The French film star is lying on his stomach, occasionally kicking up his bare legs, ruffling his curls and running the nail of his thumb over his moustache. I think the person he sees on the laptop screen in front of him is me, but I am pretty certain he is flirting with his own reflection. The attraction between the Paris-born 43-year-old and the camera tends to be reciprocal.
Long of limb, tousled of hair and chiselled of nose, Garrel has spent a career on screen as French cinema’s favourite Adonis – the man film-makers turn to when they need an erotic wrecking ball to smash up bourgeois twosomes and turn them into quivering menages a trois. His breakout role in 2003 was as a priapic student revolutionary who inserts himself in the sexual bond between his twin sister (Eva Green) and a visiting American student (Michael Pitt) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Since then, he’s been reliably effective as smouldering sexpots whose intense stare cuts across dancefloors – bewitching two friends in Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s 2010 film Heartbeats, enticing Angelina Jolie into a fling in high-fashion drama Couture, or hawkishly pouncing on the poor Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic Saint Laurent, where he played Karl Lagerfeld’s dandy companion Jacques de Bascher.
He hails from a dynasty of actor-film-makers that includes his mother Brigitte Sy, father (and ex-lover of Velvet Underground singer Nico) Philippe Garrel and grandfather Maurice Garrel, on whose advice he applied to and graduated from Paris’s prestigious Conservatoire drama school. On screen, he has not just impersonated dreamboats but also Alfred Dreyfus, King Louis XIII, Robespierre and Jean-Luc Godard. And in his latest film, Garrel does something that only good actors can do: to play magnificently against type.
In the comedy Just an Illusion, he is Yves, a former executive at a kitchen appliance firm who has recently lost his job but can’t bring himself to tell his family. Befitting the film’s 80s suburban Paris setting, Garrel’s hair here is bouffy rather than tousled, the moustache more Ron Burgundy than The Leopard-era Alain Delon. He wears a billowing beige trenchcoat that makes him look as befuddled as Monsieur Hulot, the comical everyman in the films of Jacques Tati.
In one scene, Yves is flicking through a magazine on the living room sofa while their apartment block’s caretaker Monsieur Berger (Pierre Lottin) shows Yves’ wife Sandrine (Camille Cottin, of Call My Agent fame) how to use her new desktop computer. As the mulleted Berger places his tattooed paw over Sandrine’s hand to guide the cursor, she giggles in delight. Yves, startled by echoes of the frisson that has long vanished from his marriage, rushes to put out the sparks and shows Berger the door.
If reducing France’s go-to libertine to an anxiety-ridden gooseberry isn’t a feat of acting, what is? When I’m playing a character like this one, I can do less, you know, modelling. I don’t care if I look good, and most of the time you are better on screen when you don’t care.” A hit upon its French release this spring, Just an Illusion is directed by film-making duo Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, who have been a major guarantee of box office success since Untouchable, about the relationship between a wealthy quadriplegic and his home helper.
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