Guillaume Gallienne, Caucasus departure

He says it all in The Mist Drinker , so let's not repeat here what you will read there, nor what you know from the film The Boys and Guillaume, at the Table! The member of the Comédie-Française has long slipped into the skin of women. At school, he was called a "faggot" , a "queer" , and his parents did not help him. On the contrary, his "paranoid" father, writes Gallienne, distributed blows with a belt to his offspring (six children including a girl). His mother was "funny" but "without tenderness" . At 12, the future actor suffered a breakdown. In these autobiographical pages, neither bitterness nor pathos appear, but the fear of sinking again into a melancholy disguised as laziness, like Oblomov, is repeated. So he battles against the fall and when the suffering resurfaces, he explodes. This volume from the collection My Night at the Museum is surprising because the self-portrait is not flattering.

Before meeting the actor in a Georgian restaurant near Republic Square, where he is a regular, I had reservations. I was irritated by the pride emanating from what he old-fashionedly calls his "lineage." The actor, through his mother, descends from an aristocratic Georgian family to which he is very attached. The Mist Drinker takes place partly in Tbilisi, where he goes to contemplate the portrait of his great-grandmother nicknamed Babou, painted by the portraitist Savely Sorin.