I’m surprised by what he does,” Mr.
Honoré said. “I have the impression that my films resemble me more
and more because of Louis.”
Onscreen, Mr. Garrel bites his nails and smokes, charms and broods.
On a gray afternoon in a Left Bank cafe, he seemed to have stepped straight
off the screen.
“It’s true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character,”
Mr. Garrel said. “And I feel it’s a limit. I’m always really impressed
by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp. Then
again, an actor who gives a big performance, it’s always a little embarrassing,
because he’s there saying, ‘Look at my performance.’ And that bothers me
a lot.”
Playing Ismaël, Mr. Garrel said, he had in mind Yves Montand, as
a man who befriends his rival for the same woman’s heart, in Claude Sautet’s
1972 film, “César et Rosalie.” “I’m crazy about Yves Montand,” he
said. “You want to live like he does in the film, to be his friend. He
has a certain rhythm — he’s always trying to cheer people up, to carry
them along — and I thought Ismaël should be like that.”
While shooting “Love Songs,” Mr. Garrel said, he did his best to forge
real relationships with fellow cast members. “That’s how mystery is created,”
he said. “I want the camera to be a bit like a voyeur. I like to say to
myself that the film is a residue of a larger life.” Ms. Sagnier, his “Love
Songs” co-star, said: “Louis really likes to share his energy. That’s very
rare for an actor. The only bad part is that he also shares his anguish.”
Mr. Honoré agreed that Mr. Garrel is “very inventive and spontaneous
on set.”
“But he’s also very much an intellectual who wants to master everything.”
he added. “It’s hard for him that he’s not the one choosing the takes.
He often calls me up late at night full of anguish, but after the fact.”
Said Mr. Garrel: “I hope each day to have done 10 seconds of good work
that they can use in the film. And I’m always afraid I didn’t get those
10 seconds.”
He finds it painful to wait while a film is finished without him. But
he’s not one of those actors who refuses to see the final product. “ ‘Love
Songs’ is a very tender film,” he said. “I wasn’t watching myself and my
faults. And that’s my goal. I want to take pleasure in watching the film.”
Mr. Garrel won the French César for most promising male newcomer
in 2006 for his role in “Regular Lovers,” his father’s film set during
the May 1968 student protests in Paris, and has a taste for the ever more
rarefied French cinéma d’auteur. It was the second time he’d participated
in a movie about May 1968, after Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Dreamers,” his
best-known film.
His striking looks are also the stuff of fashion shoots and fan sites,
and he routinely turns down work in more commercial films. “I like to be
able to understand the feeling of the director,” he said, “that a film
corresponds to something in his life. Otherwise, it doesn’t interest me
much.”
Mr. Garrel has recently completed a second film with his father, “La
Frontière de l’Aube,” and is working on his own short film about
a young man who feels that time is passing too quickly.
“I don’t know how long I’ll live,” he said when asked what his own future
may hold. “But I’d like to make communist films with Ken Loach, libertine
films with Almodóvar, esoteric films with Kaurismaki. That’s not
bad for a start.”
KRISTIN HOHENADEL