Three weeks before the start of the Festival, Cannes had still not announced who would have the heavy responsibility of presiding over the jury for this 75th edition. It is finally Vincent Lindon who leaps out of the secret box or panic room where Thierry Frémaux, general delegate of the cinephile raout, made increasingly feverish phone calls to anyone who would find a fifteen-day slot between May 17 and 28 to see three films a day and lend themselves to the little game at the end reward distribution. The organization of the festival would have tried to have Penélope Cruz but she would have declined due to an overbooked schedule. Marion Cotillard would also have been approached, without more success.
Finally, echoes more or less picked up in who knows what pierced pipe announced the Iranian filmmaker Ashgar Farhadi, author ofA separation and which presented in competition last year, A Hero, which won the Grand Prize ex aequo with Compartment no. 6 by Juho Kuosmanen. Except that Farhadi ended up being overtaken by one of these former students, Azadeh Masihzadeh, who accuses him of having plagiarized his documentary work entitled All Winners All Losers to feed the scenario of A hero. His French producer Alexandre Mallet-Guy, said a court in Tehran had “decided on March 14, 2022 to refer Ms. Masihzadeh’s accusation of copyright infringement on her documentary to a court”. He is well on the trip but among the members of the jury which includes actress Noomi Rapace, filmmakers Ladj Ly, Jeff Nichols, Joachim Trier, actresses and directors Jasmine Trinca and Rebecca Hall, Indian actress Deepika Padukone.
Traffic warden
Vincent Lindon is the first French actor to become president of the jury since Isabelle Huppert in 2009. He is a regular at Cannes, notoriously close to Thierry Frémaux. He had won an interpretation award for his role as a security guard in the law of the market by Stéphane Brizé in 2015. Last year, he created a certain more or less fusional feeling depending on the parts of the spectators enthusiastic or repelled by the film by interpreting the fire captain of Titanium by Julia Ducournau, pricking her buttocks with steroids, her body glistening with sweat under the cast iron and post-Cronenberg gothico-machinic ecstasy.
Son of an entrepreneur, nephew of Jérôme Lindon, founder of the prestigious Editions de Minuit, Vincent Lindon has built a career where he has multiplied the roles involved. In Welcome by Philippe Lioret in 2009, he plays a former lifeguard who helps a migrant cross the Channel. In Pater by Alain Cavalier, he plays a daring Prime Minister who launches reforms favorable to higher salaries. In the white knights by Joachim Lafosse, he takes on the ambiguous role of a humanitarian who embarks orphaned children who are not really orphans in a story directly inspired by the case of L’Arche de Zoé. He became co-producer of the films of Stéphane Brizé, the law of the market et Another world, description of the adversity of the world of work, between the security guard for the first and the manager for the second. We saw it recently also in State Scandal Investigation by Thierry de Peretti where he plays the head of narcotics with disreputable or legit methods denounced by a journalist from Release.
A fit of rage
Making headlines at times through his long-lasting relationship with Claude Chirac, left for Caroline of Monaco and then Sandrine Kiberlain, he occasionally takes an interest in politics. In 2007, he was enthusiastic about François Bayrou: “What I like about him is this mix of modernism – what he knows how to do with a computer, he impresses me, he looks like a hacker – and, at the same time, this intellectual peasant side.” In May 2020, obeying a stroke of blood, he read an open letter in a video filmed at home and published on the Mediapart site to violently attack Emmanuel Macron: “Did he choose the Louvre Palace for his enthronement, walking alone in front of the pyramid, the Palace of Versailles to receive Vladimir Putin, the Emperor of Japan or 150 high-tech millionaires and, finally, that of Chambord to celebrate his 40th birthday, denouncing “fulfilled ego” of the president and ranting in the chiaroscuro of a bourgeois apartment against the destructive liberalism that had left us “without mask” at epidemic time.
Known for ensuring the grain of his image, his central place in the economy of a casting, and sometimes even the number of lines of dialogue in a screenplay, Lindon is truly in France is one of the last representatives of the older generation. mouth and sacred monster, with an amplitude of games and chest sufficient to tie cinema of author and popular cinema, damaging the diplomatic pawn with the son of prole in distress Depardieu or with egocentric and unmanageable figures like Fabrice Luchini. He played Charcot, Rodin and declared bluntly: “Megalomania fascinates me.” And Cannes, without a doubt, is the perfect place for that.