100 Hot Men and a Dame: #100 Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet

100. Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet

Occupation: Actor

Nationality: French

Age: 23

Best Known For: His performance in Christophe Honoré's Les Chansons d'Amour [Love Songs] (outside of France, anyways).

Welcome to my first post in this exciting countdown! Joining me today is mon ami Dave, famous for his world-class blog and Tumblr and we will be discussing up-and-coming French actor Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet.

Dame James: When did you first encounter Grégoire and, if it wasn't love at first sight, when did you fall in love with him?

Dave: I think it's probably standard for any Grégoire admirer that the first encounter was through Les chansons d'amour. Let's be honest, would he even touch this list without it? I mean, I DID see his arse in La princesse de Montpensier, but he really got the duff part there - sure, Gaspard Ulliel is hot too, but that princess really didn't seem to see what she was missing in her bed chambers, and the film agreed with her. Which is a large part of why it was so rubbish, I'd wager.

But back to those chansons. It was pretty much inevitable that I was going to fall over head over heels for the plucky, encouraging, adorably fluffy-haired gay boy whose pursuit of Louis Garrel might be creepy and perverted in someone else's hands, but who WOULDN'T want Grégoire pulling you by the hand into the sack? The scenes between Garrel and Grégoire are pretty much my ideal of love, and that's probably not very good for me since no one as beautiful exists, but it's nice to lose myself in the fantasy.

Dame James: No, I'd wager that Grégoire wouldn't have snuck in this list without the help of Les Chanson d'Amour but what a way to make a splash! I'm pretty sure I mentioned in my review of the film that he was, indeed, kinda creepy and stalker-ish but I'll be damned if he didn't make that desirable. And Grégoire, for once, made Garrel seem like a normal guy and not the sexed-up horn dog he is in nearly ever film I've ever seen him in.

I think a good portion of Grégoire's charm is, like you said, he (along with Garrel) represents an ideal love in Les Chansons d'Amour. He's not a walking sex god like Garrel, Ulliel or countless other French actors we've been accustomed to over the years. Grégoire has the "Léaud Factor"; he's adorable and charming precisely because of how "normal" he is and how much he appears to be a regular, everyday guy. His good looks are just the best bonus ever.

I am so glad that you brought up La Princesses de Montpensier because I was seriously going to bring it up for the "arse" factor. But since we've both seen it, I have to say I completely agree about your assessment of Grégoire's role in it. Neither the princess nor the film seem to realize that Grégoire was not exactly a terrible catch. Red Riding Hood is another recent example of this and I was just as dumbfounded at its insistence that Amanda Seyfried would not be the slightest bit attracted to Max Irons. I am grateful that we got to see his rear in Princesse but it was a terrible casting choice (and it was not the ONLY problem with that movie).

Silly question time! Since Grégoire starred in Les Chansons d'Amour, which translates to Love Songs, what love song would you like him to sing to you with his lovely voice? Oh, and I suppose we should talk about his singing voice being another reason why he's amazing.

Dave: I'll start with the final question. I was musing over this earlier, sure I'd never come up with a nice answer - but then, for whatever reason, Marilyn Monroe singing "I wanna be loved by you, just you, nobody else but you" came into my head. And I think it would be perfect. It totally fits the kind of breathy non-singing they do in Les chansons d'amour and it's the kind of thing Erwann (his character - I admit, I only know that because I have the film playing as I write this) would sing. Grégoire, naturally, has a lovely voice - kind of rich and tremulous - but I think it's the earnestness and sweetness he sings with that really makes their duets in particular so perfect.

Absolutely with you on how his normality is what makes him so charming. Garrel mocks Grégoire's Breton jumper and looks like his usual stylishly offbeat tousled-haired sex god self, but Grégoire just has overgrown hair and an oversized puffa jacket. He's the normal guy seeing sadness in the usually untouchable Garrel, and reaching out to him. So his obsessiveness never seems lecherous, because it seems full of such genuine concern. Their romantic scenes are so beautiful because they mix a teenage horniness with what is clearly genuine affection and caring instincts on Erwann's part. He's enthralled by Garrel, but never stops being concerned for his potential sadness.

Oh, and he does have a very nice arse.

