Humbert Balsan 1954-2005

Dave Kehr

‘Qui peut remplacer Balsan?’ asked the Paris daily Libération after Humbert Balsan took his own life on February 10.

The question contains its own answer. It is unlikely that anyone will replace Balsan as a producer who positively reveled in putting together impossible projects. It is to him we owe all of the late films of the great Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, from Adieu, Bonaparte in 1985 to Alexandria ... New York in 2004. It was Balsan who helped to realize the ambitions of a large number of French women filmmakers, including Sandrine Veysset (Will it Snow for Christmas?, 1996), Brigitte Roüan (Post coítum animal triste, 1997), Françoise Prenant (Paris, mon petit corps est bien las de ce grand monde, 2000), and Claire Denis (L’Intrus, 2004). And it was Balsan who opened the way to European financing and worldwide exposure to a remarkable group of Arab filmmakers, among them Maroun Bagdadi (L’Homme Voilé, 1987), Yousry Nasrallah (El Medina, 2000; The Gate of the Sun, 2004), and Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention, 2002).

Balsan seemed almost defiantly uninterested in financial success. Even when he attempted more commercial fare – he was, for example, the French producing partner on many of the Merchant-Ivory films (Quartet [1981], Jefferson in Paris [1995]), but never the profitable ones (such as The Remains of the Day [1993]). Out of the more than sixty feature films in which Balsan was involved as a producer, there is not a single one that would be known to a public beyond dedicated cinephiles.

Balsan’s apparent indifference to financial success may have been a byproduct of his birth. A member of the Wendel clan, the heirs of France’s largest steel concern, Balsan belonged to France’s vanishing haute bourgeoisie, and had the manner to match – elegant, affable, slightly formal. He had an apartment near the Champs- Elysées (where Samuel Fuller and his family lived for much of the 1980s), an estate near Aix-en-Provence, and a gift for seeming at home anywhere in the world. Tall, blond and good-looking, he had the air of a natural aristocrat, something Robert Bresson recognised when he cast the nineteen-year-old Balsan as Gauvin in Lancelot du Lac (1974). (Balsan also worked as the second assistant director on Bresson’s Le Diable probablement [1977]). Although Balsan used to joke that it was his experiences as an actor that made him want to be a producer, he continued to play small roles in films, including Maurice Pialat’s Loulou (1980), Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981) and James Ivory’s Le Divorce (2003).

Of course, for a producer on Balsan’s level, acting is also part of the job requirement. Always impeccably attired, in the style the French call bon chic, bon genre and that Americans call preppy, Balsan invariably projected an air of calm self-confidence. He was the man who said yes, who opened doors and made things happen, seemingly without effort. Marianne Khoury, Youssef Chahine’s niece and producer, recalled for Libération her first meeting with Balsan: ‘We were sitting in the café of a hotel adding up columns of numbers and pulling out our hair, unable to see any way possible to get Adieu, Bonaparte in production. Then Balsan arrived. He sat down and smiled and everything lit up. The machine started to function. That was twenty-two years ago, and it never stopped.’

It is easy to imagine Balsan applying the same charm to his investors, assuring them – against all logic – that their money was safe, that fantastic returns were coming, that a shelf full of festival awards was just around the corner (the part about the awards was often true). But it was part of his magic to never speak of those things. If Yousry Nasrallah wanted to make a five hour film about a Palestinian village, the film would be made, even though its profit potential was less than zero. Though Balsan was clearly a master at negotiating the complexities and cronyism of the French film subsidy system, just where the bulk of the money came from remained a mystery.

It’s only now, after his death, that we can see what a good actor Balsan really was. Much of his money, it seems, was raised through the classic technique of the independent producer: he mortgaged his old films in order to make new ones. But by last February he had reached the limits of that strategy as well. There was nothing left to be sold or lent against, and at the time of his suicide Balsan had (according to Libération’s obituary) no less than eight films in various stages of production, ranging from the completed L’Intrus to Je viendrai seule, a script by the Cahiers du cinéma critic Mia Hansen-Løve that was in the first flush of development. The financial backbreaker appeared to be L’Homme de Londres, a film by the Hungarian director Béla Tarr that had acquired gigantic cost overruns because of Tarr’s insistence on shooting in the Corsican port of Bastia, apparently not a film-friendly location. The end came when Tarr discovered that the main cathedral of Bastia was covered with scaffolding as part of a renovation, and demanded that it be removed at a cost of two-hundred-thousand Euros – money that Balsan simply did not have.

We will never know why Humbert Balsan decided to hang himself in his office that day. Friends have spoken of a serious, long term depression that Balsan did his faultless best to hide from the world; perhaps it was his intense activity as a producer that protected him from his private demons, until one day it was no longer enough. At the moment, L’Homme de Londres has suspended production, with half of its five-million Euro budget spent and some thirty minutes of footage shot. No one has stepped forward to replace Balsan. No one is likely to.