There usually comes a point in a comedian’s career where he absolutely wants to be taken seriously, to become a dramatic actor. This is the case of Franck Dubosc, who after 25 years playing endearing characters of rednecks and clumsy coquettes, finally offers a new facet of his personality in his second production. rumba lifeat the movies this Wednesday.
In this bittersweet comedy, co-starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Michel Houellebecq, Dubosc plays Tony, a misanthropic school bus driver, convinced he has missed his life. He lives alone after abandoning his wife and son twenty years before. Shocked by a heart attack, he decides to confront his past and enroll undercover in his daughter’s dance class, whom he has never met, in order to make sense of his life.
For the first time in his career, Franck Dubosc is not trying to make his audience laugh. An unusual role for him, which he did not anticipate, assures us.
“Someone else could have made me put it on, precisely to prevent people from saying ‘hey, I wanted to change roles’. Because I didn’t want to change roles”, insists the ‘humorist.
“I would have done it before, otherwise,” adds the actor, behind the camera four years ago with everybody stand up. “It’s just that I had that role available and I took it. I didn’t write it for myself. I don’t really want to prove myself or show myself. I know how to play it. I know I know how to play it.” But it’s less enjoyable to play than comedy.
“I wonder if I’m a good person”
On screen, Franck Dubosc takes on a more severe appearance. He polished every detail of his suit. With his slicked-back hair, his Jean-Pierre Marielle mustache, and his cowboy boots, he’s deliberately “too vintage,” he laughs.
“I wanted him to look like the dads of people my age, not modern dads. I wanted the viewer to see his dad in him.”
Franck Dubosc confirms, however, that he wanted to “rest” alone. “Because I’m a director and I had to direct myself, I didn’t want to risk making a mistake trying to make people laugh. If I started playing too comically, I risked losing the truth and sincerity of the character.” The actor and director has his reasons for being so involved: the film is aimed at his children.
rumba life It was born from the guilt of having to frequently abandon their children to film. “I’m afraid that one day they’ll tell me ‘Dad, when we were little you weren’t there’. This movie is not going to prove anything to them, because when they grow up they will have forgotten it. But for me, it was like an exercise in style: I thought it would be interesting to see if we could like a character that was so absent.”
Franck Dubosc is obsessed with this theme: “I like to write about people we don’t like a priori and make them likeable”. As if he wanted to show that it was more complex than it seemed.
“It is a desire to say that I am not exactly who you think, not to tell others, but to tell myself. I feel guilty about many things and often wonder if I am a good person.”
“Chase away bad luck”
As he approaches sixty, Franck Dubosc thinks more and more about death. He wrote a TV movie last year inspired by the disappearance of his father, The last part. And in rumba life, plays a man in his fifties threatened by deadly cancer: “It’s not that I’m obsessed, but I’ve always written about the things that worried my life, about which I could talk because I know them,” he moderates. Frank Dubosc. “Ready, it’s a little sooner than you think, as if to ward off fate.”
This melancholic dimension, already present in his films written with Fabien Onteniente (Camping, Disk), pushes him to finally put aside the roles of bumbling flirts that made him famous. “These characters were a parenthesis in my life. It was just to please. They asked me to play them and I gave them to them. It’s not my life at all. I had a lot of fun, but now I play what I always wanted.” play. I write for myself, to please myself and whoever loves me follows me”.
Franck Dubosc now wants to embrace his new career as a director. “My first wish was always to be a director. Then I realized that being a director meant directing and eventually being hated. So I abandoned the idea because my goal was to endear myself. Then, over time, with experience, I understood that being a director it meant showing people that you need her. Eventually, she plans to completely disappear behind her movies. “These will be stories with younger characters, and I won’t be playing them anymore.”
Source: BFM TV
