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Gavin Haynes Sleepless Nights

Depardieu and Putin, Sitting in a Tree

A tree that is strong enough to hold the wine-bloated Frenchman and doesn't make him pay tax.

“There, near the birch forest, I feel fine. I’ll learn Russian. I have talked about this with our President, Francois Hollande. He knows that I love your President Vladimir Putin, and it’s mutual. And I told him that Russia – the country of the great democracy, it is not a country where the prime minister could call a citizen of the country of his a miserable man.” Not my words, the words of French acting elephant Gerard Depardieu. Over the weekend, he whispered these words into the ear of the entire Russian population, via an open letter, aimed at seducing the people of his new homeland. Like the 150kg Casanova he is, he signed off in fine quotational style: “Only in such a big country we are never alone. Because every tree and landscape brings us hope. Russia has no pettiness, it is full of great feelings. And in these feelings is hidden great virtue. Your majesty, I never feel alone. Glory to Russia!”   The letter was released the same day he went to meet his new lover, Russia's answer to Stalin, Vladimir Putin, who was down south, chilling out, smoking some proles by the Black Sea at Sochi. Putin, who doesn't miss a trick, had arranged for the television cameras to capture their embrace. And it was an embrace: a big, slightly awkward bear-hug between massive Gez and lithe Vlad – like a bun embracing a hotdog. The chemistry of two men solving each other's problems crackled between them. Then, the cameras retreated, and Gez and Vlad were allowed some time to be alone to consummate matters. There, behind closed doors, Vlad whipped out a Russian passport he'd had made in Gerard's name. “It was,” a thousand hacks are probably writing right now, “Like a real-life version of Depardieu's hit 1990 Andie MacDowell movie, Green Card.” There is little about the decision of France's biggest actor to renounce his citizenship and schlep round the world looking for safe passage like a port-filled millionaire refugee that doesn't make you squint at the screen and wonder whether you've read it right. But then again, such is the whole life of Depardieu, the gallic Oliver Reed: a scooter-wrecking, public-urinating, wine-addicted train-wreck of a man who knows only one way of doing things (his own) and one way of getting his own way (fight, fight, fight). This is a man who was last in the headlines for whipping out his bitte and pissing in a bottle on a CityJet flight out of Dublin after he was refused permission to visit the toilet. This is a man who has had a dozen scooter accidents in as many years, possibly occasioned by his habit of rolling out of liquid Parisian lunches and onto his bike. On "a good day", he'll get through "two or three" bottles of wine. On a bad one, it's "four or five". Despite emergency open-heart surgery a decade ago, no doctor has managed to make him lose the drink, though he has occasionally attempted to shift his enormous bulk via insane diets – like just not eating for ten days. In 2005, he forgot what decade it was and started smoking on The Jonathan Ross Show. That same year, he knocked out a papparrazi with a single headbutt. According to aides, he'll regularly hijack business trips to go carousing in the filthiest neighbourhoods, actively spoiling for a fight. On a chat show in 2011, he slurred over and again the words: “I am a piece of garbage.” Well, quite. He's always been a street fighter. The sixth son of an illiterate sheet-metal worker, his mother once confessed that she'd contemplated aborting him with a knitting needle. He left school at 13 to start out on a life of petty crime, before ending up as a printer's apprentice. Which is why he's regularly complained about his "narcissistic" fellow actors, announcing that the true performer "has a reek of vomit to him". Depardieu had never been a fan of France's Socialist government. In contrast to his luvvie peers, he'd backed Sarkozy. Being already about as authentically working class as they come, he had never felt a need to parrot fine-sounding words like "solidarity" and "progressiveness". But when Hollande's government proposed a 75 percent tax on earnings over a million euros, he got more vocal. He would move to Belgium, he threatened. A place where they "don't spit on success". Where they're "not afflicted with the French disease of envy". The Socialists didn't mind so much: he was a pretty easy target example to them of the rich loading themselves into the lifeboats first. But then the Prime Minister really stuck the boot in at a press conference: said Depardieu was "pathetic" and "unpatriotic", and Gerry just about flipped out. For a guy who can dish it, he found it very hard to take. He published another open letter in a Sunday paper, claiming he'd paid 145 million euros in tax across his lifetime, returning his social security card unused and detailing how he employed over a hundred people. But after all that, it turned out the Belgians wouldn't give him a passport. Something about how they were trying to get rid of their reputation as a European laughing stock. So Vlad The Opportunist seized on a joke that Depardieu had made to Le Monde about getting Russian nationality. If he genuinely wanted a passport, he'd consider it settled, he stated, rubbing his hands together. So it is with this shotgun wedding. For Putin, their bargain means that after 20 years of Russian oligarchs running away to Kensington, he has won one back for the team. The Russian government are so worried about their emigration problem (the population has actually shrunk over the the past decade) that they've started an only-slightly-sinister website propagandising in order to reverse their ongoing brain drain, where stooge-y expats who have returned announce that "LA has no soul," and "Russian people are more authentic." Though he might not be as keen on the next French exile angling for his patronage. Brigitte Bardot, the ex-nymphette, has become a crazy old bag-lady over the past few decades as she's sunk deeper and deeper into animal rights activism. So much so that she's been prosecuted five times for inciting religious hatred, after distributing pamphlets about Islamic sheep-slaughter rituals. Now, there are two elephants in the Lyon Zoo who have TB. If they are put down, she warns, she will be renouncing her citizenship of "a country so indifferent to the suffering of animals" and joining Depardieu. At this, French Twitter rapidly filled up with pictures of Putin nestling on the chest of a tiger he'd just shot. “We take good care of animals here in Russia, Brigitte,” one caption ran. The second-saddest of all of the ironies is that, while all of this has been going on, Hollande's supertax has been nixed by the constitutional court on a technicality. So it will be at least another year until it becomes law, though it's as likely it'll now be shelved altogether. And even then: it was only expected to bring in under half a billion euros a year. For all the hoo-ha, that's chump change on an annual deficit of 80 billion Euros.

Annons

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

Previous Sleepless Nights:

The Demise of the Zany Jedi Wankers

Is It Time for Britain to Turn Into a Dictatorship?

Bath Salts, Orgies, Murder and Anti-Virus Software: The Strange Case of John McAfee