How French Is He, Really?
Chéri, if you have to ask …
timothée chalamet would like you to know he’s French. He brings it up in interviews, attributing to his Frenchness both his curls and his passion for the Saint-étienne soccer team. You may have seen the video of him rapping in high school: “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.
But do the French claim him? Chalamet 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. When the actor appears on French TV, news, or radio, he is almost always described with the epithet “Franco-american.” (His mother, Nicole Flender, is the American half; his father, Marc Chalamet, was born in Nîmes.)
Still, the French press loves him, calling him the “ultimate Gen-z sex symbol” and saying Tim looks drawn by a “manga artist obsessed with young Werther.”
But I needed to know more. To help me litigate Timmy’s Frenchness, I consulted a panel of experts and critics—my French friends, whom I met while attending high school in Angoulême, the town where Wes
Anderson shot The French Dispatch
(a film in which Chalamet does not speak French).
“I think this new category of fuckable guy, like Timothée or
Harry Styles, it’s so trendy,” said teacher and artist Aude Anquetil in French, holding her hand-rolled cigarette aloft. “In France, we prefer dudes a bit more random. It’s very American to have tastes in men that are on trend.” 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.”
Another friend, medievalist Lucien Dugaz, said there are nonfrench 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 added, “France isn’t doing well. We need politically engaged actors. We don’t need Timothée.”
According to my former French teacher Marie-christine Ricci, Chalamet appears to have a “perfect accent and fluency” in Frenchlanguage interviews, but errors emerge “as speech becomes more elaborate.” 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,” 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 a high school.”