The Dujardin Connection

Dujardin is so much more than his famous toothy grin in The Artist

Uggie the dog and Jean Dujardin in the film The Artist.

Chennai, 2011. I was in the plush home cinema of a renowned cinematographer-director, quaffing fine single malt that I had habitually defiled with soda. Along with me, and said renowned personage, was an author. We had just finished watching Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist and the topic of discussion was the amazing actor Jean Dujardin. The film, of course, would go on to win five Oscars, including statuettes for Dujardin and Hazanavicius. For my companions, Dujardin was a revelation. I was familiar with the actor’s body of work, having had the great fortune of watching the Hazanavicius-Dujardin combine in OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009). The films were spoofs of the OSS 117 series that began as novels in 1949 and were inevitably followed by several films, all featuring the suave Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, an agent for the spy organisation, Office of Strategic Services. In case you are wondering about the number and the suave spy coincidence, 007 commenced in 1953, four years after 117 .

Thus far, Dujardin had struck me as an actor with great comic timing, a loose-limbed elastic-faced performer, kind of like the French Jim Carrey — only cooler. For Sight & Sound’s annual list of films of the year, I had chosen Jan Kounen’s 99 Francs (2007), starring Dujardin, in my top five and described it as a “hallucinogenic, vicious satire on the advertising industry with a haunting coda.” The actor was great as a crazed coke-fuelled advertising executive, but again, he seemed to be limited to comedies — like in Lucky Luke (2009), where he put Terence Hill’s 1991 interpretation in the shade by making the iconic comic book cowboy his own, or in the portmanteau film The Players (2012), a comedy about infidelities that includes a segment directed by Hazanavicius.

It was only when I watched Eric Rochant’s uneven spy thriller

Möbius (2013), that I began getting an inkling of Dujardin’s range. Cédric Jimenez’s

The Connection (2014) is his tour de force. The events that unfolded in William Friedkin’s

The French Connection (1971) and John Frankenheimer’s

French Connection II (1975) are looked at from a French perspective in

The Connection , or as it is called in France,

La French . The film masterfully recreates Marseilles from the mid-1970s to the early-1980s, and the editing and cinematography are cutting-edge contemporary. Dujardin plays a police magistrate, a recovering gambling addict, who makes taking down the local drug mafia his new habit. He is a family man whose sanity is threatened by his addiction to his job. Dujardin’s famously toothy grin, used to great effect in

The Artist , is conspicuous in this film by its absence and is instead replaced by a brooding intensity and an emotional rawness that I hadn’t associated with him in the past. Dujardin’s upcoming films include

One plus one , directed by the veteran Claude Lelouch, and Laurent Tirard’s

Up for Love . For the first time since I started following Dujardin’s career, I’ll be watching these films solely because of his presence.