Second Update: Desplechin has begun filming Spectateurs with Mathieu Amalric, who returns as Paul Dedalus from My Sex Life and My Golden Days, and Françoise Lebrun (The Mother and the Whore). Whatever its direct connection to those two films, it’s (somewhat curiously) billed as a docu-fiction following “a movie theatre from the 1960s to the present day.” Find the original story below [Ion Cinema]
Update: CG Cinema confirmed production has concluded on Leo Carax’s C’est pas moi, set for a 2024 release in France. “This free format film is a self-portrait, which revisits more than 40 years of the author’s filmography and questions the major stations of his life, while capturing the political tremors of the time,” they note. “Written in the first person, shot with the faithful team of the author, including the director of photography Caroline Champetier, this cut-up film thus allows Leos Carax to find some great figures of his work.” See images and the original story below.
Small news on big guys: our friends at Ion Cinema have dug up a blurb from the print edition of Le film français noting that a) Leos Carax has begun production on C’est pas moi (or It’s Not Me), about which approximately zero is publicly known and is turned more mysterious by the note it’s in “free format,” which could mean “more improv,” and could also not; b) Arnaud Desplechin is soon to begin shooting Spectateurs, a project apparently set across the ’70s and ’80s, this summer in Lille, France.
Worth noting, maybe, that a couple years ago Carax had been casting for a “film project” supported by CG Cinéma, subject of said blurb, with specific requests for a young boy, a young girl, and people “capable of falling to the ground.” Expectations had it shooting summer 2021, which it seemingly did not; but Carax is as Carax does, and a two-year delay is hardly out of practice. Desplechin’s film, meanwhile, we expect to be overwhelming, roundly excellent, and incapable of receiving U.S. distribution.
While we wait, our French-speaking readers can enjoy a recent talk between Carax and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who just wrapped his Serpent’s Path remake: