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Jean-Charles Tacchella, French film-maker feted for his romantic comedy Cousin Cousine

He broke into film after the war, knew Jean Renoir and Erich von Stroheim, and founded the avant-garde film club Objectif 49

Jean-Charles Tacchella, the screenwriter and film director who has died aged 98, was best known outside his native France for Cousin Cousine (1975), a light comedy of manners which became an indie hit in the US and received Oscar nominations for best foreign-language film and best original screenplay.
The film starred Victor Lanoux and Marie-Christine Barrault (who won a best actress nomination) as cousins by marriage who meet at a family wedding while their spouses (Marie-France Pisier and Guy Marchand) are off having an affair with each other. The two become friends, decide that having a platonic relationship is useless, and fall in love.
Marie-France Pisier won the Best Actress César for her role and the film’s international success launched her brief Hollywood career. Cousin Cousine was later remade (as Cousins) into a Hollywood rom-com with Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini. However, critics considered Tacchella’s well-acted tale of love and loyalty to be by far the superior of the two.
Jean-Charles Tacchella was born on September 23 1925 and spent his early life in Marseille. After the Liberation, he left for Paris with hopes of breaking into the film world and, aged 19, joined L’Écran français, a weekly magazine for cineastes, where he worked with Jean Renoir, Jacques Becker and Jean Grémillon.
He became friends with the avant-garde visionary director Erich von Stroheim, the Italian actress Anna Magnani, and the neorealist Italian film director and actor Vittorio De Sica, and co-founded the monthly magazine Ciné Digest.
In 1948, with the film critic and theorist André Bazin, René Clément and others, Tacchella founded Objectif 49, an avant-garde film club whose president was Jean Cocteau.
Regarded as the cradle of the French “New Wave”, Objectif 49 organised the 1949 Festival du Film Maudit (“cursed film”) in Biarritz, which drew public attention to films the group considered unjustly neglected – such as L’Atalante, from 1934, The Long Voyage Home (1940) and Les Dames du Bois de Bologne (1945) – and is regarded as a landmark in the history of postwar French film culture.
Tacchella directed 11 features, winning praise for his technical virtuosity and smooth camera-work, though apart from Cousin Cousine few bothered the critics across the channel.
Escalier C (1985, “Staircase C”) featuring the lives of assorted occupants of a rooming house – a gay fashion artist, a secretary who is forever quarrelling with her lover, an unpublished writer, a divorcee ruled by her infant daughter, a philosophical drunk and a lonely old lady who feeds the neighbourhood cats – was the French box-office hit of 1985 and won the Prix de l’Académie française as the best film of that year.
However, one British critic observed that the film’s success “proves once more the rewards due to staying within well-tried traditions and not making excessive demands upon the audience”, while another pronounced it “more nouvelle Vogue than nouvelle vague”.
Travelling Avant (“Tracking shot”, 1987) was a semi-autobiographical piece set in the Paris of 1948, in which three earnest young cinephiles juggle their ambitions to film their own masterpieces or form their own film society, with various romantic entanglements. One critic described it as “a delightful little comedy, crammed full of cineaste in-jokes”.
In The Man in My Life (1992), Maria de Medeiros played Aimee – a capricious Holly Golightly type who runs around in a blue sports car looking for a husband to keep her, while failing to see that her Mr Right is her best friend (Thierry Fortineau), a poor bookseller. Tacchella both directed and wrote the screenplay for the film, which, however, struck one British critic as “like the first draft for a musical – without the songs.”
From 2000 to 2003 Tacchella was president of the Cinémathèque française, an institute that holds one of the largest archives of film paraphernalia in the world.
Jean-Charles Tacchella, born September 23 1925, died August 29 2024

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