Michel Piccoli Is Alive
by Daniel Felsenthal
Michel Piccoli (French actor, 1925-2020) is dead. Just the other night, I watched Dillinger is Dead (1969) and now I want to have sex with him. I read an article in the Village Voice that says Michel Piccoli was only a sex symbol in Contempt (1963), but I disagree with the logic of statements like this one. Symbols are flat. Human beings are sexy. Or, if you insist: we all have symbols of our own.
My love has torn open a fantasy that will soon afflict me with a Google heartache, like when I search ex-boyfriends and find only a listing of their address and possible relatives as proof of their continued existence. I have already felt the beginnings of it, this sadness of using the internet to venture into the past while the present contracts like a wet piece of paper. In this case, the past is imagined. I have never met Michel Piccoli. I will never meet him. It has been nearly a year since he passed from a stroke. His own life is exhaustively documented, his whole passage through the late twentieth century preserved on the Cloud. During the period when he was best known, Michael Piccoli was prodigiously talented, an increasingly overweight, bald actor with hair on his shoulders and back who always looked older than his years. Perhaps most famous for gazing at Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, he acted like a stand-in for the generation of teenagers who treated the future right winger as a sophisticated pin-up doll. Michel Piccoli, on the other hand, was a socialist. He was friends with Sartre and de Beauvoir. He was cast as artists, often leering ones with heavy stares. More often, he was cast as seemingly unexceptional middle-aged men shot through with a strange beauty that seemed a combination of perfect body hair placement, unironically unfashionable hair, and interpersonal charm. In this sense, he was always as much of a subject (or is the right word object?) as Brigitte Bardot. Yet no one ever discussed Michel Piccoli as a sex symbol, and so unlike Brigitte Bardot, no one ever tried to look like him. And it is for this reason that his beauty endures.
In Michel Piccoli, directors saw someone paternal, sleazy, and credulous at once. He had a relentlessly erotic relationship with the camera, both because he lived inside his characters and also because he was a bit of a fuckboy who does that hetero male thing of lounging around in the buff while pretending to have no idea you’re looking at him. Clip after clip can be seen on Xtube and PornHub. In the French medical drama Maladie d’Amour (1987), he takes a shower, his smallish, uncut cock waving above his balls, which are like baubles below his substantial 62-year-old belly. In 1981’s Une Étrange Affaire, a young man walks down a hallway. Sound of someone pissing. Cut to Michel Piccoli: he shaves in front of a running faucet, naked ass bared carelessly to the camera. In 1999’s Paris-Timbuktu, he becomes impotent and decides to kill himself. Why react so drastically, Michel Piccoli? Because you’re a sweaty patriarch with a belly draped over your cock like a blanket pulled up to the chin, who never even imagined learning the wonders of his own anus because he was too blinkered to think What if I bottomed? Conveniently, a couple of older ladies save him from a suicide attempt, bending him over a bed while they treat the wounds on his ass. (Paris-Timbuktu might as well be a live-action cartoon.) His face a rictus of pain, he looks like a man getting pegged, if you press pause.
The video ends. I cannot watch it another time. My love for Michel Piccoli has become flat, because no matter how well we document a life, the past is ultimately nothing more than a few sleek photographs and video clips, maybe a dusty book or an urn full of ashes. The past is a projector screen for our emotions and experience. When I was 22 and dating a 61-year-old, I saw Mauvais Sang (1986) and was fascinated by the fact that Juliette Binoche was my age at the time of the film’s release, and Michel Piccoli the age of my erstwhile boyfriend. “I love you,” Juliette Binoche hugs a shirtless Piccoli from behind. “Why won’t you say you love me back?” He will not say it, cannot. Michel Piccoli occupies a world in which the hair on his back and chest should be able to speak in his stead.
Should I pin a centerfold of Michel Piccoli to my wall? Should I start an appreciation club? I have always thought that fandom was inherently one hair’s breadth away from erotic obsession. Why am I drawn to men like this, artists with the ability to play kind and lecherous at will? I console myself in my diary, where I catalogue all of my steamy affairs: Michel Piccoli was an outspoken Socialist. Socialist! Socialist <3 <3 <3 I do believe his sense of justice and equality was strong.
Things I like about Michel Piccoli: Hair placement and coloring A+ Neck hair, love it Beautiful spread of white, grey and black, like someone designed his chest with a color chart Balding pattern A+ Keeps his hair long in the back with ringlets Dick A+ It’s small which contrasts with his sense of “Big dick energy” Name A Michel is a girl’s name Face D+ looks like he would step out of a cab wearing loafers, women on either arm, lead them to the bar, and say, “What do you ladies want? drinks are on me.” Talent A Literally farted himself to death in Le Grande Bouffe (1973).
What era of Michel Piccoli would I like to sleep with most? 1985, or 1986? 1974 or 1971? The act of imagining this choice is so very depressing, and of course I must wonder if the way Michel Piccoli looked in reality had anything to do with the way he looks onscreen. The more nude we are, the better the inhabitants of the future will remember us, not like bolded terms in a textbook, but like smells. I write in order to transcribe the smell of sex while we hurtle toward death, so I can save men, not from dying, but from becoming history.
Sometimes, when I go to restaurants with big, laminated picture menus, I think of how the food on the menu has, since the moment of being photographed, gone rancid, grown moldy and rotten. How sad, I think, that what I want has decomposed and died. My meal comes, and I pretend that it looks as good as the things I can never have.
Daniel Felsenthal is a regular critic for the Village Voice and Pitchfork and the Assistant Editor of NOON. His short stories, essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of publications, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Baffler, The Believer, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Kenyon Review, X-R-A-Y and BOMB, among others, and in 2019, his novella, Sex With Andre, came out in The Puritan. Read more of his stuff at Danielfelsenthal.com and find him on Twitter @D_felsenthal.
