MORRISSEY, Jim

Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci: “The Golden Couple of European Cinema”

 

Jason Solomons (2009) has called Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci ‘the golden couple of European cinema’. Married in 1999, having met while making Gilles Mimouni’s romantic thriller L’Appartement (1996), Cassel and Bellucci have regularly formed an on-screen couple in French films including Dobermann (Jan Kounen, 1997), Agents secrets (Frédéric Schoendoerffer, 2004) and, most notoriously, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002). Off screen, the importance of the relationship to the couple’s European celebrity is highlighted by the intense media coverage of their co-appearances at festivals like Cannes and Venice. Though both have had notable roles in major Hollywood franchises (e.g. he in Ocean’s Twelve (2004); she in The Matrix Reloaded (2003)), Cassel and Bellucci have not appeared together in a Hollywood film. In this paper, I will interrogate the varying importance of the ‘celebrity couple’ to Cassel and Bellucci’s personae within and beyond continental Europe. My primary focus, however, will be on the ways in which these stars’ embodiments of gender and sexuality are modulated by their forming a celebrity couple. In several of his most fêted roles (as Vinz in La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), as Marcus in Irréversible, as Jacques Mesrine in L’Instinct de mort (Jean-François Richet, 2008)), Cassel embodies an exaggerated machismo, a “hyper-masculinity”, that can be seen to trouble traditional conceptions of gender (after Judith Butler) by signalling itself as performative. Investigating the extent to which the Cassel-Bellucci relationship might problematise such a reading, my paper will offer an extended analysis of one of Europe’s most influential celebrity couples.

 

Dr Jim Morrissey is a Teaching Associate in French Film Studies in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University.