who he was for Soviet viewers

December 11 is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Jean Marais, one of the greatest cinema legends, whose role was precisely that of the heroes of legends, myths and historical anecdotes. Alexey Vasiliev talks about who the French actor was for Soviet viewers and what can be learned from his memoirs.

The Soviet thaw broke out when a blond man with wide-set huge eyes and a spread of eyebrows comparable to the wingspan of an eagle, in the costume of a Spanish nobleman, on the high balcony of the cathedral, grabbed a rope, flew on it over the heads of the parishioners, jumped from it onto the chandelier, grabbing a long the beam with his palms and swinging repeatedly, he broke through a stained-glass window with his feet, from there he fell onto a canvas helpfully stretched by the commoners at the porch and, springing from it, jumped onto a saddled horse without touching the stirrups. Jumping onto a horse without touching the stirrups is the most difficult thing, only the most highly professional riders are capable of this, Jean Marais said. Because, of course, that blond was him.

Stalin died at the beginning of the calendar spring of 1953 – then the climate was in a harsh phase, they had not heard of global warming, and at that time snow was blowing in full force in central Russia. Mare’s somersaults, which he performed fully armed with a victorious smile in the film “Dangerous Similarity” (1948), were seen by the Soviet people when the grass was completely green—the film’s release in the USSR began on May 28. French and Italian films are already about to pour onto the screen in a regular stream, gradually dragging along Indian, Japanese, German, English ones, until by the very end of the decade, with the advent of Hollywood, Soviet viewers will feel like part of the world film process. But Jean Marais opened the parade. The recklessness of the uninhibited plasticity of his Don Cesar de Bazan, the daring gaiety of the smile with which he undressed the Duke of Alba, became an ideal rhyme with the feelings of the people, throwing off the shackles of fear, experiencing the primary joy of motor skills – just rushing around without looking back, not knowing any barriers.

In 1953, the Soviet inexperienced viewer seemed to believe that the image on the screen was real, that the actor was the character being portrayed with all his tricks and tricks. This is also why his love for Mara turned out to be so persistent that when 10 years later he came to sit on the jury of the Moscow Film Festival – the same epoch-making one where the main prize was given to Fellini’s “8 1/2” – he confirmed in numerous interviews that he himself performs all your tricks. Moreover, without rehearsals – both so as not to injure himself, not to fail before the deadline, and because the whirring of the camera disciplines him, helps him not to fall down until the entire episode is filmed.

Another 20 years later, in 1982—in different, erudite and even cynical times—when my mom and dad were preparing me for my first meeting with Mare and explained to me in both ears who he was, I heard exactly the same thing : “Jean Marais – he jumps from the tower window straight into the saddle of a horse and immediately gallops away!” – people continued to believe in it. It is curious that that meeting was the film “Parisian Secrets” (1962), with which Soviet television covered the five-day mourning for Brezhnev. (The same thing – with the film “Captain”, 1960 – was repeated in February 1984, after Andropov’s funeral.) And the strangeness of the behavior of my already sophisticated parents was not that they believed in Mare’s tricks – the tricks turned out to be true. It’s strange that they believed that this was the only activity of the cheerful blond.

However, this may seem strange only to those who were unlucky enough to be an eyewitness to Mare’s era, but I still managed to catch her tail, her echo. In the USSR, both in cinema and on television, a huge number of films with his participation were shown, and therefore Soviet viewers turned out to be the best specialists in his work. We all knew that his most infectious and organic roles were those where the hero was cheerful, embarked on some prank, or started another daring act. But in scenes of love explanations, the actor became wooden, and if it was necessary to shed a tear, it would not go into any way. And if he always rolled up his sleeves and got into tricks and fights himself, he couldn’t handle crying without outside help. For example, in the film “Eternal Return” (1943), where the hero, modern Tristan, according to legend, sobs a lot and profusely, we were never shown his first tear, those facial spasms that precede sobs: Mare turned to the camera, already generously decorated with glycerin, like the saints from the pop art icons of Pierre and Gilles. And it would be good if he froze like that – with a wet and even more irresistible face in close-up. No, he invariably began to raise his eyebrows painfully and draw them down to the bridge of his nose, as was customary in bad examples of silent films – and did not leave the viewer a single chance to refrain from laughing.

But when, jumping out of the convertible with laughter, he presses a huge dog to his hip and, scratching its scruff, runs up the stairs – we have no chance not to believe in the lightness and ease of this gesture: although try running up the stairs and laughing while holding under the weight of a meter-long dog! When Tristan has a party with his friend and looks into his eyes with delight, then – even though these plans last for an impermissibly long time, and any other actor would not be able to remain convincing – Mare infects the screen with such excitement of friendship that you believe that these the two have truly been inseparable since school. But when, with the solemnity of a provincial vaudeville old man, he departs for another world, despairing of waiting for the return of his Isolde, he is overcome by such melancholy, such Spanish shame for truly antediluvian performing falsehood that would make Rudolf Valentino himself blush.

