AND NOW… LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
France, 2002, DCP, color, 133’
PROTAGONIST OF EUROPEAN CINEMA
Jeremy Irons
➔ FRI 13 NOV | 6:00 PM | SCREEN 1
Direction: Claude Lelouch
Screenplay: Claude Lelouch, Pierre Leroux, Pierre Uytterhoeven
Cinematography: Pierre William Glenn Editing: Hélène De Luze
Production design: Johann George
Music: Michel Legrand
Costumes: Pierre Bechir
Cast: Jeremy Irons (Valentin), Patricia Kaas (Jane), Laura Mayne-Kerbrat (Jane’s friend), Xavier Lecoeur (Xavier), Romula Walker (Jenny), Mehdi Elouazani (reporter), Alessandra Martines (Françoise), Claudia Cardinale (madame Falconnetti), Stéphane Ferrara (the boxer), Thierry Lhermitte (Thierry), Yvan Attal (David), Jean-Marie Bigard (dr. Lamy), Ticky Holgado (Boubou), Amidou (police inspector)
Producers: Claude Lelouch
Production: Canal+, Films 13, France 2 Cinéma, Gemka Productions, L&G Productions, Le Studio Canal +
A love story conceived as a thriller. A gentleman... An English gangster, Valentin, sets sail from Fécamp on a magnificent sailboat,alone on a trip around the world; more to leave his past behind than to escape from the police. As a master of disguises and hold-ups, Valentin – a kind of Lupin-Frégoli – signed his name to a few exploits of the genre by robbing some of the largest jewelry storesin the world, brilliantly wielding only two weapons, bluff and humor. Meanwhile, in a Moroccan palace, Jane, a burnt out jazz singer,croons her “blues” amidst the general indifference of lounge lizards.
“(...) It is true that these two bodies, void of memory and identity, are hovering on the brink of death, torn between the mystical yearning for a miraculous healing and the secular rationality of medical salvation. They are lost in the wilderness of a pilgrimage that becomes an ecstasy (for her) or a hallucination (for him) — well, these two characters are increasingly constrained to become ghost versions of themselves, while they embody, as always, the objective transparency of Lelouch’s cinema: the seductive pleasure of a narrative that identifies life with its meaning and dissolves death.”
(Massimo Causo, Sentieri Selvaggi, 6-9-2003)
2002 Cannes FF- Closing Film, Out of Competition