by Eric Blume
A young Magimel in Benoît Jacquot's A SINGLE GIRL (1995).
This weekend, we’re celebrating one of French cinema’s greatest actors, Benoît Magimel, who turns 50 today.
Magimel exploded upon the industry in the mid 1990s, making a string of pictures right after his 21st birthday that involved collaborations with several big names. Benoît Jacquot used his broad, handsome face and hooded eyes to great effect in 1995’s A Single Girl opposite Virginie Ledoyen. The two actors have a truthful, easy spark between them that’s quintessential French post-teen. The next year, he was featured in the excellent Thieves, by then-huge director André Téchiné, alongside two of the country’s finest, Daniel Auteuil and Catherine Deneuve...
The next year saw him in director Olivier Dahan’s (pre-La Vie en Rose) film Deja Mort. While the movie is no masterpiece, Magimel goes toe-to-toe here against Romain Duris. They were at the time (and remain) two of France’s most electrifying actors, each having a combination of feral danger and intellectual power that the camera adores. In 1999, Magimel was cast opposite his then-love, Juliette Binoche, in a historical drama by Diane Kurys, Children of the Century. The film is a tad dry, but the duo find a fire under all their ruffles, and they had a child together IRL during this period, despite never marrying.
THE PIANO TEACHER (2001) Michael Haneke
It all came together for Magimel, when he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his role opposite Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film, The Piano Teacher. This movie to me is one of the most masterful, uncorked films of this century so far, a piece so unnerving I still have trouble processing it after several viewings. Huppert’s work in the film is an all-timer piece of acting, and she could easily have eaten alive the young actor playing opposite her. But Magimel brings blunt force to his role (and not to mention, to her). He enters the dance with Huppert with brutality and pity, and with passion and disgust. The film is on one level about a woman so overintellectualized and disconnected from actual living, who finally, shockingly meets her match. Magimel is alternately metallic and seductive here, willingly and unwillingly puppet and master in equal measure. He’s also shockingly beautiful in this film, a blond ice prince with dark, venomous blood in his veins. It’s a crushing performance of steel and terror, and perhaps to date his finest hour.
He spent the next two decades in films by Claude Chabrol, Guillaume Canet, Jalil Lespert, and a host of otherh talented folks. Magimel has been nominated for five César Awards, winning three, Best Supporting Actor in 2015 for an interesting movie called Standing Tall; and then back-to-back Best Actor wins for 2021’s Peaceful and 2022’s Pacification. He’s still on top of the world.
PACIFICTION (2022) Albert Serra
This past season we had the joy of seeing him reunited with his former paramour Juliette Binoche in director Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things. This film was far and away one of the best last year, and it’s shocking that this movie was excluded from the shower of awards it should have received from Oscar and Cesar. Aside from its gorgeously balletic moving camera and syrupy aesthetic, the film had the benefit of one of the greatest assets a filmmaker could have: Juliette Binoche’s expressive face. Magimel’s character spends most of the time as besotted with that face as Hung’s camera does, and it’s marvelous to see him take a back seat to his leading lady. But he does so with a slowly growing power, as he allows his character to come fully into view. Magimel and Binoche seem to effortlessly get to the tiny, exquisite bullseye of this film: a delicate transcendence of sensuality where two souls collide in a world beyond words.
Let’s cheers to the half-century mark of the brilliant actor Benoît Magimel. What is your favorite performance from him?