"My last dinner with Claude Lanzmann"

François Margolin is a director, producer and scriptwriter. He was a close friend of Claude Lanzmann and had produced his film The Four Sisters .

The last time I went to dinner with Claude Lanzmann – it was about three weeks ago – I I found surprisingly thin. He who had a stature of rock, a sort of giant, mbadive and indestructible, seemed to me different, weakened.

He'd called me a few days ago and said, "My darling, do you know who Claude Lanzmann is?" It was humor, of course, since we've seen each other extremely often in recent years and I had produced his last film, Napalm . "Have you heard of me before? Well, it would be nice for me to go eat together. "And he added," I invite you. "

This was the pinnacle of lanzmannian seduction. With a man, of course, not a woman, of course. He really needed to have something important to tell you to let himself go and show his feelings of male affection. Or that he had something to be forgiven when he felt that he had pbaded the limits – it had already happened to him, especially with me. A "normal" relationship with Claude Lanzmann often consisted in bickering, and especially getting bawled, by him.

In Paris it was said that he had "a difficult character", a mild euphemism, but I do not do not think that was the case. It was actually his way of loving, his way of life, his conception of existence. For, for him, life consisted in fighting, never accepting things as they are. To seek to denounce the scandals, to disbademble them, and first of all that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, an extermination whose historical recognition – I was going to say "official" – owes so much to his film Shoah his masterpiece.

I believe it is this permanent revolt, against all kinds of things of much less importance – such as the prohibitions of traffic in Paris, the speed limits, and even cons …- was on the contrary what made it hold, and that allowed him, at eighty-two, to continue making movies -including at the end of the world, as in North Korea, for this film testament that is Napalm -, to continue to write books, to continue to direct the magazine "Les Temps Modernes", to continue to write mails, so well written that we wanted to keep them to publish them. And, of course, to continue to be interested in women as a young man of twenty. The age he always thought he had.

With him, one had the feeling that immortality existed and that it was the living proof of it. Not that of the Immortals, those members of the French Academy of which he would have liked to be a part but to which an unjust regulation prevented him from applying (despite the desire of his great friend Jean d'Ormesson). No, rather than – and I may be shocked – Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader of North Korea, still officially President of the country, nearly twenty-five years after his death.

Death revolted him and he did not accept it. Neither for him, nor for his beloved mother, nor for his beloved sister, nor for his beloved son, Felix, who died of a horrible cancer eighteen months ago, at the age of twenty-three. "Against which he fought like a lion," he said.

I forgot: this force of nature loved to dive, ten meters. Even at his age. During our last dinner, he confessed: "You realize: they operated on me and the doctors do not guarantee that I will be able to dive this summer. Now, if I do not dive, I'm dead. "He had also called his most famous collection of texts: The Tomb of the Divine Diver .

I was picked up at his apartment on Rue Boulard, in the 14th district he was so fond of, close to the building where Simone de Beauvoir had lived. With my car, convinced he was not fit to drive.

I was wrong: he explained to me that it was out of the question not to take his. "Do you think I became crippled?" He threw me, almost threatening. So we decided to take hers. But first he had to choose his tie: it was out of the question that he would come out "badly dressed", without a dark suit, without his immaculate white shirt, and without a tie, of course.

The maid brought three and he asked me to choose. What I did. The knot was executed brilliantly, in a flash of seconds. It only remained for me to fold his collar on the knot. It was immaculate and yet we were both going to eat at our favorite Italian restaurant. A neighborhood restaurant, no frills.

In the garage, I proposed to drive. "It's not right?" He explained almost furiously. Me: "At least to get out of the garage?" Lanzmann had indeed a very large car, very wide and the turns of the car park were so tight that he had repeatedly scratched the sides of his vehicle. So it was no.

He executed a succession of front and back steps, impressive, to cross every turn, and he managed to get out without the slightest problem.

"Do not you think I'm extremely bright?" He asked as we reached the street. "Yes, of course, Claude."

Claude loved to boast, and to be the first singer of his qualities. Like a child. He was the best driver, the best diver, the best lover, of course, and even, he explained to me one day when I was coming back from a ski resort where I had stayed in a hotel he had frequented in time with Simone de Beauvoir, the best skier in the world: he claimed to have won a very famous race, which was, of course, totally wrong!

But that was it Claude Lanzmann: a young man in a body ninety-two years old

At the restaurant he ordered his favorite pasta, spaghetti alle vongole a plate of prosciutto and wine, Montepulciano d'Abbruzzo . He told me about his medical problems and the consequences of the operation he had just undergone. He could not bear the thought of risking being diminished.

And then it came to the real purpose of his invitation: he wanted to tell me about his plans and, in particular, an idea that I had suggested during a recent trip to St. Petersburg to present Napalm .

It was about making the sequel to his famous Why Israel? of the seventies. I thought that he was the only one who could talk today, objectively and with enthusiasm, about what had become of Israel, the country he loved and that many people in the world hated in 2018. He was an unconditional defender of the country, which had been a safe haven for all those Holocaust survivors he had interrogated during all these years, such as those "Four Sisters" whose portraits had just pbaded on ARTE.

Nothing in the last few years had pleased him more than the fact that the city of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, the Israeli Deauville, named its waterfront promenade: "Promenade Claude Lanzmann ". He had told me about it a good fifteen times

He was excited by the idea of ​​this "Why Israel 2?", And especially by that to embark on a new adventure. It was as if his physical troubles disappeared in an instant. That they were suddenly forgotten.

There was talk of politics. Trump, Macron … He knew everything. He asked me if I knew people in the ministries at the Elysee. He explained to me that he, so keen to call each other-ministers or Presidents of the Republic on all sides-to express their support or disagreements, often virulently, "no longer had the mobile phone belongs to nobody". "It's really a new generation," he sighed.

During all this time, he had hardly eaten anything, just a little drunk. I had never seen it that way and I admit that I was worried.

Claude always reminded me of an ogre. Who devoured everything in its path: beings and life. This life he loved so much.

He was a man more than us. Perhaps because he had rubbed shoulders with so many who had survived the Shoah, and for him it was life that always had to triumph.

Even in the most atrocious situations. Even when the most terrible dilemmas occurred

If the word was not a little overused, I would say it was a mensch . As we say in Yiddish culture

Claude, I would have liked you to finish your spaghetti alle vongole . As usual.