Last night I watched Robert Bresson‘s L’Argent (’83) — a chilly but devastating morality tale of how society will, depending on the bad breaks, occasionally turn a relative innocent into a beast. It’s quietly commanding film — a visually plain, low-temperature thing, and at the same time immensely sad (as opposed to downerish) and impossible to forget.
I hadn’t seen L’Argent (Bresson’s last) start to finish since my first viewing in ’83. It was a nourishing sit. But somewhere in the middle of this unusually short film (83 minutes), I was struck by something else.
Yvon, the lead character and tragic victim of the piece, is played by Christian Patey, who seemed to be his early 20s. (Which would make him roughly 60 today.) He looks like a young James Marsden mixed with some early ’50s Jeffrey Hunter and the late Jim Morrison before he became a pot-bellied beer drinker. In short, more exquisite than “good looking.”
Except Patey is not (or wasn’t back then) an expressive actor — in L’Argent he barely emotes. Bresson surely knew of Patey’s limitations, but chose him anyway because he figured that Patey didn’t need to “act” — his eyes, mouth and cheekbones conveyed everything about Yvon’s essence — a basic settled-in decency by way of a kind of deft neutrality — steady, soft-spoken, unruffled.
Is Patey believable as an axe murderer, which is what he truthfully confesses to being during L’Argent‘s last couple of minutes? Nope, and I’m not just talking about looks but whom or what he actually seemed to be within.
And it didn’t matter anyway. Call it whatever you prefer but Patey was a pleasure to hang with — you trusted in his apparent decency. The fact that he was cut from the same basic cloth as the young Tyrone Power, Rock Hudson, Guy Madison, Tab Hunter, Tony Curtis and others from this fraternity didn’t hurt either.
Hollywood lived by this formula for decades, of course, casting good-looking (or exceptionally good looking) actors for their looks alone, knowing full well that they wouldn’t last unless they were able to somehow reach into their hurt and transcend their looks or at least pick up some professional skills. Some managed that, many didn’t.
All to say that over the last 10 or 15 years Christian Patey-level attractiveness hasn’t seemed to matter all that much in terms of casting, certainly in the indie community.
Here’s how I put it four years ago (“When Ax-Blade Handsomeness Was Okay“): “Ax-blade handsomeness isn’t trusted, much less admired these days. It’s even despised in certain quarters. Because it’s now synonymous with callow opportunism or to-the-manor-born arrogance. Men regarded as ‘too’ good-looking are presumed to be tainted on some level — perhaps even in league with the one-percenters and up to no good. This kind of social shorthand has been around since Wall Street types and bankers began to go wild in the mid ’80s.