Lavant, Denis

“I still believe in the beauty of the act,” replies Monsieur Oscar, Denis Lavant’s shapeshifting cipher in Holy Motors (2012), when asked by Michel Piccoli why he goes on occupying life after pitiful life. In Lavant’s fifth collaboration with his twin-flame poète maudit, director Leos Carax (né Alex Christophe Dupont), the chameleonic French performer plays eleven characters. His guises include those of an elderly, begging woman; a transcendent motion-capture model; an anxious father; the leader of an accordionist troupe; a murdered man; and a murderer. A futurist, avant-garde masterpiece, the film doubles as an exegesis for Lavant’s lifelong relationship to performance. Like Monsieur Oscar’s, Lavant’s dishevelled career is looped together by something utterly simple: he still believes in the beauty of the act. “That’s the most personal statement in the film, because that’s how I view acting,” Lavant says. “Leos understands this, and I think that’s why he wrote that into the script. I’m grateful he put that line in.”¹ 

Not only a screen actor but an acrobat, a mime, and a devoted thespian, Lavant’s magic lies above all in his unrivalled elasticity. When I visualise his life’s work, I see a muscular silhouette tumbling between gestures with mad force, whether he is disco dancing, gasping fire, somersaulting through the air, or simply walking. But to observe Lavant’s brilliance is to abandon certain presumptions about what it means to act well. Despite having contributed iconic performances to the cinematic imagination, Lavant has never crossed the threshold into super-stardom. While best-known for his work with recognised auteurs like Carax and Claire Denis, Lavant’s archive also contains many appearances in forgotten, fanfare-less French releases. Lavant’s unpretentious oeuvre has seen him play a number of nameless, cryptically attributed roles, among them those of The Wanderer (L’Homme blessé, The Wounded Man, Patrice Chéreau, 1983); Caviar Delivery Man (Viva la vie, Claude Lelouch, 1984); The Joker (La squale, Fabrice Genestal, 2000); L’Ogre (The Ogre) (Le Petit Poucet, Hop-o’-My-Thumb, Marina de Van, 2011); Le Pendu (The Hanged Man) (Full House, Quentin Bocksberger, 2015); and L’Inconnu (The Unknown) (Boris sans Béatrice, Boris Without Beatrice, Denis Côté, 2016). Liberated from the model of a clear upward trajectory, Lavant’s life on-screen affirms his position as a proudly eternal dilettante in the realm of cinema. Five decades into his career, Lavant still signals the insouciance of the Bressonian non-actor, often donning an oblique, lost-boy stare to rival that of Antoine Monnier in Le diable probablement (The Devil, Probably, 1977). With his ruffled complexion and sphinxish facial manoeuvres, Lavant is a welcome alien within a medium that too often favours smoothness and legibility.  

Holy Motors

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A pliable noun, ‘the act’ suggests a movement, but also a trick, an impersonation. If Konstantin Stanislavski, the creator of ‘the method,’ is the father of modern acting, then Lavant is a wayward son. Proponents of method acting, the philosophy which dominates both critical and audience interpretations of screen performance today, proselytise about engaging characters’ speculative histories, desires, and traumas; about the importance of obsessively merging real and fictional psyches. But what’s wrong with playing pretend? Trained in the art of mimicry, Lavant revels in artifice. As his many-faced performance in Holy Motors suggests, perhaps there can be no concrete line between imitation and invention—who can tell whether Monsieur Oscar is parroting the destinies of pre-made characters, or truly improvising? 

