Jean-François Davy, but who is it? Sit, there are some for a while. Even if it is necessary to be short, it is on the erotic filmmaker who disappeared this Friday, May 2 in the morning of a heart attack that a film should be made. A daddy’s porn pope in the 1970s? Yes, but it is only a chapter of a novel led by beating drum.
“He had a thousand lives. It was a force of nature, he had almost no white hair. There was Rock’n’roll left, and never wanted to die in Ehpad. His heart attack the day before his 80th birthday planned this Saturday (May 3), this is his last fantasy. As if he had managed to master his own death, ”confides this Friday his son Mathieu Davy, renowned lawyer.
But where do you start? The “mechanical banana” trilogy, “Take your tail like everyone else”, “Q”, which meets its audience from 1972 to 1974. “Paillards comedies”, a genre in its own right in this pompidolian and post-sixty-eightard that will open up to sexual freedom, Rabelaisian pleasure. Not porn – Davy will do it later – but “undressing polissonneries” as he says.
A “visionary”
Crazy about cinema, close to a time of the cinema notebooks, the director hits a big blow in 1975 with “exhibition”, documentary on one of the first actresses X, Claudine Beccarie, whose film explores confessions, and in apotheosis, a very long scene of non -simulated masturbation.
It was the time of the “Empire of Senses” of Japanese Oshima, where cinema wants to take porn in arms, with a reflection on enjoyment. This film selected at the Cannes Film Festival, praised by three million spectators, is released in the “real” rooms – like the UGC Odéon – in this brief era of the Giscard years where porn has access to classic dark rooms, from 1974 to 1980.
It will also be the first film X of Saturday evening broadcast by Canal +. Davy will turn two suites, and will be “visionary”, according to his son Mathieu, showing the brutal reality of the commodification of sex and giving the floor to women, of “prostitution” – in which authentic prostitutes confide in front of the camera and discovered face – to “pornocrats”.
It is that in papa porn, everything was not cushy. Davy turns or also produces “to boil the pot”, he will say, real X films, of those where we do not always know, in the prism of today, where the consent of actresses stopped. Participates him in the artisanal porn cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and left before the industrial, mechanized, robotic porn era which goes further – too far – to capture an increasingly relentless audience. No more paillard comedies and kindly sulphurous embraces.
“It was a frustrated filmmaker”
Jean-François Davy always wants to return to the right path in a sense, find the cinema, the Great, he who admires Truffaut. He produces “the best way to walk” by Claude Miller with Patrick Dewaere, it is in this world that he dreams of holding his rank. But his comedy “Surprise Surprise” (1978), written in the company of Jean-Claude Carrière, with Michel Galabru and a skewer of great roles, a commercial fiasco, forces him to file for bankruptcy.
“He was a frustrated filmmaker, the bad student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, he who dreamed of a career in the mocky. It’s a UFO, ”says her third wife, Sylvie Davy. He will deliver memories of childhood in “Les Aiguilles Rouges” (2005), his most autobiographical film on his years of scouting in the Chamonix valley.
But the bitterness was not of putting in the life of the author of “Acrobit” or “May 68 in 69”, more recent projects that want parodies, false porn revisited in the 2000s. To do again, Jean-François Davy understands before almost everyone, the place that the video cassette then the DVD will take. This enthusiast of classics around the world becomes a publisher and launches the legendary collection Les Films de my life.
A life with his misunderstandings
“He was a businessman with a huge flair and human instinct,” said his son Mathieu. He did real estate. Buy, resell, touch everything … He was still heading a hotel-restaurant in Senegal. And he dreamed of producing the next film by Jean Becker, even older than him, but that could not be done. Recently, Jean-François Davy was still working on two scenarios.
A life with its misunderstandings, its unexpected, its tohu-bohu. A man who made Brigitte Lahaie run, signed or produces unavowable films with not always funny titles in the hard porn. A filmmaker who filmed an actress X – Claudine Beccarie – like a great witness, the author of her life, a woman and not only a body. A director who wanted to be Lelouch and who, failing that, has nevertheless escaped the hell of X.
He will be buried in the Quiberville-sur-Mer cemetery, on the Côte d’Albâtre (Seine-Maritime), next to his father, a painter, and his mother, who taught catechism. So be it.
