Pierre Etaix obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/14/pierre-etaix-obituary

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Although physical comedy in cinema lessened with the coming of sound, the tradition of slapstick was kept alive, principally by the American actor Jerry Lewis and the Frenchmen Jacques Tati and Pierre Etaix. Etaix, who has died aged 87, was directly inspired by his compatriot Max Linder, the first internationally celebrated film comic, and Buster Keaton. In fact, on the principle that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Etaix was not beyond pinching sight gags from his idols. He managed to create a distinct and personal oeuvre as director-actor, though with regrettably few films – only five features, including one documentary, and four shorts. One of the short films was awarded an Oscar.

This relatively sparse filmography as director was due to various reasons, one being Etaix’s painstaking methods and the necessity of precise comic timing. (The even more meticulous Tati also made only five features.) However, the main obstacles to him in building on his reputation were complex contractual problems and years of bitter legal wrangling with distribution companies. As a result, the films were not shown for some decades – either in cinemas, on television or on DVD. At last, in 2010, after more than 50,000 people – including Woody Allen, David Lynch, Charlotte Rampling and Jean-Luc Godard – had signed a petition demanding an end to an “unacceptable” situation that deprives artists of their rights, the battle was won to get the hitherto “invisible” films restored and rereleased. Their second coming was a confirmation for those who had earlier acclaimed Etaix as a comic genius, and was a revelation to a younger generation.

Etaix was born in Roanne on the river Loire in central France. He decided very early in his life to become a clown. Knowing how many skills were needed to fulfil his ambition, he studied the violin and piano, dancing and gymnastics, while teaching himself to play the xylophone, accordion, saxophone, mandolin, trumpet and concertina, as well as learning to become a magician. He also studied drawing and glass design for good measure. After joining an amateur theatre group in Roanne, Etaix moved to Paris in 1953, working as an illustrator, cartoonist and cabaret performer.

After being bowled over by Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Etaix managed to get taken on by his hero’s company, Spectra Films, which had started the lengthy preproduction of Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958). During the almost four years it took to make the film, Etaix acted as gag writer, assistant director, storyboardist, gofer and uncredited player. (He is seen briefly wheeling a bicycle and, with an imitation of clucking, startling a woman who is de-feathering a chicken.)

After Mon Oncle, Etaix performed comedy routines at Bobino, the famed Parisian music hall, and at the cabaret Les Trois Baudets in Pigalle. He also appeared in two films, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) and Tire-au-flanc (The Army Game, 1961), an army comedy co-directed by François Truffaut. In the Bresson, Etaix was one of the accomplices of the title character. “I had known Bresson, who came to see Tati from time to time during the production of Mon Oncle,” Etaix explained. “He knew that I was somewhat of a magician so I could give that impression of a pickpocket because I had learned the art of prestidigitation.”

In 1960, Etaix met the writer Jean-Claude Carrière, and they became firm friends. They formed an unlikely pair – Carrière the intellectual and Etaix the instinctual performer – but they shared a love for the comedy kings of Hollywood in the 20s. They first collaborated on “novelisations” of Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle, written by Carrière and illustrated by Etaix, then co-scripted and co-directed two shorts: Rupture (1961) and Happy Anniversary (1962). The latter, which won the Oscar for best short subject, had Etaix as a happily married man meeting a series of obstacles – mainly to do with traffic - as he desperately tries to get home in time for a celebratory dinner with his wife. Etaix, while paying homage to silent film comedy, paradoxically used sound effects as an important element in his work.

His first feature, Le Soupirant (The Suitor, 1963), was a huge success at home and abroad, and established Etaix as “the French Buster Keaton”. This was no glib journalistic label because, to some degree, Etaix courted it. For instance, some of the plot – a shy and studious young man has to get married in a hurry – echoes that of Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), and a scene where Etaix attempts to carry a drunk young woman up to her apartment is almost a carbon copy of a similar one in Keaton’s Spite Marriage (1929), as is the obsession of the man for a stage star in the same film.

This was followed by Yoyo (1965), Etaix’s masterpiece, in which he plays a spoilt millionaire who loses everything in the Wall Street crash, then finds his former sweetheart, a circus horse rider, and their son Yoyo, a budding clown. This enchanting nostalgic comedy romance, paying tribute to the tone and technique of silent cinema, has no dialogue for the first 30 minutes except for creative sound effects such as the creaking of the vast chateau doors. As both the adult Yoyo and the millionaire, Etaix brought the same control and sense of style to his performance as to his direction.

While filming Boeing Boeing (1965) in Paris, Lewis saw and loved Yoyo, so a meeting was arranged at the Ritz hotel between the two comedians. Etaix knew no English, Lewis knew no French, but according to Robert Benayoun, the French film critic, who was present: “The two comics began the richest, most hilarious, most moving of dialogues without uttering a word. Using minimal sounds, a word here or there, the action was all perfectly ‘readable’.”

Lewis proclaimed: “Twice in my life, I understood what genius meant: the first time when I looked up the definition in a dictionary, and the second time when I met Pierre Etaix.” A few years later, Lewis cast Etaix in his as yet unseen and apparently unwatchable The Day the Clown Cried.

After the success of Yoyo, Etaix’s next film, Tant Qu’on a la Santé (As Long As You’re Healthy, 1966), looked at the absurdity of modern life. In a series of comic set pieces, Etaix played a serious-minded young man harassed wherever he goes – in the city crowds and traffic, at the doctor’s surgery, on a camping site and even on a desert island.

Etaix’s first film in colour, Le Grand Amour (The Great Love, 1969), juggled inventively with the well-worn theme of a middle-aged married man falling for a much younger woman. Among the many sight gags were subjective shots of how each member of the triangle sees the others. The wife was played by Annie Fratellini, one of the few female circus clowns in France, whom Etaix married in 1969. Fratellini and her husband founded the country’s first circus school in 1974. (Both of them were featured in Federico Fellini’s semi-documentary The Clowns, 1970.)

Etaix’s last feature, the documentary Pays de Cocagne (Land of Milk and Honey, 1971), was a penetrating, rather cruel and satirical look at the French on holiday and their reactions to topical questions put to them by a hidden inquisitor (Etaix). The film, which was edited down from six hours of material to 80 minutes, was both a commercial and a critical failure, and Etaix was seldom seen on the big or small screen thereafter. In fact, he “vanished” for some years when he and Fratellini joined the touring Pinder Circus as clowns.

Among his reappearances were roles as a detective in Nagisa Oshima’s Max Mon Amour (1986) and as a friend of Henry Miller in Philip Kaufman’s Henry and June (1990). In addition, it seemed natural that he should appear in Jardins en Automne (Gardens in Autumn, 2006), Chantrapas (2010) and Winter Song (2015), directed by the Tati and Etaix admirer Otar Iosseliani, the exiled Georgian in Paris, and he had a role in Aki Kaurismäki’s splendid Le Havre (2011). Etaix also wrote a play, L’Age de Monsieur est Avancé (The Gentleman is Getting On), which was successfully staged in the autumn of 1985 at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées theatre, Paris, and which Etaix filmed for television two years later.

However, his earlier films had been forgotten for over three decades, until they were finally rereleased and made available on DVD in 2010. In the same year, he toured France with a show inspired by music hall, Miousik Papillon.

Fratellini died of cancer in 1997. Etaix is survived by their son, Marc, and by his second wife, Odile (nee Crépin), a former jazz singer.

• Pierre Etaix, actor, director and writer, born 23 November 1928; died 14 October 2016