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Vincent Cassel - Continental Star
By Will McKenzie
Vincent Cassel is known in gossip columns across Europe as the husband of the sexy Italian actress and model Monica Bellucci. With his far-set eyes and strange features, set in a kind of snarl, however, he is not quite a swoonsome matinee idol. It is very difficult to see him as Paris Match/Hello! Magazine fodder when you see him act. When he is in the right role, his acting style is raw, charismatic, unpredictable, and tough.
Cassel was born into acting and the cinema, the son of film actor Jean-Pierre. Early on in his career, at the age of 26, he starred in Metisse, an edgy and vibrant comedy directed by the young Mathieu Kassovitz. This encounter would become a potent cinematic relationship. They reunited in 1995 for La Haine, which is still, for me, Cassel's best performance. Vincent plays Vinz, a streetwise, violent skinhead, with only grudging respect for anyone. A junior Begbie in his tight jeans and zip-up Nike top, Vinz plays tough guy, scratching on decks, indulging in casual violence, sleeping in all day and getting stoned. He also has a thing for guns. There is a great scene where Vinz plays with a gun and acts out a Travis Bickle fantasy in front of his bathroom mirror. You get the feeling that this fantasy is like a child playing with a toy; but the tragedy of the whole film is that Vinz, like all his friends, is a child, deep down. Cassel manages to embue his character with menace and vulnerability, showing a fear behind the frightening tough-guy posturing. Cassel has a thin, angular face, and his eyes and cheek-bones catch the light very well: the effect of the high-contrast, black and white close-ups on his face are very powerful.
However, Cassel has struggled to repeat the role that brought him fame (and a little notoriety) in France, and international recognition. He was good in the ingenious, but uneven psycho-farce l'Appartement, (where he met his wife) although I feel he can't carry off smooth charmers in the same way as he can tough guys. He was very good in the otherwise dull serial-killer thriller The Crimson Rivers (Les Rivieres Pourpres, 2000), but not so good as the foppish Duc d'Anjou in Elizabeth - his physical and exuberant performance failed to fit in with Ang Lee's dark and broody reinvention of the Tudor age. At rock bottom, the less said of his decision to appear in Rik Mayall's and Adrian Edmondson's Guest House Paradiso, the better.
Cassel's most recent role was the voice of 'Monsieur Hood' in Shrek. While this might have been a simple example of tokenism - a French actor to lend authenticity to the voice - Shrek was successful enough to at least ensure the wider knowledge of Cassel's name around Hollywood. With a reputation for carrying off more mainstream film, and with a proven showbiz pedigree, Cassel might even be one of the few Continental stars who really break the US. If he manages to do so, then that will be more than even giants like Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Autueil have managed.
Vincent Cassel appears in Birthday Girl, at this year's RLFF.
November 2001, Birthday Girl feature @ the RLFF's webpage. |
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