Louis Garrel reflects on vanity, fatherhood and his new film Just an Illusion

‘Even though I’ve been working in film for over 20 years, I still have this desire to look beautiful on screen,” says Louis Garrel, on a video call from his bed inside a boat off the coast of Corsica. The French film star is lying on his stomach, occasionally kicking up his bare legs, ruffling his curls and running the nail of his thumb over his moustache. I think the person he sees on the laptop screen in front of him is me, but I am pretty certain he is flirting with his own reflection.

The attraction between the Paris-born 43-year-old and the camera tends to be reciprocal. Long of limb, tousled of hair and chiselled of nose, Garrel has spent a career on screen as French cinema’s favourite Adonis – the man film-makers turn to when they need an erotic wrecking ball to smash up bourgeois twosomes and turn them into quivering menages a trois.

His breakout role in 2003 was as a priapic student revolutionary who inserts himself in the sexual bond between his twin sister (Eva Green) and a visiting American student (Michael Pitt) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Since then, he’s been reliably effective as smouldering sexpots whose intense stare cuts across dancefloors – bewitching two friends in Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s 2010 film Heartbeats, enticing Angelina Jolie into a fling in high-fashion drama Couture, or hawkishly pouncing on the poor Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic Saint Laurent, where he played Karl Lagerfeld’s dandy companion Jacques de Bascher. “I fight against it because I know that good actors don’t care about looking good,” he excuses himself. “But I’m not such a good actor.”

That is false modesty of the highest order. He hails from a dynasty of actor-film-makers that includes his mother Brigitte Sy, father (and ex-lover of Velvet Underground singer Nico) Philippe Garrel and grandfather Maurice Garrel, on whose advice he applied to and graduated from Paris’s prestigious Conservatoire drama school. On screen, he has not just impersonated dreamboats but also Alfred Dreyfus, King Louis XIII, Robespierre and Jean-Luc Godard. And in his latest film, Garrel does something that only good actors can do: to play magnificently against type.

In the comedy Just an Illusion, he is Yves, a former executive at a kitchen appliance firm who has recently lost his job but can’t bring himself to tell his family. Befitting the film’s 80s suburban Paris setting, Garrel’s hair here is bouffy rather than tousled, the moustache more Ron Burgundy than The Leopard-era Alain Delon. He wears a billowing beige trenchcoat that makes him look as befuddled as Monsieur Hulot, the comical everyman in the films of Jacques Tati.

In one scene, Yves is flicking through a magazine on the living room sofa while their apartment block’s caretaker Monsieur Berger (Pierre Lottin) shows Yves’ wife Sandrine (Camille Cottin, of Call My Agent fame) how to use her new desktop computer. As the mulleted Berger places his tattooed paw over Sandrine’s hand to guide the cursor, she giggles in delight. “If you go like this, Sandrine, it jerks.” “It jerks off all over the place,” she coos back. Yves, startled by echoes of the frisson that has long vanished from his marriage, rushes to put out the sparks and shows Berger the door. If reducing France’s go-to libertine to an anxiety-ridden gooseberry isn’t a feat of acting, what is?

“When I was very young, a director told me that on screen you have to be like a gorilla,” Garrel says. “You have to be intense and fascinating to watch, but have absolutely no idea of yourself. When I’m playing a character like this one, I can do less, you know, modelling. I don’t care if I look good, and most of the time you are better on screen when you don’t care.”

A hit upon its French release this spring, Just an Illusion is directed by film-making duo Éric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, who have been a major guarantee of box office success since Untouchable, about the relationship between a wealthy quadriplegic and his home helper. Like that predecessor, their new film’s comedy is of the non-inflammatory kind, its emotional timbre unashamedly sentimental. But along the way, it processes some surprisingly big political themes, including Franco-German reconciliation, the 1870 Crémieux Decree that granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, the rise of the Front National and the anti-racism concerts that were organised in response. There is also the question of how a frustrated stay-at-home husband copes with a spouse embarking on a career. When Sandrine passes her computing exam and gets an executive-level job, Yves sheds tears of joy with her.

“What strikes me when I watch modern movies these days is that everybody gets divorced or separated and couples never live together from the beginning to the end,” says Garrel, who separated last year from his wife of eight years, the actor and model Laetitia Casta. “This movie portrays one man and one woman who stay together without separating, which would have been bourgeois in the 1970s but now feels very punk.”

The protagonist of Just an Illusion is not Yves but his younger son, 12-year-old Vincent (Simon Boublil), who has fallen hopelessly in love with a girl in his class. Vincent has caring parents, but the film’s central message is that at some point every generation has to tell the previous one to eff off, as well-meaning as they may be. I wonder how that message resonated with Garrel, given his profession is in keeping with family traditions? Has he ever told his parents to eff off? He answers in a way only someone whose family tree is mapped out on IMDb can. “Of course I love Pasolini, of course I love Godard, of course I love Truffaut. But I want to get inspired by films that don’t show at the Cinémathèque Française. Like Lethal Weapon. That is one of my favourite movies, I don’t care.” OK, but has he ever told his parents to do one? “It’s a small rebellion, I know, but that’s maybe my way to say fuck off.”

Just an Illusion is the 62nd film Garrel has acted in and his first role that really interrogates fatherhood. In real life, he has a five-year-old son from his relationship to Casta, and an 18-year-old adopted daughter, Oumy Bruni Garrel, from a previous relationship with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, sister of the former first lady of France, Carla Bruni. Oumy has starred in some films, but Garrel seems sanguine about the fact that the acting dynasty that shares his name may come to an end with his children. “She [Oumy] is a very talented actor, she has a gift. But I recently asked her, do you really want to become an actress? And she told me no, no, no, I don’t want that. So next year she’s going to study anthropology, sociology and philosophy. I’m very proud of that.” Did he discourage her? “She doesn’t need discouraging, because she’s seen the kind of life that we have.”

Seeing yourself through the eyes of your own children might make it harder to still be in love with yourself the way you were as a young man. But for an actor, it also makes it easier to not care, and act like a gorilla. Garrel seems to be developing a taste for it. Later this year, he will play the lead in It Will Happen Tonight, the new work by Nanni Moretti, one of Europe’s great comic film-makers.

“I’m 43 years old, and the moments that I appreciate the most as an actor now are when I’m in a screening room and I hear people laughing at me,” Garrel says. “It’s terrible. But this is what I’m waiting for.”

Just an Illusion is out in UK and Irish cinemas on 11 September.