Disappearance of an image

I am thinking this morning of André Lazare, of his beautiful wife, Patricia, and of some of the members of the small team he gathered around him, Valérie Chabrier, Alexis Meunier and others, to create Capital Cinéma, his distribution and production company, at the end of the 1980s. It was at that time that I had the chance to meet them.

I had been working as a night watchman at the Hotel de Nice, rue de Rivoli, for three years, which was draining my vitality and which I abhorred. Without any introduction other than my enthusiastic young man's face and my tired rings, André welcomed me into his team even more than he hired me, with the generosity and intelligent simplicity of true bosses who know what make a living means. It was only to take up a position as a switchboard operator and I didn't expect anything better as long as I got out of the hell of the hotel business, the 7am breakfast service and the uniform periods without holidays, unless I made up for them by working as many days as possible. The promise of such an opportunity was enough to inject enough joy and oxygen into my daily life, so that I could, during a month's notice, combine my new duties at the reception desk of Capital Cinéma during the day and at night, complete my exodus from the wearisome mediocrity of the job I was leaving.

He even, just as simply and in spite of the incessant financial juggling he seemed to have to do to achieve his ends as a producer, which kept him busy every day, allowed me access to his company's U-Matic video recorders and, learning that I did some video work, asked to see my work. These were certainly the most uninteresting I had ever produced and I can well understand why he did not follow up. I was happy enough to be able to join his company and have the opportunity to live the whimsical movements of his precarious boat.

After a few glorious moments where we saw a part of the elite of the cinema of the time, all that ended rather badly because of unpaid bills and the few survivors of which I was lucky enough to be, saw the rats leave the ship one after the other, gently incited to leave by a small Mr. Boisset, employed for the occasion to these low jobs. What did this momentary debacle matter to me; it seemed to me that André Lazare had suffered many others and that his future, like his past, would be enamelled with as many successes as setbacks, one following the other. For so was the man, an authentic producer for whom making films was certainly to be merged with the childhood dream of being an adventurer. The wind was changing and it was time for him to abandon the great ship Capital, the time to lick his wounds and recover, in the shelter of a buccaneer's island, before setting sail again to board a new project. Once again, in his extreme generosity, he offered me to embark on his next adventure.

This time, I said no, eager to take the chance of a year off and have the opportunity to put all my focus into what was to be my first experimental feature film on video, " The loose animals "I don't know what he would have thought of it, but I would have been proud to submit it to him if I had tried to see him later. He readily understood my desire for something else and gave me a severance package that reflected his princely ethics with those he cared for. I have the vanity to think that despite the brevity of this dazzling year of sharing their adventures, it was so for me, because both André and Patricia, through their expressions of sympathy throughout the work, knew how to make me feel it.

There would surely be a novel to be written about the life of this man whom I knew very little about, but whose dimension was easy to feel, as it must have been. I will content myself today with testifying, as I have done here, to the little I know about him and especially to say that something in me regrets not having followed André in the pursuit of his adventures. Not that I deplore my choice of orientation at the time, for the little I have done so far stems from it, but there are things in life that admiring youth feels, without taking the right measure from its source. My regret is that I was not mature enough to establish a deeper connection with André Lazare; simply to know him better. It is by the yardstick of the vast mediocrity of the behaviours that one will cross afterwards, that one can sometimes realize really and retrospectively, the exact extent of the value of an encounter.

When I was informed of his sudden death in 2008, I was deeply shocked and, as is almost always the case in such cases, unable to react to it other than by denial, so much did this news affect me. The injustice of his death made me angry. I minimized André's impact on my life and decided not to go to his funeral. Yet at that moment, all my thoughts went to Patricia, the only one of his relatives that I actually knew. I couldn't tell her then.

I'm throwing this bottle so that one day she might know, inspired by the same breath of wind, and that chance might bring together the drifts of her searches on André's name and the backwash of Google referencing that would fortuitously bring this article to the surface.

André Lazare - Biography