In praise of Mathieu Amalric

I just found out today that Mathieu Amalric is in Munich. I got so excited I was ready to cut out of work and head directly to the theater. I restrained myself, but will certainly be seeing it this week.

Mathieu Amalric is pretty much ubiquitous in the French arthouse films that manage to be released in the US. Still, nobody except for me seems to know who he is. At one point I had seen him in so many films, I wondered whether he was the French equivalent of Tom Hanks. But then I asked some French friends about him, and they hadn’t heard of him either.

Why do I love Mathieu Amalric so much? First of all, he’s a brilliant, entirely natural actor who always works with the best French directors. He has huge, expressive eyes. Regardless of what role he’s playing, he looks like he spent the previous night drinking numerous bottles of wine, passed out for five hours, rolled out of bed and skipped showering, and showed up on set ready to film. He is the most consistently scruffy actor working today. That’s not usually what I look for in a dude, but it works for him. I want to marry him.

It’s hard to recommend films that he’s in. Either you love French films and you’ll love them, or you hate them, etc. Probably the safest one to recommend is Late August, Early September.

Ones to check out if you’re feeling able to deal with a movie not only being French, but also being over three hours long:
My Sex Life… Or, How I Got Into an Argument
Kings and Queen



And of course, Munich. I also read that he’s in Sofia Coppola’s newest movie Marie-Antoinette… unfortunately he’s billed as “Man at the Masked Ball” which isn’t terribly promising. Don’t even get me started about him playing second banana (or more like fourteenth banana) to Diaper-Face Kirsten Dunst. How in the world could they even be in the same movie? Something is definitely amiss. Well, I’ll take Mathieu whenever I can see him.