Lavant’s most abiding impersonation is that of Carax himself. Carax first cast Lavant in his raw, mercurial debut feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), as Alex—a young Parisian doomed by his upcoming military service and romantic fascination with a suicidal dancer, Mireille (Mireille Perrier). As Carax explained to Philippe Garrel in a 1984 dialogue, he interpreted his prospective male lead as secondary to Perrier, his lover at the time and the sun around which his protagonist would orbit.² Carax saw an image of Lavant in a binder at an employment agency, and when the pair met, the director was attracted to the raw similarities between them: they were the same age, the same height. As Carax recalls, “He was a performer already, coming from the circus, theatre and mime but he had no interest in cinema.”³ Christened with Carax’s own birth name, the Alex of Boy Meets Girl serves as an expressionistic portrait of the dreamer-director—a solemn romantic who refuses to parse life from fantasy. When Carax re-cast Lavant in Mauvais sang (1986) and Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge, 1991), as Alex and Alex respectively, the autobiographical connection grew hazier, but remained intact. Where Lavant had shadowed Carax’s lovesickness for Perrier in Boy Meets Girl, the latter two films would be inflected by Carax’s contemporaneous romance with Juliette Binoche. During the infamously expensive and accident-riddled shooting of Les amants, in which Lavant’s Alex is homeless and addicted to alcohol, the actor regrettably dabbled in the methods of the Actors’ Studio. “It exhausted me physically, psychically, and emotionally. I had no idea where Alex ended and Denis began. I truly thought I was going crazy.”⁴ After Les amants, Lavant and Carax did not work together for fifteen years. 

The symbiotic relationship between Carax and Lavant is most lucidly observed in the former’s most recent film, 2024’s C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me). Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou as a short video installation responding to the prompt, “Where are you at?”, the film quickly exceeded these parameters to become a chaotic anti-self-portrait. Here, insights into the artist’s life, such as archival footage of his daughter, Nastya Golubeva Carax, are interrupted by a radioactive profusion of archival images. This footage often features Lavant, particularly in his role as Monsieur Merde (Mr Shit), the grotesque, babbling humanoid who originated in Carax’s chapter, ‘Merde,’ of the anthology film Tokyo! (2008), in which Merde emerges from the sewer to wreak havoc on the city. One newly shot scene sees Carax walking beside Merde in a park, partially adopting his iconic costume and walking with a similar stagger. Their creative relationship is so fused, the image implies, that there is no longer any possibility of untethering director from muse. It’s Not Me ends with a fitting homage to Lavant: an impersonation of the consummate impersonator. Annette, the marionette who starred in Carax’s 2022 film of the same name, replicates the famous scene of Mauvais sang in which the lovelorn Alex traverses the street to David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’. Lavant’s magnetism, Carax observes, doesn’t arise from a scholarly perceptiveness, but from something more elemental—an energetic life force so unperishable it is barely human. 

Les amants du Pont-Neuf

Aside from the spirit of Carax, the ghost most palpably inhabiting Lavant is doubtless that of Charlie Chaplin. Both Lavant and Chaplin use their bodies as instruments of infinite pathos, acting at the interstice of physical clumsiness and mastery. As Fergus Daly writes, “The contemporary film that Holy Motors seems, above all others, to be in dialogue with, is the criminally underrated Mister Lonely (2007) by Harmony Korine.”⁵ Like Holy Motors, Mister Lonely is a film about impersonation which explicates Lavant’s relationship to acting, spectatorship, and his closest collaborator, Carax. A fugue of saturated and sinister whimsy, Korine’s comedy sees a lonely Michael Jackson mimic (Diego Luna) scouted by a faux Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) to join a commune of fellow impersonators in the Scottish Highlands. Here, Lavant is Monroe’s husband: an aged and amateurish Chaplin proxy she met on a cruise ship, who oversees the commune—and his wife—with dictatorial frenzy. Fittingly, Carax features in the film as Michael’s Parisian agent—a peddler, like the real-life Carax, of unapologetic fantasy. 

As André Bazin observed, the medium of cinema allowed Chaplin to perfect the genre of slapstick comedy, streamlining every gesture towards an ever-escalating catastrophe without needing to rile up a live audience. Chaplin “carries to absurd lengths his basic principle of never going beyond the actual moment,” Bazin writes.⁶ Fixated on his current objective, whether to tighten screws or to traverse a tightrope, the Little Tramp never takes stock of past humiliations or future consequences. His ceaseless, automaton-like drive to waddle, rampage, or play dead evokes the fate of the inhabitants of capitalist societies to constantly flail in their attempts to construct a liveable life. Lavant’s iteration of Chaplin in Mister Lonely, however, is remarkably static, perverted by depression and egoism. Where elsewhere Lavant is quick and weightless, his Chaplin is leaden; he drags himself about, face etched with despair. Lavant’s haunting performance here literalises one of his long-held roles: as the Little Tramp’s traumatised offspring, a deer in the headlights of postmodern times.   

