A film festival requires its talented “golden couple” almost as much as its long red carpet — and at Cannes, which begins today, the prospect of a pair of glamorous homegrown lovers is especially tantalizing. So whether the sun shines on the Cote d’Azur this week or not, hopes are high for an appearance from the Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard and her partner, the acclaimed writer, director and actor Guillaume Canet.
Cotillard has been invited as one of the stars of the film that will open the festival, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Taking the role of the “muse” in Allen’s celebration of the city and its myths, she will feature alongside France’s first lady, Carla Bruni, and the Hollywood A-listers Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams.
Last month Cotillard, who first came to international attention four years ago as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, sent Batman fans across the world into a spin with the announcement that she is to appear opposite Christian Bale in director Christopher Nolan’s next comic strip outing, The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan, who worked with Cotillard on Inception, claims she will be playing a Bruce Wayne employee called Miranda Tate, but there is a growing suspicion that this might not be the whole truth. “My role is a secret, as is the whole project,” Cotillard has said.
Photo: Reuters
What is clear, however, is that later this year the 35-year-old actor from Orleans will follow up her acclaimed screen performance as a sexually polymorphous tease in Canet’s latest hit, Little White Lies, with an English-language role in Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller Contagion, in which she will star with Kate Winslet and Matt Damon.
Hot duo they may be, but there is a strong chance that Cotillard and Canet’s admirers will be disappointed today when they gather along the Croisette for the Allen premiere, because the couple are involved in another pressing joint production: the arrival of their first child.
Last week, in the pristine pages of Madame Figaro, Cotillard described being pregnant as “perfect happiness.” Even the occasionally maudlin Canet, 38, has admitted that he is “really ready to be a dad.” Apart from his burgeoning reputation as a director and screenwriter, he can be seen in British cinemas this month in Farewell, a cold war thriller based on the true story of a KGB spy who leaked information to the West. Later this spring he is to appear again, this time as the long-lost flame of Keira Knightley in a romantic set piece called Last Night.
As bright young stars, Canet and Cotillard now seem to be shining at full beam. Cotillard is already talked of with awe by the established names of the filmmaking elite. Leonardo DiCaprio, her costar in Inception, has dubbed her “one of the greats,” while Nicole Kidman, a fellow cast member in Rob Marshall’s Fellini update, Nine, has noted her “fairy quality.” For the film writer David Thomson, Cotillard’s eyes, “always on the point of weeping,” suggest that “nearly everything she can think of is tinged with grief or regret.”
Canet, in turn, is now regarded as a great hope for the commercial future of French cinema (Little White Lies sold 5.5 million tickets in France). The director grew up in the countryside beyond Paris and his parents, who were horse breeders, divorced when he was young. As a discontented teenager he went off to join a circus for a year before eventually studying acting in Paris.
His directorial debut, Mon Idole, was a comic study of the entertainment business, while his appearance in the English-language film version of Alex Garland’s The Beach earned him an international profile. In 2003, he made the dry romantic comedy Love Me If You Dare, in which he starred with Cotillard. And then came the big hit: his sharp and stylish thriller Tell No One.
A period of morose contemplation and therapy for Canet followed this success, brought on by a bout of septicemia. These doldrums ultimately gave shape to the bleakly comic ideas behind his screenplay for Little White Lies, a film that charts the deceits and delusions of a group of trendy Parisians who take a holiday together in the south of France.
“I was tired of those little lies that we tell because we don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings, or because we don’t want to wreck the atmosphere in a group,” Canet has explained, “and those lies that I was telling myself, too, about the choices I made, or to escape issues about my family and stuff.”
Whatever dark thoughts were seething below, the only visible cloud in the lives of Canet and Cotillard has been an intense period of scrutiny from the French media prompted by the director’s decision to leave his first wife, the German actor Diane Kruger.
Canet has likened his feelings for Cotillard to a slow revelation: “I’ve known her for 14 years, but we never had any relation until three years ago. One moment you’re moving in a particular direction with a person, then one day you wake up and say: ‘She’s the love of my life.’ I never saw it coming.”
Cotillard, in turn, has spoken of finding in Canet the stimulus she requires: “For me, I need to be with someone who is searching, who is wide awake.”
Her career has blossomed with their relationship, despite a perilous moment when the media picked up on remarks she had once made on a chat show about Sept. 11, 2001, suggesting the attacks might have been staged by the establishment. She now says she was misquoted. “I didn’t say that. The first reason is I know people who have lost members of families or friends in those planes. So how could I believe in the conspiracy theory?”
Since this blip, her popularity in Hollywood has grown and she has not suffered from the so-called “Binoche factor,” the tendency for French-speaking stars to price themselves out of the industry in their native land and yet fail to find big roles in the US.
Her approach to acting is akin to total immersion. While she was playing Piaf she sang every day, although her singing voice was not used. Once filming had finished, she says, it took her months to leave the “Little Sparrow” behind. The daughter of an actor and a director, she is a bohemian, not to say hippy, who loves making jewelry and almost gave up acting to work full time for Greenpeace.
Cotillard said this spring she had come to relish the challenge of acting in a foreign language. “It’s totally different. And it’s more work. But it’s something that I love to do. I love to work on the detail of the sound, how you stress a word, the meaning of the rhythm of what you say. It’s very, very interesting.”
For now, though, with motherhood pending, she is wedded to her life in Paris with Canet and has no plans to move to Los Angeles. Proximity to old friends is important. “Last night I was at an event and then two friends called to say, hey, we’re round the corner having a drink, and I said, ‘I’m on my way.’ It was great.”
The couple are often spotted out together doing normal things, like drinking coffee and buying food. But then — thanks to an illusory Gallic effect that is, coincidentally, examined by Woody Allen in Cotillard’s latest film — even “normal things” can appear alluringly glamorous if they are being done in Paris.
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