Disappearance of Jean-Paul Belmondo: “Tac tac badaboum! It will swing in the clouds!”

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On the front page of the press, the disappearance, Monday, of actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, icon of French cinema.

“French cinema loses a star, the firmament gains one”: in unison with the French press, Le Parisien / Today in France salutes the extraordinary personality and the exceptional career of the “Magnifique”: “Tac tac badaboum! It will swing in the clouds”. Jean-Paul Belmondo the facetious, “the most fanciful, the most endearing, the most popular actor in French cinema”: Le Figaro pays homage to “the banter, the natural, the feline and distanced game” of “L’as des as”, revealed to the cinema by the New Wave. “I’m dead. And you’ll miss me, because it was funny.”

A black and white photo taken on the set of “Tendre voyou”, a quote from Jean-Paul Belmondo in “Le Marginal”, as an epitaph: for Release, if one asks oneself “why Jean-Paul Belmondo (had) become the French incarnation of the star”, “the answer lies in the line which connects (his) double career of nanars and films of authors: ( a) permanent recklessness. So natural and so inaccessible “.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor with a thousand facets was also passionate about sport, boxing, tennis, football – to the point of having been for a time vice-president of PSG.

Hence the homage of The team, which returns this morning to the series of draws of the Blues: “Peur sur la ville”, headlines the sports daily, in reference both to the current bad patch of the France team and to the film by Henri Verneuil, released in 1975. A huge commercial success at the time, with nearly 4 million admissions …

Homage, also, of the foreign press. The evening quotes, him, the French actor Jean Dujardin, who had declared during the presentation of a César of honor Jean-Paul Belmondo, in 2017, that he was “the French cinema all by itself”. For the Belgian newspaper, “Bébel” was a “giant” who had managed to “seize the hearts of the public with a mimicry and a pirouette and never let go for more than half a century”.

But where did this nickname Bébel come from? From the character of the burglar Pépel, hero of the film “Les bas-fonds” by Jean Renoir, after Orient Day. “Bébel the magnificent is gone”, announces the Lebanese daily, touched by this actor who knew “to do everything without taking himself too seriously”. For the British daily The Guardian, Belmondo will forever remain “the face of the New Wave”, the face like no other of a comedian whose one of the professors had predicted that “his career as principal actor was doomed to failure, because of His look”. “People will burst out laughing when they see an actress in Belmondo’s arms,” ​​said the teacher, not very inspired.

Belmondo, his jokes, his smile, his face… and his stunts. To do with a drawing by Ranson, for Le Parisien / Today in France, which shows him arriving in paradise suspended from a helicopter, as in “Le Guignolo”. Bébel, also seen in “The Man from Rio”, suspended in the void between two buildings in Brasilia. Hanging one last time, from his tombstone, before the big jump, in the drawing of Hic, for the Algerian daily El Watan.

From Rio Man to Jair Bolsonaro. In Brazil, the president’s proximity to the army worries more and more the opposition, one year before the presidential election. While Jair Bolsonaro has engaged in a standoff with democratic institutions and many military police have been participating for weeks in demonstrations in support of the president, the press wonders if the rallies scheduled for today of the independence of Brazil, will turn to the confrontation between the pro and the anti-Bolsonaro. According to Release, “the growing role of the military in all instances of power” would arouse, in any case, more and more, “the specter of the putsch of 1964”. This concern is evoked in a drawing by Nando Motta, found on Twitter, where a TV presenter wonders “whether there is going to be a coup or not”. “Do you remember when the concern, on this holiday, was whether it was going to rain or not,” regrets a Brazilian woman in front of her screen.

It is a scenario worthy of the cinema. Six Palestinians escaped Monday, September 6, from a high security prison in Israel … by digging a tunnel. This “great Palestinian escape” makes the headlines of many Arab dailies, notably the Saudi newspaper Arab News, which reports that the news was met with celebrations in the West Bank and Gaza. “The escape that humiliated the occupier”, rejoices the pan-Arab daily in London Al-Araby Al-Jadid, by reporting the “shock” caused in Israel by this incredible escape. Al-Araby Al Jadid, which also publishes a drawing of Hajaj, where we see two Palestinians digging two tunnels that gradually form the two bands of the Israeli flag.

We do not leave each other on this. There is no question of letting you slip away without sharing with you the first images of a work installed this weekend in front of the stadium of the Scottish club Brechin City Football Club. Fans will now be able to admire a remarkable statue of Scottish hero William Wallace – whose character was portrayed onscreen by actor Mal Gibson in “Braveheart”. A total disaster, reminiscent of a totally missed statue of Cristiano Ronaldo, made for Madeira airport, and which had displeased the family of the Portuguese footballer so much that it had to be changed. Not sure that Mel Gibson’s is making old bones either. Read in The Independent.

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