Patrice Chéreau: Last News

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentParis-based sales company Charades has closed a raft of deals on “Forever Young,” Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s film which competed at Cannes and earned a warm critical welcome. “Forever Young” opens at the end of the 1980s in Paris and follows a young troupe of comedians who have just have been admitted to Les Amandiers, the prestigious theater school headed by Patrice Chéreau. Bruni Tedeschi wrote the script alongside Agnès De Sacy and regular collaborator Noémie Lvovsky.

French director Claire Denis is set to return to West Africa for her next feature film, an adaptation of late French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1980 work Black Battles With Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens).

French cinema guilds L’Arp and La SRF have put out a joint statement declaring solidarity with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Jean-Hugues Anglade became an arthouse cinema star of the ’80s and ’90s behind the potent one-two punch of international hits Betty Blue and La Femme Nikita. Playing men who loved hard and recklessly, the actor embodied onscreen a raw, alluring passion that he then upended, to powerful effect, portraying mad King Charles IX in writer-director Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 period epic Queen Margot.But a decade earlier, Anglade made his big-screen breakthrough embodying another raw, reckless lover in Chéreau’s gritty, gay, mean streets drama L’homme blessé, or The Wounded Man (★★★☆☆), earning a Most Promising Newcomer César Award nomination for his intense performance as Henri, a young man who comes of age cruising his local train station.The film — which premiered at Cannes in 1983, and had an extremely limited stateside release in 1985 — actually did win the César for its script, by Chéreau and author-activist Hervé Guibert, inspired by the street-savvy works of Jean Genet.Viewing the film now, as it arrives finally on digital home video via a brilliant, new 4K restoration courtesy of Altered Innocence and Studiocanal, other muses also spring to mind, from the slinky sailors of Rainer Fassbinder’s Querelle, released a year prior, to the pugnacious gay hustler of Wallace Potts’ sublimely sexy 1979 French erotica Le Beau Mec.Somewhere between Le Beau Mec and William Friedkin’s Cruising, we might meet Henri, looking like a sweaty, unstable young Al Pacino, as he prowls his economically depressed, French provincial town.

Based on her own time spent in the acting school Les Amandiers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” aims to recreate a very specific time and place both in her life and in France, more than it cares to inform her audience about what, exactly, was so special about this school. Funded in the 1980s by Patrice Chéreau, a successful and daring director of theatre, opera and film, Les Amandiers did not last very long but for a few years it was considered to be one of the most exciting places in France and even Europe for young actors to develop their crafts, and for directors to find new talent.

Jessica Kiang There are no more potential-killing words of creative advice than “write what you know.” Certainly it’s a shame that when donning her screenwriter chapeau, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi — a fine actress and a director with a deft, light touch, especially with breezy character comedy — seems to have taken them so to heart. Once again she goes back to the autobiographical well for her latest directorial trifle, “Forever Young,” which she co-writes alongside Agnès De Sacy and regular collaborator Noémie Lvovsky.Once again the result is set in a rarefied world of which Bruni Tedeschi has intimate knowledge: this time the 1980s acting school run by the late French theater, opera and film director Patrice Chéreau.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentWhen Italian-French actress and director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was in her twenties she had the formative experience of attending the prestigious acting school at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, France, led by late great auteur Patrice Chéreau. Her fifth directorial effort, “Forever Young,” which is in competition in Cannes, is a tribute to that time and, ultimately, to any young person’s passion for the theatre. Tedeschi spoke to Variety in Cannes about how she mixed remembrances and re-invention to make this film.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentPathé may be one of France’s oldest film groups, but it is young at heart. The only French film company that is still fully involved in exhibition, production, distribution and sales, Pathé has been confronting the challenges wrought by the pandemic and the arrival of streamers with bold steps and ambitious new projects.

French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who won an Oscar for Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at respected cinematography festival Camerimage, which will be held in Torun, Poland, and through virtual presentations from Nov. 14-21.