Lavant does not run to catch up. Lavant’s most cherished spells of movement are usually compelled by an inexplicable, existential pull. Instead of being anchored by the present moment, his characters are haunted by the past (melancholia, ennui) and the future (paranoia, doom). Like Chaplin’s, many of Lavant’s iconic characters are urchins and orphans. However, Lavant’s personages don’t make even the clumsiest steps towards social mobility. Often, he instead tumbles downwards—as in Les amants, in which Alex commits arson and manslaughter to prevent his beloved, slumming Michèle (Binoche) from returning to the world of the housed. Baudelairian depressives, grifters, and drifters, Lavant’s creations rarely try to assimilate into the demands of late capitalism. In his collaborations with Carax, we see Lavant wandering towards obscure destinations as if sleepwalking; or, in Holy Motors, running to nowhere, on a treadmill in his motion-capture skinsuit. Elsewhere, Lavant propels into action when romantic desire is too lawless to be articulated, as in the explosive musical sequences of Mauvais sang or Les amants. In Lavant’s rebellious body, ‘unproductive’ spurts of action burst with vitality and mystique.

Boy Meets Girl

In the role of Merde, Lavant further reimagines the Little Tramp, blowing up his destructive qualities to spawn a “terrorist monster.”⁷ In Tokyo!, Lavant’s Merde is introduced with the theme music of Godzilla, invoking that he, like the outsized mutant who arose from the nuclear pollutants of imperialism, is a creature wrought from human debris. Carax: “He’s in a way close to the Charlie Chaplin figure, except he’s this absurd immigrant who cries ‘Why have you placed me among the people I hate the most?’ It’s like he’s both the Tramp and Monsieur Verdoux.”⁸ Desecrating the city and attacking passers-by, Merde is a spectre of pure abjection, a being excised from the symbolic order itself. As Julia Kristeva writes of shit, “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death.”⁹ But even Lavant’s performance as Merde is underlined by his undying tenderness for the battered, Trampian outsider. Lavant’s Merde, who speaks like a toddler and acts only upon his instincts for sensual pleasure, also transmits a near-divine innocence, an inability to be cruel. Marcel Marceau: “The soul of a mime is a complex one: part child and part artist, part clown and part tragic figure.”¹⁰ 

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The coming of sound was a black hole of uncertainty for Chaplin. “The spoken word reduces everybody to a certain glibness. The voice is a beautiful thing, most revealing, and I didn’t want to be too revealing in my art because it may show a limitation (…) whereas movement is as near to nature as a bird flying,” Chaplin told Life’s Richard Meryman in 1966.¹¹ Chaplin’s entrance into speech was the death of the untranslatable Little Tramp. If Lavant is a postmodern ghost of Chaplin, he is one forced into the expository machine of sound cinema, which he nevertheless resists. “My first language is the body,” says the performer in an interview following his work in a 2014 instalment of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Walker series, Journey to the West, in which Lavant plays a speechless shadow to Lee Kang-Sheng’s slow-moving, vagabond monk.¹² Whereas criteria for impactful acting today often fetishise the actor’s delivery of speech, for Lavant speaking is a notably fraught act, much more precarious than the spatial fact of physicality. For Mister Lonely, Lavant, who does not speak English, learnt his lines phonetically with Carax’s guidance. In one intimate scene, his Little Tramp sits alone in a corner, shirtless with his suspenders slack against his chest, rehearsing English platitudes as if interrogating himself. “How old are you?” he asks, and fails to locate a convincing answer. Lavant’s elocution is winded, and his voice, here and elsewhere, is unstable: a thick, hoarse whisper. Lavant’s failure to speak is itself a success: he never takes for granted the relationship between sound and image. 

