It’s like Disneyland Paris with better clothes.” He wrinkled his nose to underscore his distaste, before dealing the most damning of killer blows. “They put on a big show of being French and purist about it, but the whole thing is defined by the people who go there. “They created meaning out of emptiness.“Cannes isn’t France,” a French friend once told me in a brisk tone of airy disdain that was, in notable contrast, the very essence of France itself. Instead, she admits to scrolling through her friend’s Instagram accounts to observe “those girls who live through it and have made a success out of it,” she says. “I need it because otherwise the world is too heavy.” You might assume that an actor whose directorial collaborators include some of the most renowned names in cinema-Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Arnaud Desplechin, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Xavier Dolan-might have a haughtier take on the vapid side of this scene. “You know, I like the superficiality,” she says, her voice so quiet you have to lean in close to hear it. She’s glad to be back in the throes of it all, though. Since 2013, she’s returned for every festival except for last year’s, when she was diagnosed with the coronavirus shortly before Cannes started and missed out on four of her films’ world premieres. “Cannes is, more or less, the right balance between the superficial and deep art,” she says, a smile revealing the famous gap in her teeth. She seems tired when we speak, but then again the festival is something of a circus. It’s something that I try to do in my films-transform that melancholy into something beautiful.” I had this melancholy in me as a kid, and I still carry it. “Well, cinema really saved me from my sorrow,” she concurs. In that film, as in later projects, her tears always seemed like they came from somewhere real. She is one of the finest plumbers of pure emotion on screen: In 2013, Seydoux won the prestigious Palme d’Or-Cannes’s top prize, usually gifted solely to a film’s director-alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos for their moving turns in Blue Is the Warmest Color, the controversial but highly praised queer drama that put Seydoux’s name on the global map. “I wanted to bring tenderness to this film,” Seydoux says, “because David’s world is harsh.” This is one of her last days here: She’s come to the festival to support both Crimes of the Future and One Fine Morning, a low-key romantic drama from art-house director Mia Hansen-Løve, which premiered the week prior.Ĭaprice is arguably the film’s most tender and complex character: a trauma surgeon turned artist who, when confronted with the opportunity to stage the pair’s most controversial show yet, pushes back and bursts into tears. Seydoux wears oval Celine tortoiseshell sunglasses, a white T-shirt, and blue jeans. The clouds that threatened a rainstorm that morning have dissipated and passed without incident, and the sun glares against the sea. Seydoux is sitting on the roof terrace of a hotel in Cannes during the city’s prestigious film festival. On the contrary: “This is exactly what I like,” she says. A mainstay in European cinema before crossing over into the blockbuster mainstream with films like Blue Is the Warmest Color, No Time to Die, and The French Dispatch, the French actor might seem out of her comfort zone in a role like that. In David Cronenberg’s new body-horror romance, Crimes of the Future, Léa Seydoux plays a performance artist who treats autopsies like theater, cutting into her lover and tattooing his organs.
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