Jacques Rozier, Last of the French New Wave Directors, Dies at 96

Jacques Rozier, who directed critically acclaimed movies like “Adieu Philippine” and “Du Côté d’Orouët” and who was thought-about the final surviving member of the French New Wave, if an underrated one, died on June 2 within the village of Théoule-sur-Mer in southern France. He was 96.

His demise was introduced on social media by his good friend and former collaborator Michèle Berson.

Mr. Rozier was in his 30s when he emerged as a part of the French movie vanguard of the late Fifties and Sixties, channeling the identical insurrectionary spirit as New Wave contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose final names grew to become one-word signifiers of swashbuckling directorial brilliance.

Such luminaries acknowledged him as a member in good standing in what amounted to considered one of cinema historical past’s most unique golf equipment, collectively dedicated to reinventing the artwork type by upending standard notions of what a film may very well be.

And he outlasted all of them. After the demise in 2019 of Agnès Varda, one other director related to the motion, Mr. Godard stated in an interview with the Swiss public broadcasting community RTS that there have been now solely two actual New Wave administrators left, himself and Mr. Rozier. Mr. Godard, a longtime good friend of Mr. Rozier, died final yr.

“Adieu Philippine” (1962) was Mr. Rozier’s debut characteristic, a narrative a couple of younger tv technician’s breezy seaside dalliance with two teenage women earlier than he heads off to serve within the Algerian War.

While the movie was not a business success, it impressed an rising era of mavericks.

Cahiers du Cinéma, the French movie journal that served because the bible of the motion, put the film’s feminine stars, Yveline Céry and Stefania Sabatini, on the quilt of a problem titled “Nouvelle Vague” (“New Wave”) and described the movie as “the paragon of the New Wave, the one where the virtues of jeunes cinéma shine with their purest brilliance.”

The celebrated administrators Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, who have been additionally aligned with the motion, declared “Adieu Philippine” a masterpiece. Mr. Truffaut wrote that it was “the clearest success of the new cinema where spontaneity is all the more powerful when it is the result of long and careful work.” Before its premiere on the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Godard referred to as the movie “quite simply the best French film of recent years.”

Even so, it took Mr. Rozier, a single-minded director recognized for feuding along with his producers, years to attain even modest acclaim throughout the Atlantic. When “Adieu Philippine” lastly premiered in New York in 1973, the critic Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote in his evaluate that it was “especially ironic” that “perhaps the most agreeable, and surely one of the loveliest, of all New Wave movies” ought to have “had to wait so long.”

Even then, Mr. Rozier spent the subsequent many years largely as a darling of critics and cineastes. The New Yorker referred to as him the “odd man out” in a 2012 appreciation by the critic Richard Brody, a champion of his work. Observing that none of his 5 characteristic movies have been accessible within the United States, Mr. Brody wrote that Mr. Rozier “gets the award for Best French Director Undistributed Here.”

Mr. Rozier was born on Nov. 10, 1926, in Paris. After graduating from the Institute for Advanced Film Studies (now La Fémis) in his residence metropolis, he labored as an assistant in tv and on movie productions, together with “French Cancan,” a 1955 musical directed by Jean Renoir. Mr. Rozier would go on to direct many French tv exhibits all through the Sixties.

Information on his survivors was not instantly accessible. His former spouse, Michèle O’Glor, a author and actress, died final yr, following the demise in 2021 of their son Jean Jacques Rozier, who labored as an operator on a number of of his father’s movies.

Nine years after “Adieu Philippine” premiered at Cannes, Mr. Rozier returned to that fabled French Riviera pageant with “Du côté d’Orouët,” a rambling comedy launched in 1973 that was shot on 16-millimeter movie. It adopted three younger girls from Paris embarking on a trip on the west coast of France.

More than two and a half hours lengthy “and ultra casual, ‘Du côté d’Orouët’ is the epitome of what Quentin Tarantino would term a ‘hang out’ movie,” the Australian movie website Senses of Cinema famous in 2018.

Rambling seaside movies have been frequent for Mr. Rozier. Among them are the 1976 comedy “Les Naufragés de l’île de la Tortue” (“The Castaways of Turtle Island”), a couple of journey agent who units up Robinson Crusoe-style holidays in Caribbean islands, and “Maine-Océan” (“Maine-Ocean Express”), a 1986 highway comedy set on a practice touring from Paris to Saint-Nazaire on the coast of Brittany.

His films, together with his remaining one, the theater-world comedy “Fifi Martingale,” from 2001, “are deliciously unstrung,” Mr. Brody wrote in his New Yorker appreciation.

“He builds them on the basis of elaborate improvisations, constructing long scenes of comic misadventures and amorous misunderstandings,” he wrote. “He casts the minutiae of daily life as cosmic playthings of destiny and invests them with an extraordinary, bittersweet romantic energy.”