L'attore, il maschio, la bestia. La polisemia strutturata di Gérard Depardieu

This paper aims first to investigate Depardieu’s acting style, based on the rejection of naturalism to the advantage of naturalness, and secondly to detect, in some of the most recent performances, traces of symbolic meanings evoked by the persona of the young Depardieu, such as the combination of feminine grace and animal brutality. On the threshold of seventy years, this provocative star appears a kind of revenant, decadent but overactive incarnation of the persistence of modernity in the era of "cinema after cinema".