Background

Lelouch, Claude was born on October 30, 1937 in Paris. Son of Simon Lelouch and Charlotte Abeilard.

Career

His two early features— Un Homme et une Femme and Vivre pour Vivre— were extended commercials for the hope that pain is absorbed bv prettiness. His characters are emotional stewpots always on the go in some headv, ultra-modern kitchen. They are beautiful people in glamorous jobs, able to travel at will. Their petty' affairs and the entirely mechanical obstacles that are inserted and then withdrawn from their world are passed off as being typical of the emotional and intellectual demands of life.

But the reality is, as always, spelled out in the director’s stvle. Lelouch works like a still photographer for a glossy- magazine. His effects are decorative, trite, and invariably the trick of a lens rather than an observed interaction of people. Lelouch persistently films in telephoto: this leads to soulful close-ups of people cut off from their environment. The background is unnaturally flat, foreground detail is out of focus. There is an accu-mulating, claustrophobic sterility in his films because the characters have no three-dimensional existence. They live only in the minds maudlin telephoto, forever gazing sadly at their self-pity.

Just as fashion photographs try to make us want clothes, Lelouch s telephoto intimacy is intended to play on our most vicarious emotional responses. His world has already been taken over by the forces of devitalization: the sickly theme songs swan on; nothing detracts from the glamour of rational packaging; no piece of human behavior overthrows romantic cliche. And all the while, there is the ghostly intimation of greater significance so that, in Vivre pour Vivre, Yves Montands private life is supposedly paralleled by his involvement as a reporter in the world’s troublespots. Lelouch announces his concern for suffering with the offensive tact of a politician.

Lelouch works on, though he has not found the right mix of romance and advertising stvle to repeat the success of A Man and a Woman. His version of Les Miserables starred fean-Paul Belmondo as Valjean and helped to revive that actor’s career. And Now Ladies and Gentleman promises to be something rather more adventurous, with Jeremy Irons at its center.

Works

More photos

• Other Work

  • The Crook
  • Roman de Gare
  • A Man & A Woman
  • And Now, Ladies & Gentlemen

Personality

Conceivably, more people were introduced to French cinema in the sixties and seventies by Lelouch than hy any other director. Un Homme et une Femme was a lavishly admired movie, and it is never a pleasant task to deflate enjovment. But Lelouch is a sapping director, slick, meretricious, yet high-minded.

French cinema and innocent audiences alike need to he defended against him. His work is as clammy, strident, and wearying as color Sunday supplements and, like them, it manages to he profitable by smothering the prickly realities of people and by insinuating the style of advertising into fiction.

Connections

Married Christine Cochet, 1968 (divorced). 3 children; married Marie-Sophie Pochat. 3 children.

Father:

Simon Lelouch

Mother:

Charlotte Abeilard

Spouse:

Christine Cochet

Spouse:

Marie-Sophie Pochat