Le Débutant (1986)
Directed by Daniel Janneau, Francis Perrin

Film Review

Francis Perrin was an experienced and very successful stage actor long before he began to make his presence felt in the cinema, which has always been of secondary interest to him.   In Le Débutant, the film he scripted and one of the few in which he takes the lead role, Perrin offers a light-hearted account of his apprenticeship as an actor in which his love of the stage is more than evident.  In his early career, Perrin won particular praise for his Molière interpretations, in plays that included Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire, and snippets from these plays showing the actor at his best are among the enjoyable scenes the film has to offer.

Le Débutant has other rewards, most notably Julien Guiomar as a harsh but humane drama instructor and the all-too-brief presence of Dominique Lavanant as a bossy thespian with Jean-Claude Brialy as her submissive husband.  There's not much in the way of plot but what there is Perrin manages to fill out with his customary charm and penchant for humour.  Cheekily, Perrin named his fictional alter ego after the writer-director Francis Veber, whose character François Perrin appears in several of his films.  The film does suffer from a certain amount of repetitiveness, both in the writing and in the direction.  Daniel Janneau's slack mise-en-scène would seem to be better suited for television, although it does give Perrin the chance to shine as the film's real author.  In a similar vein  to Steve Suissa's L'Envol (2000), Le Débutant presents perhaps too rosy a picture of the life of an actor and patently lacks depth, but it just about gets by with it strong central performance from a sympathetic lead actor. Francis Perrin followed this by starring in Michel Lang's Club de rencontres (1987) before taking the lead role in the television series Inspecteur Médeuze (1993).

Film Synopsis

François Veber is a young electrician who leads a humdrum existence in Touraine with his partner, a physical education instructor.  His one great passion in life is the theatre and he can hardly believe his good fortune when Marguerite Balicourt, the leader of a repertory company, hires him as a stage manager.  Without a moment's hesitation, the young man leaves his partner and is soon heading for Paris and a new life.  François's opportunity to tread the boards comes when a member of the company gets himself blind drunk and he decides to take his place.  Marguerite is not impressed and François is sent packing, with a well-meaning rebuff that he is not an actor.  Undeterred and now sure of his vocation in life, François enlists in the École Nationale de Théâtre and after two years he finally gets to live his dream...