At 42, you don’t write your memoirs. Which is just as well because The Sun Is Showing Me the Way, Sandrine Bonnaire’s first book, is everything but a collection of memories and anecdotes about the wonderful profession of acting.
The Sun Is Showing Me the Way may have started writing itself spontaneously some twenty years ago, when Sandrine Bonnaire met the Morgue-Gaillac journalist couple for a portrait that was to appear in a morning daily. A friendship was born, trust developed over the years between these three people and “somewhere along the way” (as she amusingly puts it herself), when she had started working on a documentary devoted to her sister and called Elle s’appelle Sabine, there was a sudden urge, a need for depth.
Sandrine Bonnaire has made a point of avoiding glossy magazine publicity, but here, in the form of a very free conversation where questions are quickly forgotten so that all the focus is on the answers, she confides and surrenders herself, at the risk of impropriety, but maintains her modesty and her humour in every situation and whatever the circumstances. The account of her childhood in the suburbs of Paris is a model of its genre: large family, scatty mother and grandmother, workman father who was taciturn but adored, a whole world which - in the space of a few pages - Sandrine Bonnaire manages to make our own. And when she tackles Pialat or Sautet, Depardieu or William Hurt, her first husband, the father of her eldest daughter, she does it in the same tone of voice, with the same apparently casual precision, as if it came naturally, giving us a real sense and solid proof of her popularity, and her rejection of conventions and intellectual codes.
A career spanning more than twenty-five years for this young woman who made her debut at sixteen in A nos amours, and is now contemplating making her own first fictional feature. A free woman with no concessions or hindrances, someone whose voice and whose footsteps we would like to follow all the way.
Sandrine Bonnaire was brought to public attention in 1983 by the Maurice Pialat film A nos amours. She was 16 years old and won the César award for the best female newcomer. She worked with Pialat again in 1987 in Sous le soleil de Satan which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. At 19 she played a young dropout in Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi, earning her the best actress César award. She went on to make films with Patrice Leconte (Monsieur Hire), Jacques Doillon (La Puritaine), Jacques Rivette (Jeanne la Pucelle and Secret Défense), André Téchiné (Les Innocents) and Claude Chabrol (La Cérémonie).
L'auteur
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