Jacques Doillon

Biography: life and films

With his interest in childhood, adolescence and the complexities of romance, Jacques Doillon is the French film director who most resembles François Tuffaut. Like Truffaut, Doillon comes from a humble background and became a filmmaker through a love of cinema that he nurtured in his youth. He is the epitome of the film auteur, tackling subjects which are close to his heart and employing a consistent style throughout his work, one that reflects the austerity seen in the films of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer, the two directors to have had most influence on him. Doillon's cinema is as charming as it is brutal, its uncompromising realism often softened by a wry humour and visual poetry. It also shows an acute understanding for the way in which young people think and cope with the world around them. Doillon seems to see the world not as a well-adjusted adult, but through the eyes of a totally mixed up teenager.

Jacques Doillon was born on 15th March 1944, in Paris, France. After leaving school he abandoned a career in insurance and found a work placement with a film company. Having worked as an assistant editor on a few films - including Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1967) and François Reichenbach's Mexico-Mexico (1968) - he graduated to the position of editor, on such films as Pierre Roustang's Paris top secret (1969) and Eddy Matalon's Trop petit mon ami (1970). By the early 1970s, Doillon had started to make his own short films, mostly documentaries. These include On ne se dit pas tout entre époux (1971), adapted from a comic book by the famous French cartoonist Gébé. Doillon then worked with Gébé on his first full-length film, L'An 01 (1973), a collation of anarchic sketches that evokes the spirit of the May '68 popular uprisings in France.

Jacques Doillon's filmmaking career began properly with his first solo feature, Les Doigts dans la tête (1974). With its echoes of May '68, the film is a powerful portrayal of adolescent alienation and rebellion and was acclaimed by many critics, in particular François Truffaut. It was Truffaut who suggested that Doillon should direct Un sac de billes, after Maurice Pialat declined producer Claude Berri's invitation to make the film. An adaptation of Joseph Joffo's novel about two Jewish boys fleeing from the Nazis, this was to be Doillon's first commercial success and established him as a professional filmmaker in France.

What Les Doigts dans la tête and Un sac de billes both reveal is a director who has a special aptitude for engaging with the problems of children and teenagers, so it is perhaps not surprising that this would become a major strand of his oeuvre. These two early successes gave Doillon the confidence and auteur legitimacy to tackle subjects that were of particular interest to him, and in a way that suited him, like the directors of the French New Wave before him. Another critical success was La Drôlesse (1979), a provocative work about a kidnapped teenager who becomes emotionally attached to her alienated young abductor - this won the Prix du Jeune Cinéma award at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

It was in the 1980s and 1990s that Jacques Doillon was at his most productive and made some of his best known films. In La Fille prodigue (1981) and La Pirate (1984), his first two collaborations with his real-life partner Jane Birkin, he breaches two of cinema's great taboos, incest and lesbianism. Then came one of his finest films, La Vie de famille (1985), in which he explores the inability of a father and his estranged daughter to communicate with one another. The subtle complexities of relationships between middle-aged men and adolescent girls is a theme that Doillon would often return to in his subsequent work, notably in La Puritaine (1986) and the superb La Fille de 15 ans (1989), in which he played the lead adult role.

One of Jacques Doillon's most successful films in the 1990s was Le Petit criminel (1990), a compelling portrait of a juvenile delinquent who becomes obsessed with finding his missing sister. Doillon received the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc for this film, and it also won the Most Promising Actor César for its 15-year-old lead actor Gérald Thomassin. Another hit was Ponette (1996), a haunting study in bereavement in which a little girl must come to terms with the sudden death of her mother. For her captivating performance, four-year-old year Victoire Thivisol took the Best Actress Award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival. Other notable films of the 1990s include: La Vengeance d'une femme (1990), a dark, minimalist study in revenge in which Isabelle Huppert and Béatrice Dalle play a dangerous psychological game; and Amoureuse (1992), the film that radically transformed the image of its lead actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (Doillon's step daughter), from an innocent gamine to a streetwise adolescent who is far too eager to grow up.

Since 2000, Jacques Doillon has been less active, partly because he has found it more difficult to raise the money to finance his films. In Raja (2003), he revisits the central theme of La Fille de 15 ans, the possibility that a middle-aged man may fall in love with an adolescent girl, except that this time there is also a cultural barrier as well as a generational one. This film won Doillon the French Cineaste of the Year award at Cannes in 2004. Le Premier venu (2008), another major critical success, is concerned with three young people from a working class milieu who become locked in a destructive and seemingly irreconcilable love triangle. This film reunites Doillon with actor Gérald Thomassin (once again superb as a dangerously unsettled youngster) and is an effective mélange of social realist drama, black comedy and film noir thriller. Doillon's most recent film, Le Mariage à trois (2010), features another fraught love triange, but is much lighter in tone and has a sunnier, almost Rohmer-esque, feel to it. Doillon seems to be mellowing with age.

Jacques Doillon has so far made around thirty films for cinema and television, and shows no sign of wanting to give up his métier. One of the most highly respected of French auteur filmmakers, his work continues to attract critical appreciation and he serves as an inspiration for today's budding auteurs. Doillon's eldest daughter Lola appears keen to follow in her father's footsteps and has already distinguished herself with two notable films, Et toi t'es sur qui? (2007) and Contre toi (2010). Meanwhile, his other daughter Lou has taken after her mother (Jane Birkin) and has become an actress of some renown. They're a talented clan, the Doillons.

Filmography

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