Lavant and Carax’s creative chemistry is partly rooted in their shared fascination with silence: at about the same time that Lavant, inspired by his obsession with the great Marceau, studied mime as a young teenager, Carax underwent a spell of selective mutism, and became inspired by the silent films he watched at Henri Langlois’ Cinematheque, especially those of D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, and Ernst Lubitsch. “He directs me almost like a sculptor, physically,”¹³ says Lavant of working with Carax, echoing the words of the influential mime artist Étienne Decroux: “My passion, my zeal for mime (…) grew out of my fervour for sculpture and its sensual, carnal pleasures.”¹⁴ Silence resounds in Boy Meets Girl, with speech taking on an estranged and inchoate quality. Lavant’s Alex speaks with reluctance, syllables spooling from his throat without affect or inflection. Emotion is concentrated in the unblinking rigor of his gaze; the wisdom of his prematurely creased face; and the tormented pace of his movements. In Mauvais sang, Carax and Lavant’s shared resistance to the “revealing” (Chaplin) function of speech is also essential, as Lavant’s Alex, facetiously nicknamed ‘Chatterbox’ for his muteness, ventriloquises objects to communicate with his lovers, Lise (Julie Delpy) and Anna (Binoche). 

With Mauvais sang, Carax also coaxed Lavant’s propensity for mime into a more spectacular dimension: “He forced me to learn all these things—motorcycle riding, card tricks, skydiving.”¹⁵ In such mobile performances as this one—or his brief turn as the dancing devil in Jonathan Glazer’s cult rejected Cadbury Flake advertisement—Lavant resonates most with the non-narrative cinematic tradition that Tom Gunning coined ‘the cinema of attraction’. Gunning argues that an exhibitionist impulse dominated cinema prior to 1906-1907, as showcased especially in the films of Georges Méliès, who considered “the ‘fable,’ or ‘tale’ (…) as a pretext for the ‘stage effects,’ the ‘tricks,’ or for a nicely arranged tableau.”¹⁶ The work of Méliès and other exhibitionist filmmakers was directly focussed on the potentialities of the body: both that of the aroused spectator; and of the films’ subjects, among them many impossibly athletic figures adopted from the circus. Méliès also used the medium to manipulate the human body itself—as in L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1902), which sees the magician-director’s head inflated like a balloon. The unforgettable motion-capture sequence in Holy Motors, in which Monsieur Oscar and his scene partner transcend from their animalistic, simulated fucking to become twined phoenixes, reads as a séance invoking the abandoned tradition, albeit one which amplifies its latent eroticism. 

Beau Travail

Holy Motors identifies Lavant’s forebears even further back in cinema history, however, as it opens with a flickering series of chronophotographic portraits by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. The first spectral images animate a nude man running, the stilted pace rendering his movements eerie. Even under the scrutiny of a film camera, Lavant’s approach to movement enables him to miraculously slow time. Referring to Lavant in his Cannes press notes for Holy Motors, Carax says, “When I film this body on the move, I feel the same pleasure I imagine Muybridge felt watching his galloping horse.”¹⁷ Marey and Muybridge’s work echoes another of Lavant’s indelible performances, as chief sergeant Galoup in Beau travail (1999). A displaced adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd, Beau travail is a portrait of searing envy, ego death, and cruelty among a troupe of French legionnaires in colonised Djibouti. An outsider even in the clothes of an insider, Lavant’s Galoup is an embittered voyeur battling for homosocial supremacy. 

