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Patrick Bauchau: Film Comment

Secrets at Play - Patrick Bauchau

From Film Comment -- July/August, 1998
by Beverly Walker

The tumultuous decade of the Sixties generated its share of cinematic anomalies, but none with a more piquant twist than Patrick Bauchau - actor-philosopher-auteurist, who abandoned a promising European career in 1968, resurfacing a decade and a half later in Wim Wenders's critically acclaimed The State of Things. Now a decade and a half after that, he's conquered American television as a regular in the hit NBC series "Pretender."

Bauchau first made a splash in La Collectionneuse, the 1967 feature debut of Eric Rohmer. Set on the sun-dappled beaches of St. Tropez, it showcases three uncommonly attractive people, two guys and a girl, chatting about sexual ethics even as they couple up in various permutations. Sometimes characterized as France's first "hippie" movie, it's certainly one of the era's quintessential works and should've catapulted its young cast - Bauchau, Haydée Politoff, Daniel Pommereulle - to stardom.

But it was instead Rohmer who went on to have the stellar career. The performers were largely dismissed as real-life "hippies" astutely used by a sly satirist who critiqued - and exploited - their lifestyle. This wasn't entirely wrong. Certainly they were nonprofessionals, and Bauchau himself had other aspirations - to direct, possibly, or produce. A recent Oxford graduate, he was bewildered and embarrassed by the fuss over his striking good looks. When he became critically ill after completing his next role - in Tuset Street, a trendy Spanish flick - he simply vanished from the Parisian film scene. "I saw my illness as a metaphor. My value system was wrong. Though I sensed something about me as an actor worked, I was very critical of movies and not ready to confront the business world. I disconnected."

Patrick Bauchau would not draw the film world's attention again until 1982, when he emerged, seemingly out of the blue, to give a haunting star performance as the beleaguered movie director in Wim Wenders's The State of Things. This meditative work unexpectedly won first prize at the Venice Film Festival and became a cult hit across Europe - in the process, jump-starting Bauchau's career anew.

During the Eighties and Nineties, he criss-crossed the world to appear in dozens of film and television productions, ranging from European art films - Entre Nous, Lola, The Music Teacher - to pure sleaze such as Emmanuelle 4. American independents - Choose Me, The Rapture - constitute a dubious middle ground on his rollercoaster credit list.

Though Bauchau is of Russian-Belgian heritage, he can't be pinned to any particular nationality or culture. A tall, strikingly handsome man who carries himself with elegance and grace, his lightly accented, sonorous voice is perhaps his most distinctive attribute - capable of sounding ironic, threatening, or erotic by turn. His fluency in five languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian) has led to employment in numerous doozies, including Creepers by Italian horrormeister Dario Argento; Chain of Desire, in which he plays a masochist thrashed by Grace Zabriskie; or Every Breath, an audacious but failed attempt to satirize snuff movies, which also stars Joanna Pacula and Judd Nelson.

Whether haute or downright dirty, Bauchau tends to be cast on the extremes, as a serpentine baddie or a flawed saint; in either case, his work is never less than intelligent. He played a druglord in Clear and Present Danger, a Continental killer in a Peter Falk "Columbo" special, and the French physician who discovered the HIV virus in And the Band Played On. Some of his most effective work has never been released theatrically in the U.S. He's eloquent as a doomed gay priest in the Brazilian film Jenipapo (The Interview), and charmingly insidious as an androgynous provocateur in Erreur de jeunesse (Youthful Folly).

In NBC's stylish thriller "Pretender," Bauchau utilizes aspects of these same archetypes, effectively creating a fascinating, ambiguous character rare for a U.S. television series. His Dr. Sydney is a brilliant, innovative scientific educator, a futuristic Svengali-with-heart paying penance for past misdeeds. Bauchau was a godsend to the show's producers - and the network - when casting director Sharon Biali "discovered" him. Says Rick Wallace, who wrote and directed the pilot, "He's a very attractive man who combines warmth and accessibility with an edge of danger, well able to play a complicated character who is morally compromised." Increasingly, Bauchau's part is custom-tailored for him and expanding for the usual reason: viewer fascination. "We see his e-mail," says producer Craig Van Sickel. "Women of all ages think he's adorable; men see him as a 'man's man.' They want to know more about him, but we want to preserve his mystique; we don't tell them too much."

Not to worry. Few in TV-land would recognize Patrick Bauchau's previous films - much less relate to his unique historical position as one of the creators of American-style auteurism way back in the early Sixties. In the seminal work The American Cinema, published in 1968, critic Andrew Sarris acknowledged Bauchau's contributions to his own thinking. The two had first met by chance on Place de l'Odéon in Paris, when each was prowling around the edges of the nouvelle vague and seeing (mostly American) movies at the Cinémathèque Française. Today, Sarris confirms that "Patrick was very important to me. He spoke French and a kind of hipster English beautifully, and was well-educated and philosophical. He was able to make connections and had a big influence on me." For his part, Bauchau remembers Sarris as "a kindred spirit from whom I learned enormously."

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Photo of Patrick Bauchau and Haydée Politoff in La Collectionneuse © 1967 Les Films du Losange [fr]/Rome Paris Films [fr]. Do not use photo without prior, written permission.