Dame James: Oooh, I'm liking your love song answer! It's both a good song and perfect for Grégoire's voice. I'd go with "Stickwitu" by The Pussycat Dolls. I will concede that it's not nearly as brilliant a choice as yours, but I really dig that song and I think I'd die from happiness listening to him try to wrap his French tongue around such an Americanized expression like "stickwitu".

I feel terrible that we keep going on and on about Les Chansons d'Amour--and I do agree with your assessment of his and Garrel's relationship and why it's so fascinating--but not a bunch of his work has been made available in the US (or UK in your case, Dave), as far as I know. I have seen La Belle Personne but that was a horrendous waste of Grégoire's talent. Then again, aside from "Les Chansons d'Amour", Christophe Honoré really has reduced some quite amazing actors to being mind-blowingly godawful. Montpensier was also another waste of his talent, although, if you get the chance, fast forward about a half hour in and just watch Grégoire's arse. You won't be disappointed.

Then again, I think it's quite remarkable that we've both latched onto this actor just because of this one role. It's not every actor who can so firmly plant himself in the mind of many with just one performance, especially when they're acting with one of the five sexiest living French actors. For that alone, I will be a firm devotee of his. Any final thoughts, Dave? Also, have you seen any other work of his that you could recommend? I just added something called Black Heaven to my Netflix queue that sounded interesting.

Dave: I've not seen him in anything other than the two aforementioned, sadly. He seems to be in a lot of war films, they're the only other available features over here! Black Heaven sounds intriguing if almost sure to be terrible because it concerns video games.

But surely his moment is yet to come (well, his second moment). Personally I'd enjoy seeing him make his way around all five of the sexiest living French actors - maybe some sort of quadrilogy? As long as America doesn't get its hands on him, he needs to stay adorably, naively, beautifully French.

 

Because Americans tend to ruin everything that was once good, I totally agree he should stay in France. And what do you all think? Are you as smitten with Grégoire as Dave and I are or he is just another young French actor (quelle horror!)

Sex Hair

Christophe Honoré Can Suck My Balls: Rants on La Belle Personne

If Christophe Honoré is the voice of the new French cinema, then France may as well call it a day and just stop making movies altogether. I know I've already complained about him ad nauseum after Dans Paris, but his latest film, La Belle Personne, was just too awful to ignore. I can't believe I waited four months for the English subtitles to appear online.

If you're wondering why I bothered watching yet another Honoré movie, I can honestly say I'm not so sure myself. For some reason, I thought that since Love Songs wasn't horrible (original review) and showed some promise that was absent in Ma Mère and Dans Paris, maybe his next one would be even better. I really should have known better. Honoré has a keen knack for suckering me in with either an interesting premise or fantastic A-List cast and then make my life hell with a hellish movie. He got me this time with the 1-2 punch of Louis Garrel and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet. Unfortunately, there's no making out between the two of them in this one and that's only the beginning of the disappointments with La Belle Personne.

The film starts off with a bang, oddly enough, which only furthers the disappointment later on. The young students who dominate La Belle Personne are all introduced in this heavily understated opening taking place in their English classroom. They're supposed to be listening to some inane conversation in English on a cassette tape; instead, however, the camera follows their gazes between each other, sometimes reciprocated but often times not. I found it an interesting and thrifty way to set up relationships between the main characters--what could have been a lengthy introduction spread over multiple scenes or, heaven forbid, done with a voiceover, is instead captured in a minute or two without a word between any of them. Better still, Honoré's annoying Nouvelle Vague tendencies are completely extricated. Gone are the annoyingly random jump cuts that distract from more than they add to the scene. In my head, I was already doing cartwheels in celebration: Honoré had finally reined it in!

