Did you hear the one about
the comedian turned eminent
director? ... Rock presenting the 2005
Oscars. Photograph: Mark J Terrill
Comedian Chris Rock has aired his disaffection with Hollywood before. "Hollywood's just not funny," he has said, daringly soon before accepting the gig to present the Oscars. "You walk around and think 'Where's the funny at?' All there is is a bunch of directors and actors walking around. I like going into a diner and meeting real people. Funny is where the real people are."
What few people had guessed is that behind the Everybody Hates Chris and Madagascar star's Tinseltown fatigue lay a deep affection for the nouvelle vague, which he is apparently planning to honour with a remake of Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon, from his own script (with Louis CK) and with himself as both director and star.
Rohmer's work is memorably described by David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film as "semiformal, literary inquiries into the sensibilities of a group of people gathered round some modest action - so modest, indeed, that an outsider might not notice". Whether such nuances will survive the translation to contemporary America and the directorial touch of a comedian not hitherto known - in films like The Longest Yard and Dogma - for fine-tuned subtlety, remains to be seen.
But one crosses one's fingers that it will. Many a comedian before him has aspired to serious roles - Kenneth Williams longed to play Shakespeare even as he was camping it up for the Carry On franchise, and Woody Allen's fondness for intense European psychodrama is, some would argue, all too well known.
With any luck, it could set a model for other comics. While the prospect of, say, the Farrelly brothers tackling a Bresson re-make, or Rowan Atkinson deploying his mobile features in one of Dreyer's silent scripts, is enough to set stomachs across Europe turning, other similarly unexpected projects have worked out a lot better - the lugubrious jowls of Buster Keaton, for instance, were perfect for Samuel Beckett's Film, and many would argue that Jerry Lewis's finest hour on film was in the less than laugh-a-minute King of Comedy.
Which funnymen would you most like to see showing off their serious side?