While the actors comprising Galoup’s army were trained by the choreographer Bernardo Montet in a lengthy rehearsal process, developing not only a cohesion of movement but similarly stiff and taut physiques, Lavant skipped this phase altogether. Instead, he simply tanned and juggled to train for the role. His resulting performance is animated foremost by a primordial fury. “I was in this character’s energy,” Lavant says: an embodiment which “flowed” instinctually from his own experience of Djibouti’s arid heat.¹⁸ Having left his brief interest in method acting in the early nineties, Lavant has since reified his understanding of performance as a sensory process which belies intellectual sophistication. Remembering shooting a scene in which the legionnaires seize an empty building, Lavant recalls, “It was like we were in a war film! Even as my colleagues were under greater pressure to play the scene authentically as if they were actually soldiers, I actually played it while imagining films, actually believing it was all just a big game.” Instead of “taking a method approach, immersively analysing how (he’d) behave as a legionnaire,” Lavant says, he was “dancing the role.”¹⁹ While Lavant’s improvised dance to ‘Rhythm of the Night,’ another instance of the language of the body prevailing, is undoubtedly Galoup’s most widely remembered scene, I am even more struck by a more muted, even missable moment. Galoup lies on his bed with a shotgun arranged beside him, contemplating suicide. Here, Lavant is as still and serene as a painted Ophelia, except for a bulging vein which pounds from his bicep. Although Lavant claims this was a perfect coincidence, he is a performer so attuned to his own embodiment that I continue to believe he willed the vein to writhe. 

Lavant’s near-chronophotographic ability to capture movement in minute detail is likewise displayed in Tsai’s Journey to the West. Taking the 16th-century Chinese folktale as its namesake and casting Lavant as ‘the dragon’, the film first presents Lavant’s textured face in prolonged extreme close-ups. Set in a characteristically opaque expression, one which could indicate either peace or pain, here duration renders Lavant’s sidelong profile a landscape: a rocky mountain crested with creaturely eyes. “I lost a sense of time, I felt active even when still,” Lavant said of the process.²⁰ Later, Lavant pursues Lee through the streets of Marseille, mimicking the exact pace at which he peels his soles from the ground. Here, Tsai places Lavant in dialogue with Lee, a similarly corporeal performer. Like the duck-walking Chaplin and the heavy-footed Lavant, Lee too has a certain stagger, a way of moving that is completely his own. In Dennis Zhou’s ode to the Taiwanese actor for Metrograph, he writes: “Lee is the greatest actor in the world at simply being a body. He’s the greatest performer of eating, sleeping, and walking, because he eats without hunger, sleeps without dreams, and walks without destination.”²¹ Like Lee, beneath the pyrotechnics and acrobatics for which he is known, Lavant is a superb performer of being itself, enthralling even in stillness. 

Journey to the West

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“It does not come from cinema,” Lavant has said when asked about his love of performance. “It is Carax, Denis, Korine, Tsai, that see it in me, when it comes to cinema. My love comes from theatre, stage, and street performing especially, where your intensity is needed to attract people.” Even when shooting Journey to the West, Lavant was deeply conscious of his audience: “The other actors, the boom operator, the cinematographer. I perform for them; the crew is the first audience.”²² While Lavant’s engagement with the cinema has been sparse over the last ten years, his presence onstage is constant. As Theodor Adorno once wrote about Chaplin, Lavant “acts incessantly, just like Kafka’s trapeze artist, who sleeps in the baggage rack so as not to ease off training even for a moment.”²³ He has shown a particular affinity with the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, having performed his plays Worstward Ho, Krapp’s Last Tape, L’Image, and Waiting for Godot over the past seven years. His interest in Beckett marks a continuing attraction to outsider artistry (Beckett was virtually unknown in his time), as well as mad, ill, and otherwise socially abjected characters. In a recent Q&A session at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Lavant celebrated Beckett’s theatre for its anchorage in bodily limitation and suffering, interpreting the battered psychic life of Estragon, his role in Waiting for Godot, as arising from the chronic rheumatism in his feet. Lavant celebrates Beckett’s own embodied creative process: “(Beckett) really admired Joyce and wanted to be like him, so he bought the same shoes, but Joyce was a size smaller than him, so he suffered through wearing them.”²⁴ For Lavant, the body remains a sovereign vehicle of knowledge and imagination. Lavant still believes in the beauty of the act, even if the act is imperceptibly small, even if the act is ugly.

Endnotes