This week Moviehouse feels no need to lapse into What’s Wrong With Contemporary French Cinema Rant No. 43. Instead we’re putting aside our differences to remember just how thrilling Gallic film can be.

The cause of our excitement is Satan (or Sheitan in Arabic), not our Dark Lord, but a splendid new horror-comedy starring Vincent Cassel. Though many French icons seem considerably less cool once they venture north of Normandy (Johnny Halliday anyone?), M. Cassel kicked though the usual cultural barriers as Vinz, the volatile Jewish skinhead in La Haine. His role in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 explosive portrait of disaffected suburban youth belongs to an extraordinary class of male anti-heroes including Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver or Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper.
“When I was younger I was looking at French cinema and I decided I will never find anything to do here,” Cassel tells me. “That’s why I started to work on my English. That’s why I went To New York. I was dreaming about The Actor’s Studio and Raging Bull. I never thought I’d do anything in France.” He laughs. “But then, living in New York for a while, I realised how French I really was.”
Returning to Paris, he set about forging a new French cinema as the leading man of choice for outlaw directors such as Kassovitz, Jan Kounen and Gaspar Noé. “The moment I met Mathieu and the actors around him,” says Vincent. “I realised we could not get involved with French cinema. We had to create our own thing. A lot of those movies except for La Haine were banned. It had a social dimension so that was fine. I don’t fight against French cinema but it’s something I don’t relate to. I don’t know enough about your film industry in Ireland to say, but if you look at the industry over here, it’s small and unadventurous. It’s very bourgeois.”
Really? How did that happen to the most stridently Marxist film sector in Europe?
“Time,” he laughs. “I suppose everything radical has to become bourgeois eventually.”
At 40, the lively actor with shamefully good English is still resisting such a move himself. For 10 years, he’s been involved with the Kourtrajmé collective, an underground art movement that currently consists of 134 actors, directors, jugglers and graffiti artists. “We even have a midget,” adds Cassel. Kourtrajmé is “backwards slang” for courts-métrages , meaning shortfilms. The collective was founded by Kim Chapiron with fellow directors Romain Gavras (son of the Greek-born director Costa-Gavras) and Toumani Sangaré and uses a guerilla approach to filmmaking that has, thus far, served them well.
“12 years ago, a young Chinese guy walks up to me when I’m visiting a friend,” recalls Vincent. “He says ‘Can you say something for the Kourtrajmé?’ So I said something into his camera – it was a stolen hi-8 camera at the time. Shortly after, I received a CD-Rom that make no sense at all but included the little segment he shot with me. And I don’t know what it was about it, but I loved it. It was so modern – the way it was edited, the way it was shot, the way he used sound. It was different. I thought it was fresh and that I should call this guy even though he’s just 13. So I did. And then this kid – Kim Chapiron – called me back to make a short film.
“We kept in touch since and by the time he was in his 20s, there were a bunch of them. So I kept on talking about them to every producer in Paris about this crew but nobody could really see what it was about. It was very cheaply made. It didn’t cost anything. They’d give copies away for free. By the time they were ready to shoot something as a feature, the traditional French producers still couldn’t get it. So I just decided to produce it myself. And that’s Sheitan.”
Kim Chapiron’s delightfully unhinged debut sees four Parisian chavs – nice to see that Burberry has crossed the channel to become the French scanger uniform of choice – accept a pretty girl’s invitation to head out to the sticks for a Christmas party. When they get there it transpires that her parents are probably dead, leaving just the kids, and their demented caretaker Joseph (Cassel), who may have stuck some sort of deal with the AntiChrist.
“At first the kids were a little, ‘Oh thank you very much Vincent’ on set,” says the actor. “But I wasn’t doing anything great for them. I’ve always told them you should feel comfortable with me. We talked the same language. I’m not doing this to help you. I’m doing this because I think you’re great and I think it’s great for me to be part of your thing. It’s not a present and I’m not Mother Theresa. But if anything, there were problems with my acting for the first day. I had been so caught up in producing I hadn’t given my character much thought. So day two I reached my actor’s secret weapon – I drank a lot of wine and after that I had no problem getting into it.”
It’s easy to forget that quite unlike the youngsters he champions, or indeed many of the thugs he plays, M. Cassel is cinema royalty. His father is the actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, a prominent figure in the Nouvelle Vague who has played opposite Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve and shot with the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville and Luis Buñuel. Vincent is also half of Europe’s most glamorous couple. His wife, the divine Monica Bellucci, also appears in Satan and clearly shares his taste in cutting-edge projects.
“I can’t remember how many films we’ve done together,” he says. “But I love working with her. She’s a real traditional Italian movie star. I think directors think it’s a funny cinema thing to have us together. I’m happy with that. Like I’d have a choice.”
Most memorably, the couple starred in the devastating rape-revenge drama Irreversible. One assumes a film depicting the nine minute rape of your wife is emotionally draining to make. Lord knows, it’s upsetting to watch. Indeed, Cassel’s brother was so upset after a screening at Cannes, he punched the director Gaspar Noé.
“Well, yes,” he says.” But not for the reasons you might suppose. It was exhausting for us because it was all improvised so you never knew how long a take would be. But my brother is a rapper. He’s the toughest one in the family. He still went to pieces after the film. It was just the shock. It was fine later on. He’s just lucky we didn’t go with Gaspar’s original script. It was much worse. It was just total porn.”
Keeping with left-field projects, Vincent has just finished shooting David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises in London. Written by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), it’s a story of the Russian Mafia in London, starring Naomi Watts as a midwife who confronts crime boss Viggo Mortensen after a prostitute dies.
“I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say about it,” says Vincent. “With a Cronenberg movie, you’re never sure what bits you can give away.”
Then he laughs. “Though we did do a lot of scenes in brothels and hospitals.” That sounds about
right.
Satan is released on Tartan DVD on March 26.