Grégoire Colin Movies
Tall, lean, and possessing sensuously moody features, French actor Grégoire Colin has been acting in films and on the stage since he was 12. Although he found steady work in his native country for years, it was not until 1992 that audiences outside of France became aware of him. That year, he had the title role of a disturbed, enigmatic teenager in Agnieszka Holland's Olivier, Olivier and gave an unnerving performance that caught the attention of international critics and art house audiences.Colin went on to excel in roles that demanded of him a sober, sometimes dark, complexity. In 1994, he starred as a serious young monk in another art house favorite, Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain, and that same year portrayed a teenager looking for love in the wrong places in U.S. Go Home, the first of his collaborations with director Claire Denis. He and Denis collaborated again, two years later, on the widely acclaimed Nénette et Boni, in which the actor starred as a lovelorn pizza maker; in 1999, he once more stepped in front of Denis' camera to play a young Foreign Legion recruit, in the military drama Beau Travail.
Colin did some of the strongest and most disturbing work of his career to date in Erick Zonca's La Vie Rêvée des Anges (The Dreamlife of Angels, 1998), an internationally celebrated film in which he played a coolly monstrous club owner. After doing some lighter work in Jacques Rivette's Sécret Défense, a comedy drama that cast him as a young man bent on killing his father, Colin stepped into period costume to portray a Jewish radical and poet living in pre-World War II Pairs in Disparus (1999). ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
- 1992
- R
Olivier, the nine-year-old son of a country veterinarian, vanishes one afternoon on the way to his grandmother's house. The emotional aftermath of his disappearance sends his father packing from France to Africa and nearly destroys his mother, who clings to her remaining child, Nadine, and her devoted neighbor, Marcel. Several years later, having relocated to the city, the police investigator who handled the case meets a Paris rent boy whom he believes to be the missing Olivier. Once he returns to his rural home, the teenaged Olivier tries to assuage his mother's now-entrenched grief and heal the rift between his reunited parents. Meanwhile, he must overcome his brooding, adolescent sister's jealousy and doubts about his identity and reconcile his sleazy street life with his picturesque new surroundings. Questions about the tight-lipped Olivier's true motivations continue to crop up, however, threatening to send his mother over the edge for good. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- François Cluzet, Brigitte Roüan, (more)
- 1991
In this coming-of-age drama, based on a novel by Charles Juliet, François is a sensitive and thoughtful student at a military boarding school in 1948. He is fourteen and an orphan, and the French are still fighting in Indochina, as they will continue to do for many years. He believes he will be sent to fight there when he graduates, and he is sure he will die in that far-away place. While he sees himself as stubbornly principled, others, including the school's bullies, simply see him as stubborn and a nuisance besides. In fact, his humiliation by the school's bullies is so constant that one of his persistent fantasies is to become a skilled boxer and trounce them all. That is one reason why he has become fixated on one of the school's military instructors, a handsome sergeant who was a championship boxer. While there may be an unformed erotic component to his fixation, it does not manifest overtly but adds fuel to his sexual initiation with the sergeant's wife. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Laurent Grévill, Martin Lamotte, (more)
- 1989
Most of the characters in this romantic drama are waiting for something. Jeanne (Clementine Celarie) is waiting for her husband Francois (Daniel Olbrychski) to return; he abandoned her and their son Christophe (Gregoire Colin) a couple of years ago. The boy is waiting for his father, too. Meanwhile, Jeanne's current lover Marcel (Jean-Paul Lillienfeld) is waiting for her to come to her senses about the cad who went a way, and recognize the worthiness of his love for her. Finally, the absent husband is also waiting for the right time to make his belated reappearance. All this takes place near the gas station Jeanne runs in a dessicated and remote region in southern France. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Grégoire Colin, Clémentine Célarié, (more)
