Don't be fooled by Jean Dujardin's smooth, possibly Oscar-winning, charm in The Artist. True, France is more than ever in love with Dujardin: French Spitting Image has rushed out a new puppet of him, he was among French GQ's men of the year, and is permanently on the front pages. But if France adores and idolises him (he has long been Paris's most bankable actor) it's not for his sauveness but because he is the undisputed master of French naff.
An unpretentious, working-class joker, who was a locksmith before launching into cabaret standup, Dujardin found fame in the late 1990s for his scathing sendups of Jean-average: bog-standard French men, with all their prejudices, foibles and bathroom-habits (pumicing their heels) or cruelty to their girlfriends (accelerating and breaking in the car while she tries to apply makeup). For years, Dujardin has been the man who forced workaday France to laugh – very loudly – at itself.
From 1999 to 2003, he starred in one of France's most successful TV comedy sketch-shows, Un Gars et une Fille (A Guy and a Girl), a series of seven-minute micro-skits about the relationship between a highly competitive and often downright cruel French couple with the pet-names Loulou and Chouchou, hailed as a "phenomenon" of modern French society. Think of a cross between Little Britain and Harry Enfield, but with no gothic twists.
In 2005 he became a box-office sensation with the cinema surfer-dude pastiche, Brice de Nice, about a 30-year-old with worse hair than Jimmy Savile, clothed only in yellow and obsessed with the film Point Break. Brice, whose catchphrase is Jt'ai cassé – meaning gotcha, was a character Dujardin created himself in his standup days. But with the film's success, his naff catchphrases were soon being aped by French teenagers and Dujardin became a kind of French Catherine Tate.
He has long been tipped as "the new Jean-Paul Belmondo", able to move between deadpan and madcap. He won acclaim in France for the spoof-spy OSS 117 films, a kind of French Austin Powers, then impressed critics with serious roles. Le Monde has hailed The Artist's "unprecedented triumph" for a French film, even before the Oscars ceremony next March.
Dujardin's hilarious attempts to keep pace with US media promotion of The Artist without understanding a word his interviewers are saying have become viral hits in France, particularly his desperate impersonation of a camel on The Late Show. France loves him because he's not a snob. But celebrity magazines are hungry for him too. When Dujardin separated from the mother of his two sons and married his Un Gars et Une Fille co-star Alexandra Lamy, they were quickly dubbed the "French Brangelina".
