The Cannes Film Festival, just as before, belongs to Léa Seydoux.
The French actor has already discussed in a Palme d’Or at the event in 2013 for “Orange May be the Hottest Shade,” which produced her and Adèle Exarchopoulos, the first actors to gain Cannes’ prime prize, that they shared with manager Abdellatif Kechiche.
A year ago, she had four shows at the event but missed them since she tried good for COVID-19. But this year, Seydoux provides two of the most acceptable efficiency of her career in a couple of shows unveiled at Cannes: Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning” and Brian Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future.” Together, they have only reinforced the view that Seydoux is the premier French actor of her generation.
On a recent morning, several prevents from Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, Seydoux greeted a writer cheerfully. How was she? “Great!” she answered. “Must I not be great?”
The 36-year-old Seydoux has already produced a significant mark in Hollywood, most notably by getting the stereotypical role of “Bond Girl” and stretching the type — a “Bond Woman” she expanded — across several shows, putting a new dimension of level to the franchise. Seydoux was so excellent that actually, David Bond desired to negotiate down.
But it’s pronounced as of this year’s Cannes that Hollywood was just one stop of many in the fast-evolving, exceptionally varied career of Seydoux, who has been able to be among Europe’s many famous people while exuding a strange melancholy on screen. She’s ubiquitous and mysterious at the same time.
“I carry a disappointment,” Seydoux says, searching it to a timid childhood. “Theatre, for me, is something playful. It’s a real consolation since, in a way, I changed my disappointment into an object of beauty. Or I tried to, anyway. It’s in contrast to it works every time.”
“If I didn’t have theatre, I could have been depressed,” she adds. “That’s why I function all the time. It’s a method to be connected.”
In “One Fine Day,” among the standouts of Cannes, Seydoux represents a new widow increasing a girl in Paris while looking after her aged dad, whose storage is slipping. Following reconnecting and having an old buddy, a passionate affair follows. “One Fine Day,” a semi-autobiographical film Hansen-Love wrote fleetingly before her dad died of COVID-19, throbs with the irreconcilable coexistence of grief and enjoyment, demise and restoration, and life’s vexing impermanence. The “Bergman Island” filmmaker, Hansen-Love, wrote it with Seydoux in mind.
“She was perhaps the best actor with this technology,” describes Hansen-Love. “She’s enigmatic in a way that very few actresses are. She’s not trying to show things. She’s not affected.”
“There’s a disappointment and melancholy about her that contrasts with her status as a superstar that techniques me,” gives the writer-director. “On usually the one hand, she is a gorgeous figure in the landscape of cinema. She’s sexy. She’s in shows where she is seen from the standpoint of a strong imagination, and she loves that a lot, I think. But there’s a purity and simplicity about her that gives me the same emotion when I movie unknown actors.”
Sony Photographs Classics obtained the movie Saturday for U.S. theatrical distribution, stating it as Seydoux’s “best efficiency to date.”
Before this moment, Seydoux has skilled a number of the worst edges of the film business. In 2017 she claimed Harvey Weinstein when forcibly tried to hug her in a hotel room during a conference that was ostensibly about a possible role. The recording technique of the lesbian romance “Orange May be the Hottest Shade,” in which Kechiche could shoot as much as 100 requires of an individual shot, has already been questioned.
But Seydoux, who later closed as much as adapt the erotic story “Emmanuelle” with “Happening” filmmaker Audrey Diwan, says she’s never hesitated to state her sexuality on screen. “One Fine Day,” with the benefit of Hansen-Love’s perspective, is one of the very sensual shows at Cannes.
“I believed that film was about passion,” says Seydoux. “I do not suffer from nudity. It’s something I like to see as a spectator, as a viewer. I do believe it’s beautiful. I like intercourse views in films.”
In Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Potential,” which starts July 3 in theatres, Seydoux stars alongside Viggo Mortensen in a film yet more centred on the body. In a future where people and pockets have attracted sooner, she represents a physician who works procedures to eliminate tumours and organs with the sparkle of an artist.
“To be honest, I didn’t realize everything about the movie,” Seydoux says, smiling. “For me, it’s such a metaphor about what it is to be an artist.”
“Crimes of the Future” may provide normal science-fiction earth, but Seydoux is excessively seated in it. Anxious for more open-ended cinematic journeys, Seydoux says doing many different shows “is how I’m free. I do not desire to be caught in one single place.”
“I am not mad about shows that are ‘entertaining,'” says Seydoux. “I do not genuinely believe that I head to the theatre to be entertained. I know it’s a big thing in America. I like to question my issues more. I do not like to be provided with answers. I do not need to stop thinking. I do believe particular shows are to supply you with images.”