The rest of the film, unfortunately, doesn't live up to the standards of the opening. La Belle Personne revolves around Junie (Léa Seydoux), a blankly mysterious girl whom the main characters Otto (Leprince-Ringuet) and Nemours (Garrel) both fall hard for. She's the sort of character that stares blankly off in the distance whenever someone asks about her mysterious past and we're supposed to interpret that silence as an in-depth analysis of everything we could ever understand about her. In case you didn't catch my sarcasm, I can't stand and don't entirely understand films that use this as a plot device. I don't find it interesting in the slightest and actually find the whole thing desperately shallow. Some people may find deep reservations of feelings and a whole backstory hidden in that gaze; I just see emptiness. La Belle Personne falls into the same trap. The whole movie is so nicely photographed and nicely edited that it all becomes boring after awhile. I can only take so many scenes of people staring at each other or confronting someone about why they're not sharing their emotions with them. By the end of the movie, this tedium gets to the point where I was wishing for Honoré's crazy jump cuts. And you know that's never a good sign. D

Christophe Honoré and His Destructive Direction

I've tried to like Christophe Honoré's films--really, I have. His New Wave sensibilities seem to be right up this Truffaut and Godard fanboy's alley, but nothing I've seen of his has convinced me that he is in the same league with those heavy hitters. First was Ma Mère, that horribly pretentious, "sexually liberating" Bertolucci rip-off which is so mind-numbingly stupid and confusing it's still probably one of the ten worst films I've ever seen. Love Songs was considerably better (then again, anything short of a remake of The Bucket List would have been in comparison) but I wasn't as enamored with it as many other bloggers I read were. The musical scenes were nicely done and stuck with the low key nature of the film, but the way Honoré reduces the actors performance to a mere showcasing of random emotions, selected on whim to suit the needs of the scene rather than the development of the character drove me up a wall.


And now we come to Dans Paris. I saw a trailer for it awhile ago and thought it looked like fun, so I decided to give it a whirl, hoping in vein that this would be the movie where I finally "got" what people see in him. And...well, I'm still waiting for that movie. It's not that Dans Paris is an atrocity on the level of Ma Mè, it's rather that it failed to reach even the mediocre heights of Love Songs that most disappointed me. And, once again, it's in Honoré's direction where the film became a massive disappointment. He uses many of the techniques pioneered by the New Wave greats, but he fails to understand and utilize them appropriately. The beginning, for example, serves as the catalyst for the rest of the story and one of the major missteps in the film. Paul (Romain Duris) has moved away from his family in the city to live in the country with his girlfriend Alice (Alice Butaud), a relationship which has begun to dissolve rapidly. But instead of selecting a logical way to represent this, Honoré goes off the deep end and keeps cutting from the couple getting along, to them getting in an argument, to them having sex in the most random way possible. I honestly couldn't keep track of what was going on and, during the happy parts, Paul had gotten a new girlfriend. There's one scene in particular that is clearly an homage to the bedroom scene in Breathless where Belmondo and Seberg just kinda sit around and talk about random things for 20 minutes that simply doesn't work because of how erratic it all is. Paul and Anna go through all the highs and lows I mentioned earlier, with all the "boring" in-between parts edited out so that all we see are these highs and lows (angry, sad, happy, etc.). Why it works for Godard and not Honoré is that Godard was careful never to cut too much away. Belmondo and Seberg may have gone through the highs and lows, but he was careful to build up to them, not simply going for broke just to get it out of the way.

Can I just talk about how ridiculously stupid that ending is for a minute? I understand the point of Anna's character and how she's the only one Paul opens up to about his sister, but why on earth does she stay in the apartment all night? You would think that after being completely ditched by a guy you would be so humiliated that you would just leave right away and not stay the whole night, even after the guy comes home and would rather talk with this brother when he knows you're there. It may make sense in Honoré World, but, in reality, it's completely aggravating and plain dumb.

The fact that Honoré manages to get top-name French talent to appear in his films, including his muse Louis Garrel who has appeared in Honoré's last four films, continues to astound me. In the case of Dans Paris, the characters are strongly written and the actors are more than up to the challenge, but Honoré undermines them every step of the way. It's like someone offering a chocolate-lover an enormous piece of triple layer, triple chocolate cake and then informing you immediately afterwards that you are going to go on a three-mile run. It's simply not fair to offer something so tantalizing to any actor and then pull the rug out on them like that. I still have another Honoré film to see--La Belle Personne, simply waiting for English subtitles to appear online--so I'm sincerely hoping that that one doesn't descend to the idiocy that is Dans Paris (and Honoré learns to loosen up a bit). C

Qu'est-ce que les français ont été jusqu'à?: Short Rants on Les Chanson d'Amour [Love Songs] and Tell No One

Les Chansons d'Amour [Love Songs] (Christophe Honoré, 2008): Well, at least it was a major improvement over Ma Mère. There's something about Honoré's erratic, actor-unfriendly direction that doesn't work for me. What takes place in individual scenes is usually very interesting, but the way Honoré connects (or, shall I say, doesn't connect) eliminates any chance for dramatic effect. Just like I complained about in Ma Mère, the characters do complete 180's between consecutive scenes (Garrel's character literally went from "Get away, stalker" to "I think I'm in love" with Leprince-Ringuet's character in a matter of two scenes) and erases any chance for proper character development. How can we get to know these characters and relate to them when their reaction to anything and everything happening is chopped away and we are left to guess how they bridged the gap between two very different emotional states? Some may think I'm just lazy for not connecting the dots, but I think Honoré is lazy for not providing a few more dots. I pity the poor actors, which include Honoré fave Louis Garrel, Ludvine Sagnier and talented newcomer Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, who are forced to act here without much to go on or really do. They try their damndest, but it is freaking hard trying to make characters from ideas and vignettes of people.

The brilliant thing about Les Chansons d'Amour, however, is the use of musical numbers in the narrative. They aren't used like the musical numbers in HSM3, which are mainly for entertainment purposes only; in Les Chansons d'Amour, the songs allow the characters to express themselves and their unusual relationships in ways that they can't in the "real" world of speaking and communicating with each other. When Julie and Ismael, in another one of their numerous and ongoing fights, suddenly break out into song with Alice trying to unite them, it is not merely to entertain us for a few minutes. With her constant interruptions into their fighting and literally stepping between them, trying to unite them together through her, we finally understand her role in the threesome relationship that they have developed. While the lyrics don't translate so well in English sometimes, the music is often times beautiful and completely captures the emotions they are trying to portray. Dramatically, the film is kind of a bust, but with an interesting use of musical numbers and game cast members, Les Chansons d'Amour sort of redeems itself by the end. Sort of. B-

Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, 2008): Whoever described this film as "Hitchcockian" was entirely accurate; the fact that it's more Saboteur than The 39 Steps or North By Northwest seems to have been left out, unfortunately. For a two hour, edge-of-your-seat thriller, this film felt like it dragged on for at least 4 and a half (Gone With the Wind feels infinitely shorter in comparison). I kept waiting for something in the first twenty minutes to grab my attention and make me care in the slightest about any of the main character, but, alas, the wait was in vain. By the time Francois Cluzet's character is about to be taken in by the police for the murder of his dead wife's friend and he decides to run away from the police because he's innocent (my least favorite cliché in the history of film, FYI), all I kept hoping was that someone would catch him, put him in jail and give him the electric chair. With a main character you can't root for, plot twists that lead to incessant and annoying dead ends and scenes that just go nowhere and somehow feel boring, Tell No One is quite possibly one of the biggest duds of the year. And was anyone else annoyed as hell by the ending? Why are you bothering to tell me one 10 minute explanation when most of it's a lie and then you are forced to spend another 5 minuted telling me what really happened? Blurg, this movie was awful and another entry into my future book, This Film is Good?!: Films Beloved by Critics of All Sorts that Suck Major Ass. D+

Don't See This Movie!

If anyone asks, "Do you want to watch Ma Mère?" please, for God's sake, run in the other direction. I don't care if they try to entice you with the promise that the film has extremely graphic and kinky sex, don't even bother. If you want to get off, go watch some porn. This film won't do anything for you except possibly give you a headache. Nothing in this film makes the slightest bit of sense. Characters and motivations do a complete 180 scene by scene, the plot (if there is one) makes absolutely no sense to any sane person and the only thing that you will feel at the end of this film is that you need to take a shower. Ma Mère thinks it is saying something important or interesting about sex or incest or life or God know's what else, but the film is just a sloppy, self-important mess with gratutious sex thrown in just because it can. I'm almost certain that this film is one of the ten worst I have ever seen in my life. It's that bad. I stopped it about half way through and when I came back I just wanted to shut the whole damn thing off. F


In other news, Louis Garrel also has my shoes! First Zac and now Louis...I guess I really do have good taste!

I won't let you whip me with a power cord, but I'll be willing to be angsty with you...perferably naked.