Claude Pinoteau has just left us. With him, French cinema is losing one of its greatest directors, as popular as it is demanding. He had inaugurated his career as a director with The Silent, a spy film of astonishing mastery, worn by a great Lino Ventura. First movie, first hit. But Claude Pinoteau had been at a good school, studying as a stage manager, prop designer and then assistant to some of the greatest names in French cinema: Henri Verneuil, Philippe de Broca, Jean-Pierre Melville, Max Ophüls, Jean Cocteau…
From film to film, Claude Pinoteau had established himself as one of the
most talented directors of his generation, both in the
that in the comedy of manners, in the art of
tie and unravel the threads of the most panting intrigues like
in that of making a fair, amused, lucid and benevolent portrait of
his contemporaries.
Claude Pinoteau will also be remembered by millions of
French, and this is certainly not the least of its merits, as the
director of La Boum, delicious comedy, real phenomenon
which revealed to the wider public the emerging talent of
the very young Sophie Marceau.