trivial celebritydom where the end has nothing to do with the means. Aside from Beckham being (I am told) a competent football player, this couple is adored purely because they are famous. This duo is the banal feckless peak of British aspiration, eclipsing even the equally shallow and traditionally pedestalled Royal Family.
Paris
Thankfully, the French like to do things differently. Cantat and Trintignent were universally adored by the Gallic public, and they are everything that the Beckadamses are not. He, an intellectual Morrisonesque poet, social campaigner, musician, singer and hard-drinking, coke-sniffing, pill-dropping wild boy with his band Noir Desir, originally, and untypically for a French outfit, a punk ensemble who later mellowed with age and produced some sublime, dramatic compositions.
And she, talented and vulnerable, a renowned actress who starred in some of France's best-loved films including Les Apprentis (The Apprentices, 1995), opposite her husband François Cluzet, and Comme Elle Respire (White Lies, 1998), with Guillaume Depardieu.Both were married to other people, Trintignent having four sons from three fathers, including Richard Kolinka,the drummer of the popular rock band Téléphone (possibly the only other French rock band to hit the big-time) and both captured the hearts and imaginations of the French psyche which, along with the media, obsessed about them on a daily basis.
At the time of the incident that led to her death, Trintignant was filming a production on the life of the French writer Colette. She was on location in the Lithuanian capital during the summer of 2003, accompanied by Cantat with whom she had been living with in Paris while still married to Cluzet.
The Incident
What happened in the hotel room after a day of filming will remain a mystery to anyone except Trintignant, who cannot tell her recollection of events, and Cantat, who is languishing in prison. For the record, he maintains that the couple had been fighting, a frequent occurrence in a relationship that conformed to the tempestuous clichés that one might expect in such a situation, and was prone to passionate and often drunken rages, particularly Cantat's jealousy over the close relationship Marie maintained with Cluzot.
That night, says Cantat, he recalls 'slapping her around the face'. She fell backwards, hitting her head on a mantle-piece and collapsed on the floor. Cantat, believing she had passed out from drinking, laid her in bed and reputedly left her to recover. After receiving a drunken incoherent call from Cantat later that night, Trintignant's brother called the authorities and an ambulance was dispatched to the hotel at around 7:30 a.m., by which time Trintignant had already been in a coma for two hours. While still in a coma and on life support, she was flown by private jet days later to France—where she died on Aug. 1.
During the trial that followed, Cantat admitted he tussled with Trintignant but insisted her death was a tragic accident. "We loved each other and our love was growing," he tearfully told judges. Family and friends of both Cantat and Trintignant attended, including the actress' mother Nadine, who was directing her daughter in the Colette production.
Cantat's mother and father, as well as members of his band, sat nearby. Cantat was clean-shaven and seemingly calm throughout the trial—in stark contrast to his earlier appearance at a pre-trial hearing where he looked disheveled and dejected.
The multimillionaire singer, held in the Czarist-era Lukiskes Prison since his arrest, told judges he slapped Trintignant four times in a drunken stupor—contradicting prosecutors who said he fatally punched her at least 19 times in a jealous rage. "Everything happened very fast," he said during the trial. "Never, never did I want things to happen that way. This hand should never have risen. And I do not accept myself having raised this hand." Nadine Trintignant scoffed at Cantat's claim that her daughter's death was unintentional. "He should have stopped after the first blow, but he just kept on beating my Marie," she told the court after Cantat's testimony. "He is a killer."
Trintignant is buried at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, close to the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Cantat has received death threats and his Marseille house was recently burned to the ground in what many believe to be a revenge attack. A tragic, yet fully appropriate, conclusion to a story that befits the people who constructed this couple that were loved so much by their public. It is said in politics that the people get the leaders that they deserve. The same is true of cultural iconography. The French embody such a tale of sex, depravity and murderousness, and the UK truly deserves the cultural void that is David Beckham and his fish of a wife.
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