Festivals - Arnaud Desplechin President of the jury of Deauville 2022

By Mulder, 22 may 2022

After numerous César nominations and selections in the world's greatest festivals, demonstrating the durability of his talent and international recognition, he returns to Cannes this year with a new film, Brother and Sister, presented in competition. After Catherine Deneuve and Charlotte Gainsbourg, two key figures in his work, he will be the President of the 48th Deauville American Film Festival this year, and the festival organizers were eagerly awaiting his availability to bring his uniquely French perspective to American cinema. 

From his first medium-length film, The Life of the Dead (1992), Arnaud Desplechin entered the territory of cinema, that of fiction and transcended reality, and established himself as a maestro of dialogue with the actors. A matrix work, a founding work that will never cease to radiate and spread its rays, it is clearly crowned with the Jean Vigo Prize. A film maker, as he likes to define himself, Desplechin will not cease to weave, in his own unique and impudent way, the threads of the cinema question. A faithful disciple of Stanley Cavell and Jean Douchet, a lover of American cinema, he practices an art of love that unites the physical and the metaphysical.

Arnaud Desplechin builds a cinema of the novel, of fiction, while never ceasing to explode its frameworks and norms, distilling a strangeness to better question the mystery of reality. His work is a labyrinth where getting lost makes you think, where seeing makes you vibrate and where doubt sinks in... 

His second film, La Sentinelle (1996), is still about death, where he already intertwines different genres and levels of narratives. From film to film, Arnaud Desplechin dialogues with his motives, his obsessions, his ghosts and his doubles, which will be embodied in his next film How I quarreled... (my sex life) in the character of Paul Dedalus and the form of an actor in the person of Mathieu Amalric. It is no coincidence that her next film Esther Kahn is a thriller ... on the condition of actress or if his foray into the series In Therapy appears as an ambush of the camera not very orthodox on the side of his actress Suzanne Lindon ...

Kings and Queen (2004), A Christmas Carol (2008) and her American escape Jimmy P. (2013), Three Memories of My Youth (2015), still show her taste for family dramas, tinged with ancient mythology, for filiation and psychoanalysis as the art of investigation, conspiracy and even espionage.

Les fantômes d'Ismaël (2017) tightens to the point of vertigo the threads of the web of a labyrinthine work where echoes of the past resound, haunted by spectres and which continues to flirt with the fantastic and the thriller.

With Deception (2021), the almost fantastical adaptation of Philip Roth's novel, he seems to whisper in our ears the rosebud of his work, the secret of the inextricable game between the novel and life, that of the disguises of the "I" and the shimmering of the senses, the mystery of creation...

Flimography : 
1992 - The Sentinel
1996 - How I argued... (my sexual life)
2000 - Esther Kahn
2003 - Leo, playing "In the company of men
2004 - Kings and Queen
2007 - The Beloved (documentary)
2008 - A Christmas Story
2013 - Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian)
2014 - The Forest (TV movie)
2015 - Three Memories of My Youth
2017 - The Ghosts of Ishmael
2019 - Roubaix, a light
2021 - Deception
2022 - Brother and Sister

Photo : Copyright Thomas Brunot

(Source - press release)