Beauty, kindness, cinema — and one story I cannot tell

My French friend Thomas has a story about Gaspard Ulliel.

It is not shocking and not for me to tell. I wish I could. It is simply beautiful.

Xavier Dolan, the film director, came closest to putting it into words.

“Your discreet laugh, your attentive eye. Your scar. Your talent. Your listening. Your whispers, your kindness. Every feature of your person was actually made from a sparkly sweetness.”

Ah yes. The scar.

Gaspard Ulliel had that characteristic, dimple-like scar on his left cheek. He got it at the age of six when he tried to ride a Doberman pinscher like a horse and the dog caught him across the face with its claws. The scar became one of his most recognisable features — and, somehow, part of his beauty. Ulliel himself once said that it might have helped his acting because it added something to his face.

I recently watched two Ulliel movies.

In André Téchiné’s Les égarés (Strayed) (2003), he plays a mysterious young wanderer who leads a mother and her two children, fleeing from the Nazis, into the forest, where they spend a long period of survival, danger and sexual tension.

Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times described Ulliel as an intense but assured seventeen-year-old, with a “feral quality” that was unsettling, but also the instincts and skills of a survivalist.

I love feral.

I then saw Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) (2004), which tells the story of a young woman’s relentless search for her fiancé, who has disappeared in the trenches of the Somme during the First World War.

Ulliel plays a gentle young soldier, psychologically broken by the horrors of war. His performance relies heavily on those expressive, soulful eyes and a melancholic vulnerability that lingers.

I love deeply romantic, tragic and hauntingly vulnerable boys.

These were his breakout roles.

Afterwards came the young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising (2007), and twelve years as the face of Chanel’s men’s fragrance, Bleu de Chanel.

His androgynous beauty and roles in films such as Strayed, Paris, je t’aime and Saint Laurent also made him an important gay icon for many viewers.

In Saint Laurent (2014), Ulliel played the iconic fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, in a film that explored the designer’s homosexuality, his intense relationships and the gay world of 1970s Paris.

And then there was Louis Garrel.

Ulliel later spoke warmly about their kiss, which was not even in the original script. Bonello decided on the night that the scene needed it. Ulliel and Garrel agreed to give him one take. Ulliel described the moment as “magic”.

With It’s Only the End of the World (2016), he played Louis, a gay playwright returning home to his family in Xavier Dolan’s award-winning drama.

And in Paris, je t’aime (2006), in the “Le Marais” segment directed by Gus Van Sant, he appears as a young gay man flirting in a print shop.

But God gave him beauty…

…and God took it away.

Ulliel died on 19 January 2022, aged just thirty-seven, following a skiing accident at La Rosière resort in Savoie.

People spoke afterwards of his profound kindness, his discretion and his warmth.

And that is what brings me back to Thomas.

I still have no idea what his story is.

I only know that it is beautiful.

Perhaps that is enough.

For someone whose face seemed almost impossibly made for cinema, it is strangely fitting that what stays with me is not a film, or a photograph, or even that famous scar.

It is kindness.

And that does it for me.