Rufus

In Amélie (2001), Rufus plays Raphaël Poulain, the withdrawn father of Audrey Tautou’s lonely heroine. Jean-Pierre Jeunet keeps the film busy with visual business, but this is a character defined by his reluctance to join in. We were moved by the heroine’s loneliness, even when the film was working too hard to charm us. Her father belongs to the same story of people keeping themselves apart, and that gives Rufus’s familiar outsider role something more useful to do than merely add to the collection of peculiar characters.

By the time he played Robert Kube in Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen (1991), Rufus had already appeared in films by Polanski, Lelouch, Demy and Godard. His work with Jeunet continued as Peeler in The City of Lost Children (1995). That recurring collaboration helps explain why eccentric supporting characters are so central to his reputation. These parts suit him, though repeatedly casting an actor as the odd man risks leaving him with little else to play.

Delicatessen earns our affection through the precision of its slapstick and Dominique Pinon’s sweetness. Rufus’s Robert Kube is part of the crowded supporting company, and we like the film without finding all its eccentrics equally rewarding. Some become tiresome; that is a reservation about the kind of part Rufus is repeatedly asked to play, not a reason to dismiss supporting work. Jeunet and Caro’s comedy works best when its unusual characters have something to contribute beyond their strangeness.

Train of Life (1998) gives Rufus the lead as Mordechai in a Holocaust tragicomedy. That role is worth remembering when the Jeunet association threatens to become the entire description of him. Still, the withdrawn father in Amélie offers a persuasive reason to value his smaller parts: there is recognisable loneliness beneath the eccentricity. Start there, allowing for a director who sometimes adds another flourish when the people already have our attention.