Mathieu Kassovitz is a useful, unshowy actor who is happiest at the edge of someone else's frame, and a director who made one film, La Haine, that most of his acting and nearly all of his later directing has not come near.
Fi1m perspective
On screen Mathieu Kassovitz is usually the man at the edge of the picture, watching. In Amélie (2001) he is Nino Quincampoix, the shy young man Audrey Tautou's heroine circles for most of the film; in Munich (2005) he is Robert, one of the men around Eric Bana. Neither film belongs to him and he does not try to take it. He plays ordinary, unsure young men under some sort of pressure, and he plays them without asking us to notice.
The odd thing about his acting is that it is the smaller half of him. He grew up in his father's films and worked as an assistant director, made shorts from 1990 and a first feature, Métisse, in 1993. Then in 1995 he wrote, directed and co-edited La Haine, and everything since has been measured against it. He has kept the two jobs running side by side: acting in The Fifth Element (1997), Amélie and Munich, and later The Wolf's Call (2019) and the television series The Bureau, while directing thrillers, among them The Crimson Rivers (2000), Gothika (2003) and Babylon A.D. (2008).
La Haine is the reason to care. Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmaoui wander a Paris suburb through the day after a police beating, and Kassovitz lets them be funny and tiresome as well as angry, which is why we mind what happens to them. He cut it with Scott Stevenson so the aimlessness never goes slack, and the hip-hop from Assassin keeps it restless. We laughed far more than we expected to at three young men with nothing to do, and came out angrier than we went in, because the film had made us like them first and then reminded us what was waiting for them. He shows off, and a conversation can feel arranged to reach a useful line, but the friendship survives the flourishes.
The Hollywood directing did not go as well. Gothika and Babylon A.D. were met with mixed or worse notices and read, fairly, as work for hire. Kassovitz has said "I am not an actor-director. I am a director-actor," and has called acting mostly a matter of being a puppet. That is unkind to his own acting, which is good at exactly that: Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Steven Spielberg both needed a face that would not compete with the film, and he gave them one. But it is honest about where his attention goes. When we reviewed Munich and Amélie, we wrote about Bana and Tautou. He was not there to be written about.
If you want him as an actor, Amélie is the place; he is a generous partner to Tautou and asks nothing for himself. If you want to know what he is for, watch the film he made in 1995, then notice how little of what followed, in either job, looks like it.
Biography
Mathieu Kassovitz is a French actor, film director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 3 August 1967 in Paris, he began his career as an actor in the early 1990s. He is known for roles including Nino Quincampoix in Amélie (2001), Robert in Munich (2005) and Studer in Haywire (2011).
As a director, Kassovitz is best known for La Haine (1995), for which he won César Awards for Best Film and Best Editing, as well as the Best Director prize at Cannes. Other directorial credits include The Crimson Rivers (2000), Gothika (2003) and Babylon A.D. (2008). He has also appeared in The Fifth Element (1997), Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017).
