Bacri, like a family resemblance: the man behind the image

Two years ago, Jean-Pierre Bacri left us. Discreetly, as this modest man wished. “Without making crates of it,” he would have said. Without regrets too, because he felt he had “a good life”. Why then did the death of this popular actor and screenwriter, whose rants and grumpy depressive image stuck to the skin, affect the French so much? This is the question that director Stéphane Benhamou tried to answer with this portrait, released after Noémie Lvovsky’s very beautiful film Les Sentiments, which pays tribute to one of the most atypical actors of his generation.

Agnès Jaoui, a decisive encounter

Bacri did not fit into any box. He will have spent his life thwarting the traps to which a certain determinism should have assigned him. That of the “con from Cannes” of his youth, of the banker he would have become if he hadn’t decided to go to Paris to follow a summer flirtation, then of the pied-noir a bit boastful of the films of Alexandre Arcady who revealed it to the cinema or even the eternal stooge. “When I met Agnès (Jaoui), a miracle happened in my life as in my writing,” he admitted. A couple of authors was born on this day. A meeting with Alain Resnais, four Césars and the recognition of the entire profession will follow.

Thanks to the testimonies of those close to him, including Sam Karmann, the faithful friend he met at Cours Simon, but also to some of his interviews, the film strives to go behind the image to paint the portrait of this autodidact who was also funny, warm, passionate about the theater, where he had started and dreamed of playing the Misanthrope, committed in his life as in his work “150%”, and faithful to the moral values ​​of his father, postman. “He told me one day, he says, a sweeper or a President of the Republic, it’s the same. With that, I believe we can build ourselves…”

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