I have already died three times

Actor and director Jacques Nolot opens up to the camera about his desires, doubts, anxieties… and of what fulfils him in life as much as it connects him with death. Between dreams and memory, everything seems to gradually crumble.

Aside from the joy of rediscovering his face, almost lost, and his friendly voice, in this belated portrait of actor and filmmaker Jacques Nolot what can we hope to find that he wouldn’t have already said or shown in his own films, and those of others (Téchiné, Vecchiali)? A counter-shot of unfiltered reality, to clarify everything that Nolot had already revealed, under the guise of fiction, about his life as a former gigolo, sublimated in cinema, and also to surrender a few extra secrets, a little intimacy still to be confessed before dropping the curtain? Or conversely: an unexpected coda, filmed by someone else to say: I fooled you, it wasn’t me, only fiction disguised with my face, and here I am as I am, body and soul totally bared, delivered to you once and for all?  In fact, Maxence Vassilyevitch’s film opens on the whiteness of an almost naked body, bent in fatigue, swollen with old age, laboriously getting out of the bed where he sleeps alone, donning a sweater thrown on the floor the evening before, then making his way with difficulty with his large manly belly, his spindly manly legs, towards his breakfast – but first: a cigarette. The film then lets the day unfold, without taking its gaze off Nolot, watching him do a handful of ordinary things, listening to him talk about memories, known and unknown. Not like his films, nor totally different, I’ve Already Died Three Times incites an emotion that partly relies on something quite stupid. Roland Barthes had described Nolot as a “roulure [tramp], but in the semantic sense of the term”: with no attachment, no place, no bearings. His films say nothing else, and a question that haunted all of them: where can you seek refuge, in the end, when you’ve led this vagabond life? I’ve Already Died Three Times has brought the news back for us. It the news is good: Nolot is safe, and under his drooping eyelids, his beautiful sad eyes have not lost  their sparkle.

Jérôme Momcilovic