When Lionel Jospin played at the cinema in The Name of People

The former Prime Minister, who died this Sunday, played his own role with a scathing second degree, facing Jacques Gamblin and Sara Forestier.

16 years ago, he made a notable appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. But not as Prime Minister. His political career already seemed to be behind him, after the failure of the 2002 Presidential election. It was as a film actor that Lionel Jospin – who has just passed away at the age of 88 – walked the Croisette, an improbable member of the cast of Michel Leclerc’s film, The Names of Peoplethen presented in a special screening in the Critics’ Week selection.

In this film, Jacques Gamblin plays Arthur Martin, a moderate, calm, gray left-wing man. And who officially declares himself to be a “Jospinist”. A fan. One of the few still nostalgic for the former leader of the Socialist Party. And suddenly, when he has fallen in love with an anti-fascist anarchist (we would say LFI today), his young partner arranges an evening with… Lionel Jospin! Here is the Statesman who arrives at his home, all smiles, to spend a surrealist friendly evening. A great moment of cinema as recounted by Michel Leclerc in First :

“When we wrote the scene, it was like we were challenging ourselves. Once it was in the film, I realized that it excited everyone a little bit.“, the filmmaker confided to us at the time. “Moreover, at Critics’ Week in Cannes, people came to ask for his autographs. As he is by definition the anti-bling politician, I think that people find a new interest in him given the current situation…”

But then how did Lionel Jospin end up in The Names of People ? Leclerc explained to Figaro which convinced the politician to turn into an actor: “Six months before filming, we sent the script to Lionel Jospin, rue de Solférino, at the headquarters of the Socialist Party. We had no response. It was a friend of a friend of a friend who finally gave it to him personally. Lionel Jospin replied to us in a letter that he found the script very amusing but he did not want to make any commitment before meeting us”.

Finally, the flow passes and Michel Leclerc undertakes not to put dialogue in the Prime Minister’s mouth: “I gave him complete freedom in his comments…” Lionel Jospin thus improvised and took obvious pleasure in playing his own role on screen, with an obvious sense of self-deprecation. Also a way of breaking this austere image that he kept throughout his life.

The Names of People remains Michel Leclerc’s greatest success to date, with almost 1 million admissions in theaters.