A lovable klutz in On connait la chanson and a dapper Alan Ayckbourn fan in real life, Andre Dussollier tells Nick Roddick about his way of playing comedy
Everybody tells you there will be days like these, but it doesn't help: they still nip up when you're not looking and bite you in the bum.The weather doesn't help a lot. The clothes most of us brought for being out on the street in Berlin in February are having to cope with something that is more like London in June. I imagine a heat-sensitive camera in the Zoo-Palast at the start of a screening would look a lot like a thermal weather map of the Sahara.
So I turn up perspiring at the Kempinski, having also dressed too rapidly and not, it has to be said, in the best possible taste.
A few minutes later, I find myself in the impeccable presence of Andre Dussollier.
Dussollier, whom some of us remember as the most playboy-like of the trio in Trois hommes et un couffin (the model, of course, for Three Men and a Baby), plays the most consistently likeable character in Alain Resnais' On connait la chanson - a duffel-coated klutz with a tote bag and the social skills of someone eager to tell you about his butterfly collection.
If Dussollier's character, Simon, was English, he would probably be a trainspotter. As it is, he writes radio plays and knows everything there is to know about Les Buttes Chaumont.
In real life, however - and, for that matter, in most of the other roles he has played - Dussollier is casually elegant, perfectly coiffed and a stark contrast to your dedicated but distinctly rumpled representative who becomes aware, during the conversation, that something of this morning's breakfast has remained on his T-shirt.
"Simon is a bit different from my normal roles," concedes Dussollier amiably, with that 100% focus that truly professional thespians bring to the interview process. "I normally play characters who are rather more sure of themselves, who dominate the situation. But here, Simon is the kind of character who has one foot in reality, the other in the land of dreams."
"Is he modelled on anyone in particular?" I ask, shifting so that the breakfast stain moves out of sight. "Do you know people like that?"
"I've met a few in my time," he smiles.
Doing his third film with Alain Resnais - after La vie est un roman and Melo (the first film where it became totally clear that Resnais, the intellectual, puzzle-filmmaker of yore, was off on a whole new hedonistic tack) - Dussollier has had, like all the other actors, to get used to miming to playback, since popular songs both hold the movie together and, occasionally, push it off in a different direction.
On connait la chanson is an explicit homage to Dennis Potter, but Dussollier is mildly surprised when I describe the way in which, in Potter's TV plays, the action changes gear when a musical number comes up. I don't like to add that, while Resnais' film deals with, at best, limited emotional crises, Potter's are anthologies of angst. And, as a result, the effect is quite different.
"With us, the songs follow straight on from the dialogue," says Dussollier, "and that was what was most difficult - bringing off the marriage between the character and the song. You also had to be able to deal with the playback, which was really loud, because we had to sing - we couldn't not sing. It had to be loud, so that you couldn't hear us singing, because only Lambert Wilson is really a singer.
"The way it works best for me is when you are the character but, at the same time, you also get a little bit into the mood of the song. Let me give you an example: right at the end, my character sings a Johnny Halliday song. Now Johnny Halliday - OK, he's 50 now, but he's still a rocker, and his songs are aggressive and violent. My character is a real moaning minnie, quite different from in the song. I think it's great if, from time to time, some of the intensity of Hallyday comes through into the character of Simon. You could almost say that, for the character, the song is a way of expressing things Simon couldn't otherwise express."
The trick of the film, of course, is that the songs may represent the emotions of the characters, but otherwise have no link with them: female characters mouth gruffly male songs, male ones warble little-girl lyrics. The exception is Jane Birkin, who has a cameo role and gets to sing a few lines of her own song, 'Quoi'. But, since Jane Birkin is, of course, the most beautiful woman in the galaxy, that's OK by me.
Working with Resnais is a rewarding process, says Dussollier, because he approaches comedy in a different way to most of his compatriots. "He knows all the English playwrights," says the actor, "and Ayckbourn is a writer I like a lot." The English playwright, of course, provided the origin for Resnais' last film, Smoking/No Smoking, and movie buffs may like to spot the Ayckbourn homage in Sabine Azema's kitchen. "But they always get Ayckbourn wrong in France. They play him much too heavily: there's a certain French way of playing comedy which involves a very theatrical delivery and, in Ayckbourn, the comedy doesn't come out of the delivery, it comes out of the situations.
"When Resnais did Smoking/No Smoking - I don't know, maybe it's different for you, because you're English. But, for us, there's a feeling of an intelligent human being doing comedy: no heavy effects, just an element of truth. I like that truthful way of playing comedy."
The director himself, Dussollier adds sadly, had been intending to come to Berlin, but was prevented by illness. "He's been having tests in hospital, so that's why he couldn't come," he explains. "He's 75 now, but he's still very healthy. He had a virus last year, and he's really fed up, because his body is playing up."
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