Mare later shared the wisdom that life taught him, its most important revelations, in numerous memoirs. They confirm: happiness, friendship, as well as courage, he played from his own experience; I didn’t know love – and borrowed its manifestations from former idols, whose age had long passed. And misfortune was simply disgusting to him. In fact, all these things turned out to be tightly interconnected in the pattern of fate that determined the pattern of his roles. “My mother was not happy. Seeing her like this and suffering from it, I even more strongly desired that happiness that my father had so well defined. Being happy soon became my only aspiration. However, despite my youth, I soon realized that it is impossible to achieve happiness if you experience negative feelings such as jealousy, fear, pride and envy. The first disadvantage I managed to overcome was fear. Having a reputation as a leader in college, I suffered from my cowardice, was ashamed of it, although only my mother and myself knew about my shortcoming. To overcome fear, I forced myself to do everything that could cause it.” And one more thing: “If at a certain age it is already difficult to find love, then friendship accompanies you throughout your life.”

Mara was lucky to have friends. The main one, of course, was the writer and director Jean Cocteau, whom the actor met as a 23-year-old extra and remained almost inseparable for a quarter of a century, until Cocteau’s death. If you know the happiness of friendship, if you stay – or have remained – in it long enough to become an adult and begin to articulate consciously the effects that friendship has on you, you will be amazed at how accurately your own thoughts will be repeated in the words with which Marais covered his book “The Incomprehensible Jean Cocteau” (1993). “I repeated hundreds of times that Cocteau’s only drawback was that he endowed me with virtues that I did not recognize in myself. Whereas in him I saw virtues so obvious that they helped me become better than I was. My father was right: I was born for friendship and to live by it.” “Not only was I infinitely happy that he (Cocteau) lived with me, but even my house took on meaning thanks to his presence. With his move, the familiar rooms looked different. They became habitable – in the full sense of the word.”

Throughout the 1940s, the two had fun in the movies, creating spectacular, cutting-edge looks for Mare, much like a mannequin in a shop window. During the occupation of France, they flirted with the Teutonic beginning – in “The Eternal Return” they dyed Mare’s hair piercing white, forced her to lose weight so that her cheekbones stuck out, and dressed her in riding breeches; in “The Double-Headed Eagle” (1947) she cut her hair short, like a soldier, stuffing his powerful body in the stupid Tyrolean outfit – shorts, leggings, shirt with rolled up sleeves. In the post-war “Parents Terrible” (1948), they decided to check whether the 35-year-old Mara would be able to reproduce himself at the time of their meeting – in all the mercurial unpredictability and inconsistency of the emotional outbursts of a big man who had not yet recovered from his boyish whims. In “Orpheus” (1950), when the bistros of the Left Bank were crowded with existentialists and future beatniks, always with a cigarette, always in character, they came up with an inflated, nervous type, tanned, dressed up and combed with all the possible elegance of the then casual style. All these films were experiments in transplanting myths, ancient heroes into today’s days, to test how they would feel in modern clothes. By resurrecting legends on the screen, they themselves created a legend that will be divided into many unforgettable images of French cinema.

At the height of the occupation, Marais punched collaborator and critic Alain Lobro in the face because “he dared to use unacceptable expressions about Jean Cocteau that looked like denunciation.” This practically cost the actor his career at the Comédie Française theater, where he had just been hired, and three years later almost destroyed his own production of Andromache. This episode became part of one of François Truffaut’s best films, “The Last Metro” (1980), where the role of the rising theatrical idol was played by Gérard Depardieu.

In “The Girls of Rochefort” (1967) by Jacques Demy – perhaps the best musical in history – Catherine Deneuve sees her own portrait in her lover’s gallery and then spends the entire film looking for the sailor who so accurately portrayed her, having never seen her, and called the painting “The Girl” dreams.” Demy borrowed the plot of this magical film from Marais: it was he, 19 years old, who first heard the name Cocteau when, while visiting a friend, he saw on the wall a reproduction of a portrait of a young man in whom he recognized himself. Marais became obsessed with Cocteau, bought his books and admired this man more and more until, like Deneuve in Rochefort, he finally met him – four years later. Demy would soon repay Marais for telling him the story by pairing him with Deneuve in Donkey Skin (1970).

When Cocteau died in 1963, Marais said at his coffin: “Jean, I’m not crying. I am going to sleep. I will fall asleep looking at you and die, because from now on I will pretend that I am alive.” And he went to “pretend” in the immortal and funniest comedies in the world about Fantômas (1964–1967), where he managed, in time with such a virtuoso of eccentricities as Louis de Funes, to play machine-gun nonsense of dialogues like ““Silence, silence, silence!” – “But – listen, listen…”.” Only this form of grief, such pretense and such a dream befits a good person, even if he has lost a friend; “because,” as Jean Marais wrote, “he who has been given happiness must illuminate others with it.”

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