PARIS — Jean-Paul Belmondo uses a metal crutch and drags his right leg when he walks. His upper body tilts to the left when he moves. He speaks in short sentences, sometimes slurring his words. His right arm sits lifeless by his side.
But when the 75-year-old French actor with the blue-green eyes and broken nose smiles, he evokes the image of the charming gangster and cocky seducer he played in films decades ago.
“My crutch,” he said in a brief interview, as he tried to find his balance in the grand ballroom of the Hotel InterContinental here. “It’s terrible, a crutch, isn’t it?”
It was during a vacation in Corsica in 2001 that Mr. Belmondo had a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and left him unable to speak for six months.
With intensive daily physical therapy, he has been able to get back some of his physical strength. After all, he almost became a professional boxer and soccer player (he played goalie) and was adored by fans as an athlete who did most of his own stunts in his action-packed films.
Now, after more than 80 films and a score of theater roles, he summoned a different kind of courage for his first film since his stroke.
He agreed to do “A Man and His Dog” (“Un Homme et Son Chien”), which opened in France on Jan. 14, he said, only if it showed him as the old, disabled man that he is.
“It’s me,” he said, “without any special effects.”
A crimson cashmere sweater and a sport coat adorned with his Legion of Honor rosette gave him an air of elegance, despite the chunky rings on the fingers of his left hand, His jeans revealed the outline of his left thigh, which is much more muscular than his right.

“I hope,” he said, “to be an example for all. I hope.”
So the film makes no effort to disguise Mr. Belmondo’s physical limitations. He is shown walking — slowly and with a cane — in only one scene. He has little dialogue. The deep lines creasing his face are made more dramatic with shadows; the nose squashed decades ago in a boxing ring gives him an oddly broken look.
The film is advertised on billboards throughout Paris, and its release coincided with the publication last week of a new biography by Bertrand Tessier, titled “Belmondo the Incorrigible.”
To showcase the comeback, the Paris-Match of Jan. 14 put Mr. Belmondo on the cover, tanned, smiling, several gold chains peeking out from his lime-colored linen shirt. He was photographed with a woman identified as the new love of his life, Barbara Gandolfi, a 33-year-old, raven-haired, equally tanned Italian in hoop earrings and a low-cut strapless dress who runs a vending machine business and owns nightclubs in Belgium.
“They looked at each other, they had a drink, and the rest is history,” said the actor Charles Gérard, Mr. Belmondo’s friend of 60 years, in an interview. “I have lunch with him two, three times a week, and you have no idea how women are still attracted to him.”
The plot of the film, based on Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 classic of neorealism, “Umberto D.,” is just as sentimental as the original, if more preposterous. An old man is thrown out on the street and finds himself homeless and alone, except for his dog.
In the original, Umberto D. was a retired bureaucrat unable to survive on a paltry pension who is forced out of his rented room by an unfeeling landlady. In the remake, Charles, played by Mr. Belmondo, is also a retiree, but he is shown the door by a widow who had been his lover. She had given him and his dog a maid’s room in her large home, but she finds him a nuisance after she decides to marry again.
“Robert is going to marry me, not my past,” she declares. Charles is reduced to eating at a soup kitchen. His wallet is stolen. He loses his dog., then finds him again. He tries without success to give the dog away to a little girl he meets in a park.
In one moving scene, he cries out for his dog — in the gilded ballroom of the Hotel InterContinental in the heart of Paris.
The director, Francis Huster (who also appears in the film), does not explain why, in an age of extraordinary French social services to protect pensioners, Charles has no means of finding even temporary lodging. Like Umberto D., Charles ultimately considers suicide, and the film, like the original, ends on a hopeful but oddly unsatisfying note.
“A Man and His Dog,” with its melodramatic soundtrack and long silences, has divided the French film world. And it has attracted limited crowds; Baseline, a box-office tracking firm, reported that in its first week the film sold slightly more than 100,000 tickets. The failure to embrace the film reflects in part a desire to remember Mr. Belmondo as he was in his signature roles: the lovable gangster in “Breathless” (1960), the tobacco tycoon in “Mississippi Mermaid” (1969), the French soldier in perpetual motion in the comedy “That Man From Rio” (1964).
This is, after all, the man who played opposite beauties like Catherine Deneuve, Jean Seberg, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale, Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress (with whom he had a long affair).
“It’s a little sad to see him this way, but his performance is wonderful,” said Sophie Andrieu, a museum programming assistant, as she left the film on a recent afternoon. Her friend. Sophie Gaudiller, a classical dancer, was more skeptical. “It’s rather monotonous,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to succeed.”
In the media, some of the criticism has been savage. Under the headline “What’s Left of Belmondo?” the weekly magazine Le Point called the film a documentary of a man who suffered a stroke, saying, “One can only be staggered by this portrayal of decrepitude and this disillusioned universe where the only point of interest is ... a dog.”
Le Monde faulted the film for “the effort visibly made by the actor in the dialogue, the melodramatic overstatement of the script and the theatricality of the production.”
The most scathing critique came from the Swiss-based daily Le Matin, which called “A Man and His Dog” “absolutely despicable” and a “leaden melodrama” that subjects viewers to “an undignified Calvary that inspires only one embarrassing feeling: pity.”
The best way to deal with the film would be to boycott it, Le Matin added.
Arielle Dombasle, who starred with Mr. Belmondo in the 2000 movie “Amazon,” his last film role before his stroke, agreed with that advice. “Jean-Paul was always the strong adventurer, an athletic animal,” she said in an interview. “He is not cerebral. People want to see their hero. To see him as an old man who loves his dog is ridiculous.”
Even though Mr. Belmondo stopped performing after his stroke, he did not leave the public eye. His marriage to Nathalie Tardivel, a former dancer for a TV show and his longtime companion, in 2002; the birth of their daughter Stella in 2003 (his fourth child); and their divorce last year were widely covered in the popular French press. (Paris-Match ran a cover story about him in “A Man and His Dog” in March and another on his divorce in September.)
For other Belmondo supporters and friends, the film is nothing less than an inspirational tour de force.
“He had been an athlete, and he showed incredible will in his struggle to recover,” Dr. Jean-Luc Isambert, a coordinator at the Le Normandy rehabilitation center in Granville, Normandy, where Mr. Belmondo did some of his rehabilitation work, said in an interview. “His comeback is a message of hope to anyone who has ever suffered the tragedy of a stroke.”
Mr. Gérard, who has appeared with him in more than a dozen films, said of his performance: “He is playing a role like none other he has ever played in his life. At the end, he is so moving you really want to cry.”
In the film, Mr. Gérard plays a beggar who steals Mr. Belmondo’s wallet as they are sitting together on a park bench. Other aging film veterans — including Max von Sydow — have cameo appearances.
Michel Drucker, a television host who has been a close friend of Mr. Belmondo for 40 years, said in an interview that he has watched Mr. Belmondo “learn to speak again, word by word, and to walk again, centimeter by centimeter.” He had to teach himself to eat and to write with his left hand, and more than once, doctors thought they might have to amputate part of his right leg, Mr. Drucker said in an interview.
This month Mr. Drucker devoted his hourlong weekly television show to Mr. Belmondo and those involved in the film. In his first on-screen interview since the stroke, Mr. Belmondo answered questions about his family and the drama of searching for his dog, Corail, who was lost for three days in Bois de Boulogne in Paris last year.
“His comeback is unique in the history of cinema,” Mr. Drucker said. “It doesn’t matter if the film is good or bad. For the country, for the people of France, Jean-Paul is back.”
Da The New York Times, 23 Gennaio 2009