Timothée Chalamet would like you to know he’s French. You may have seen the video of him, a teenage toothpick draped in sweats, rapping in his high-school auditorium: “It’s time to do my dance / Timmy Tim, pull up your pants / Voulez-vous coucher avec moi / Oui, je suis from France.” Or maybe you witnessed him years later, at the Paris premiere of Little Women, carrying one of those mini Eiffel Tower keychains. When it was announced earlier this year that the actor would be the new face of the perfume Bleu de Chanel, he dug deep to prove he was qualified. To his Frenchness, Timmy attributes his curls, his passion for the Saint-Étienne soccer team, his sense of observation, his newfound respect for “time, tradition, and conversation,” and a formative cedarwood-tinged sense memory following a visit to a perfumery in Grasse. “I remember very vividly feeling at the time that it was a creative expression to curate the scent of my room,” he said. “That felt very French and nostalgic.”
So just how French is he? Chéri, if you have to ask …
Unlike his actress sister, Pauline, Timothée has never lived in France full time, nor has he acted in a French film, though he would like François Ozon to please give him a call. With each movie release, the actor appears on French TV, news, and sometimes radio, almost always described by the epithet “Franco-American.” (His mother, Nicole Flender, is the American half; his father, Marc Chalamet, was born in Nîmes.) Growing up, Tim spent his dreamy Call Me By Your Name–esque summers visiting his grandparents in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village southwest of Lyon, where he says he played outside “while the adults had coffee.”
Timmy Wéek
There’s Something About Timothée
Okay, so what does the French media think? That the prodigious actor is the “ultimate Gen-Z sex symbol,” that Tim looks drawn by a “manga artist obsessed with young Werther,” that his twinky naked-back look at Venice Film Festival last year made the whole world swoon. (Given that the New York Times marked the age of the twink in 2018, it tracks that French media would only be catching on to it now.) Last year, one French journalist dedicated an entire book to him and his ilk — Harry Styles, Tom Holland — with a title that translates to Free From Masculinity: How Timothée Chalamet Made Me Believe in a New Man.
Still, I needed to know more. To help me litigate Timmy’s Frenchness, I consulted a panel of experts and critics: my French friends. We met while attending high school in Angoulême, the very town where Wes Anderson gathered his acting troupe for The French Dispatch — a film in which Chalamet does not speak French.
“First of all, one French particularity is that we don’t like to be told who to like,” said teacher and artist Aude Anquetil in French, holding her hand-rolled cigarette aloft. “I think this new category of fuckable guy, like Timothée or Harry Styles, it’s so trendy. In France, we prefer dudes a bit more random. It’s very American to have tastes in men that are on trend.” She admitted she likes him as an actor and person, but that as a fantasy, he has no hold over her. Has she heard him speak French? “Ridiculous. Almost humiliating.” Does she consider him French? “Not at all. This is someone who is missing substance underneath a French veneer. I always find it a bit dangerous to stay on the surface for an aesthetic meant to please, using an aesthetic just to reach commercial or career ends.”
“Are you asking because for Americans, he represents France?” medievalist Lucien Dugaz said, almost panicked. He argued that there are non-French actors who are much more French in their approach—the Australian Cate Blanchett, for one: “She has an artistic engagement, a manifesto, that Timothée is very far from having.” He compared Timothée to the Puy du Fou, a French theme park known for its fake medieval village; like the park, the actor uses “a varnish of French clichés that don’t correspond with reality.”
“France isn’t doing well,” he concluded. “We need politically engaged actors. We don’t need Timothée.”
Thinking that my discerning but perhaps overly critical friends may have, after several glasses of Burgundy, exaggerated about Chalamet’s poor français, I asked my former teacher, the very patient Marie-Christine Ricci, to listen to part of a 2018 TV interview at my behest. Ricci — who has taught French to Anglophones for 40 years — says he has at first a “perfect accent and fluency” but notes that some errors emerge “as the speech becomes more elaborate.” When he can’t find the mot juste, Timmy jumps back into English or asks the interviewer to translate, and his “comprehension is impaired” when journalists’ questions turn really idiomatic. What she noted above all was a “lack of confidence.” She would place his spoken French at a C1 or C2 level per the CEFR, which would allow Tim to begin a master’s degree in letters at the Sorbonne. But does competent French a Frenchman make?
“I don’t particularly see him as French, no,” said Inès Ollivier, a lawyer and podcaster. “If someone asked me to list French actors, I wouldn’t say Timothée Chalamet. We kind of don’t care.” He does look French though, right? “I think in the USA, he must have a French face,” she said, “but in France, he’s kind of got the face of … a dude smoking cigarettes in front of high school.”
Ollivier was the only French person I spoke to who was aware of Chalamet’s current romantic relationship. “So funny that he’s dating Kylie Jenner,” she said. “So American.”
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