Arnaud Desplechin Jury President

Arnaud Desplechin

Jury Pres­i­dent

Sparkling Cin­e­ma

“What shat­ters me most in cin­e­ma is when real­i­ty starts to shim­mer, when real­i­ty becomes an epiphany.”

Arnaud Desplechin © Thomas Brunot

After many nom­i­na­tions and in the biggest inter­na­tion­al film fes­ti­vals, wit­ness­ing the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of his tal­ent, Arnaud Desplechin returns to the Cannes com­pe­ti­tion this year with his new film, Broth­er and Sis­ter. Fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Cather­ine Deneuve and Char­lotte Gains­bourg, two essen­tial fig­ures in his work, he will serve as Pres­i­dent of this year’s 48^th Deauville Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val, and we eager­ly await his sin­gu­lar French per­spec­tive on Amer­i­can cinema.

With his first mid-length film, La vie des morts (1992), Arnaud Desplechin burst into the realm of cin­e­ma, the world of fic­tion and tran­scend­ed real­i­ty, stak­ing out his rep­u­ta­tion most notably as a mas­ter of work­ing with actors. A foun­da­tion­al work that con­tin­ues to res­onate to this day, it was pre­scient­ly award­ed the Jean Vigo Award. From that point for­ward, this builder of films, as Desplechin likes to define him­self, would con­tin­ue in his shame­less and unique way to tease out the threads of the mys­tery of cin­e­ma. A faith­ful dis­ci­ple of Stan­ley Cavell and Jean Douchet, enam­ored with Amer­i­can films, he prac­tices a lov­ing art that fus­es the phys­i­cal and metaphysical.

Arnaud Desplechin builds a cin­e­ma of roman­tic sto­ry­telling, nev­er ceas­ing to break his own struc­tures and norms, dis­till­ing a strange uncan­ni­ness, the bet­ter to explore the ques­tion of real­i­ty. His work is a labyrinth in which get­ting lost makes you think, in which see­ing makes you feel and in which all doubt gets crushed… Death is also on the mind of his sec­ond film, The Sen­tinel (1996), in which he begins to inter­weave dif­fer­ent gen­res and lev­els of nar­ra­tive. From film to film, Desplechin engages in a dia­logue with his own motifs and obses­sions, with his own ghosts and dou­bles, which were made flesh in his sub­se­quent film, My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argu­ment, in the form of the char­ac­ter Paul Dedalus and the actor Math­ieu Amal­ric. No coin­ci­dence that his next film, Esther Kahn, was a thriller about the con­di­tion of being an actress, or that his for­ay into the series In Treat­ment seems like a high­ly unortho­dox cin­e­mat­ic ambush on his actress, Suzanne Lindon…

Kings & Queen (2004), A Christ­mas Tale (2008), his Amer­i­can escapade Jim­my P.: Psy­chother­a­py Of A Plains Indi­an (2013), and My Gold­en Days (2015) all fur­ther prove his taste for fam­i­ly dra­ma tinged with ancient mythol­o­gy, for explor­ing inher­i­tance and psy­cho­analy­sis as the art of inves­ti­ga­tion, com­plic­i­ty, even espionage.

Ismael’s Ghosts (2017) dizzy­ing­ly tight­ens the screws on a labyrinthine oeu­vre resound­ing with echoes from the past, haunt­ed by ghosts, a fil­mog­ra­phy that con­tin­ues to flirt with the modes of fan­ta­sy and thriller.

With Decep­tion (2021), the almost fan­tas­ti­cal adap­ta­tion of the nov­el by Philip Roth, he near­ly whis­pers in our ear the Rose­bud of his body of work, the secret of the entan­gle­ment between fic­tion and life, the game of the dis­tort­ed “I” and shim­mer­ing sens­es, the mys­tery of creation…

We are delight­ed to wel­come Arnaud Desplechin as the Pres­i­dent of this 48^th edition.