English-speaking French actresses like Léa Seydoux can play both sides of the Atlantic. She can take on studio movies like “Spectre” or “Dune: Part Two,” and also explore complex character roles in some 11 Cannes entries over two decades.
This year she stars in two discrete Cannes films, “Anatomy of a Fall” original screenplay Oscar-winner Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown,” and “Corsage” director Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster.” Seydoux has been talked up as a Best Actress contender here at the festival.
In “The Unknown,” based on Harari’s graphic novel, Seydoux plays a man trapped in a woman’s body, who tries to find out how a single act of drug-infused party sex transformed him. And in “Gentle Monster,” Seydoux starts out as a happily married pop singer who is jarred to learn that her seemingly sweet and loving husband is a pedophile. She has no idea what kind, or how he may have acted with her young son. Was he a documentary filmmaker doing research, or selling child porn for money? Did he act on his impulses with young children? Slowly, a once complacently happy woman reacts as layers of the “gentle monster” are revealed.
Seydoux has been coming to Cannes since she acted in a short 20 years ago. But her breakout moment was 2013’s “Blue is the Warmest Color,” when she was 28. The festival went wild over the movie, which ended up winning the Palme d’Or not only for its director Abdellatif Kechiche but for Seydoux and her onscreen lover, 19-year-old rookie costar Adèle Exarchopoulos. “It was such a big deal,” Seydoux said in a Cannes interview with IndieWire. “It was amazing. It touched so many people, not only the critics. It was also the first time that I was doing a movie that had a strong political meaning.”
This year, Seydoux was reunited with her old friend Exarchopoulos, who also screened a movie in Cannes (alcoholic drama “Another Day”). After “Blue Is the Warmest Color” came out, the actresses spoke up about their sense of having been psychologically harassed by their director. “You sign up for a movie,” said Seydoux, “and you start to film. Then you are in a way stuck in it.”
After “Blue,” Seydoux made a crucial decision: “I have the final approval for every scene where I will see my body,” she said. “I want to have a little control over what I want to show.”
Since “Blue,” Seydoux has worked steadily with directors in France and Hollywood, from Wes Anderson (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) and Woody Allen (“Midnight in Paris”) to Mia Hansen-Løve (“One Fine Morning”). But she also slogged her way through parts that could have been “more interesting,” she said.
‘Gentle Monster’Courtesy Cannes Film Festival
At 40, Seydoux is embracing a more mature phase, able to plumb her deeper experience. “I gain a certain confidence doing this job for more than 20 years,” she said. “I like to adapt myself. because I’ve worked with so many different directors that have such different styles.”
“The Unknown” was the first film to demand that she speak three languages: her native French, English, and German. “On certain films, you have to adapt also your style of acting,” she said. “Some movies you internalize things, others you have to be almost out there, externalized. These two [Cannes films] are both internalized. They are different, but they have similarities. Both characters have a secret, something they can’t tell, and they have to live with the shame of this secret. Marie’s film has social subject matter, while Arthur’s is more philosophical, existential, metaphysical.”
While Seydoux is her usual attractive self in “Gentle Monster,” which includes her performing pop songs onstage as well as sharing hot sex with her husband (Austrian actor Laurence Rupp), for the most part, she’s de-glammed as a distraught woman suddenly separated from a partner she didn’t really know.
In “The Unknown,” on the other hand, which was filmed two months after she gave birth to her second child, she fearlessly showed her fleshy, chesty postpartum body without vanity. “I threw that away,” she said. “It’s the first time that I was able to explore my body in a way that I’ve never experienced before. Most of the time, the bodies that we see onscreen are often sexualized or objectified, even though it’s changing now. But this was the first time that I had the possibility to explore my body in a different way and not see through that angle.”
‘The Unknown’NEON
The first time she saw “The Unknown,” it hit her hard. “I thought it was brave,” she said. “I think it’s important to show a body we can relate to. I’m tired [of seeing] these bodies on screen that are completely controlled, and bodies that are not real. There is a beauty in the truthfulness of the body that I had at the time. Even though it was not comfortable to show myself that way, I thought it was important and necessary.”
It worked for the movie, “because I’m playing a man stuck in a woman’s body,” she said. “But it was paradoxical, because it was just after I had my baby, I was still breastfeeding, I was milking. What I wanted to do was the opposite of a performance. I wanted this to be incarnated, to find the truth of the character, even though it’s like a fantasy shot like a documentary. There’s no effects, and no explanation. For the audience, it has to be a visceral experience. It’s a movie that makes you think, and we need that.”
Many shots in “The Unknown” are quiet, without dialogue. “I love to express things without words,” said Seydoux. Also light on dialogue is “Gentle Monster,” which Kreutzer tells through the eyes of a woman who doesn’t know what’s going on. “Then she can discover the story as it unfolds,” said Seydoux, “through her perspective, and she has to face all these different emotions. She doesn’t want to be in denial. I had to express so many contradictory feelings.”
And for the first time in a film, Seydoux gets to show off her offscreen hobby, singing. She worked closely with Camille Ducol, who won the Oscar for Best Song for “Emilia Pérez.”
Having survived her James Bond role as psychologist Dr. Madeleine Swann in “Spectre” and “No Time to Die,” Seydoux is thrilled that her “Dune: Part Two” director Denis Villeneuve is taking the helm of the next Bond series. “I would love it to be a cinema,” she said, “because I was sad when I heard that they sold their franchise, but if they make good artistic choices… I said to Denis, ‘For me, you are the cinema.’”
Next up, Seydoux has two American indies. First, the sophomore effort from American Charlie Polinger, “The Masque of the Red Death,” costarring “Anora” Oscar-winner Mikey Madison, who blew Seydoux away: “She was so talented,” she said. Seydoux is also starring in the Zellner brothers’ next movie, “Alpha Gang,” a “crazy” sci-fi ensemble comedy. “I will always go towards my fear. I will go from it’s something I’m attracted to, to this uncomfortable zone. I’m in an interesting place, because we always have things to learn.”
