The Passion of Pierre Clémenti: European cinema's christ-devil child

Helen Donlon

"I hung out in St. Germain. Picking up cigarettes from the street. One day, a guy came up to me and said, 'Come, we need you.' I followed him to a big house where people dressed in Medieval costumes were rehearsing a play. It was Procès aux Templiers. One of them came towards me. We looked each other in the eye; it was the beginning of a long friendship.
- What's your name?
- Pierre Clémenti
- I'm Jean-Pierre Kalfon. Do you want to be in theatre? Come on, I'll show you how . . . That's how I became an actor."
--Pierre Clémenti, Quelques messages personnels.
[n.b. all translated quotes from Quelques messages personnels referenced in the text as QMP]

Born at 6am in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, 28th September 1942, Pierre Clémenti died in the same city, of liver cancer, Monday 27th December 1999; days before the end of the century. He never knew his father, who was said to have been killed in the war, and instead took his name from his Corsican mother. He discovered poetry at reform school as a young teenager, and his love of it lasted a lifetime. After working as a bellboy at the Hotel Littré in the late 1950s, where he managed to sell a few poems to a female guest he'd spent the night with, he was able to concentrate on hanging out with his friends in Saint Germain. On these streets he was fatefully sidetracked into an acting career that became symbolic of so many aspects of European cinema of the time: experimentalism, anarchy, androgyny, anti-heroism, surrealism and pariah culture.

Clémenti became a student of drama at the Vieux-Colombier and Rue Blanche Schools, and his acting career began in underground theatre in the early 1960s when Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon introduced him to fringe director Marc'O, who quickly invited Clémenti into his avant-garde troupe, later to achieve marginal fame under the guise of their act "Les Idoles". The group would spend their days rehearsing or hanging out in Saint Germain, at places like The Drugstore or la Coupole, amidst a group of friends, like-minded French youth who were to go on to be symbols of a whole generation, but who at the time were known to each other simply as La Bande de la Coupole. The actress Zouzou (L'Amour l'apres-midi, Rohmer, 1972) was part of that gang, and remembers meeting Clémenti in the early sixties, when she and actor/musician Jacques Dutronc (Merci pour le chocolat, 2001) would regularly cross paths with Marc'O's crowd at the Drugstore.

"One evening I met a sublime boy, dressed entirely in black. No-one knew him, he had a wild air, and winked at me . . . Ever since we first met on Rue Saint-Benoit, Pierre and I never stopped crossing paths. I knew his wife Margaret from the Drugstore . . . I found them magnificent together. They had a little chambre de bonne on Rue Gregoire-de-Tours. Whenever I passed below their window, I would go and see them. In those days we didn't make appointments." ¹

It was at the Cafe Flore in Saint Germain in 1963 that Clémenti met Alain Delon who invited him, on the promise of a part, to come to Rome where he was filming The Leopard (Visconti, 1963). Clémenti arrived in Rome at Visconti's palace in jeans and a leather jacket. Visconti told him he had the hands of a prince. He hired him to play the son of prince Salina, and this marked the beginning of Clémenti's great love affair with Italy and Italian cinema.

Next page: Les Idoles