Léa Seydoux is the star of Cannes this year.

The Frenchwoman plays the leading role in three films in the official program and an important supporting role in a fourth, Wes Anderson's “French Dispatch” (FAZ of July 13).

Whereby a main role is no guarantee for the best place in the eye of the camera.

When things go bad, the heroine becomes an object too.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

In Arnaud Desplechin's film “Tromperie” (Deception), which is part of the “Cannes Prémière” series, Léa Seydoux plays the English lover of the writer Philip Roth. In his 1990 novel of the same name, Roth translated the stages of his love affair, which began and ended during a long stay in London, into a series of bed conversations, from the first sex to the last kiss. Desplechin, who, as he says, also made his film in response to the restrictions during the first corona lockdown, takes this intimate play situation at its word. But not quite. He not only lets his characters, the aging author and the younger woman trapped in a cold marriage, talk, but also shows how they meet on the street. He shows the writer and his wife whom he is cheating,in the bedroom and having a marriage fight, he sends him to New York, where he meets his ex-wife with cancer and a former student, and he attaches an epilogue in which the lovers are reconciled over the printed book. But the film still doesn't move.

A tear like an ornament

In “Tromperie” it takes revenge that the cinema, unlike literature, cannot look its characters in the heads.

It has to give them something to do so that they can reveal themselves.

Desplechin's efforts to cover up this shortcoming make it all the more visible.

Even a table talk in New York remains a table talk.

Perhaps the film should have been limited to Roth's perfectly choreographed word ballet.

But he obviously lacked the courage to do so.

But Léa Seydoux is a feast for the eyes in “Tromperie”: her elegance, her casualness, the almost childlike beauty of her face.

Except that in her main role she is not the main character in the story.

She remains exposed to the gaze of the writer (Denis Podalydès), which the camera doubles.

Practically nothing is learned about her life outside of the affair.

Sometimes a tear runs down her cheek, in the cinema it is always a sign that something important is happening.

Here it works like an ornament.

The passion gets stuck in costumes

The character that Seydoux embodies in Ildikó Enyedi's competition entry “A feleségem története” (The story of my wife) could be a double of the lovers from “Tromperie”. She is the wife of a ship's captain who married her without a lot of fuss because he needed a companion for his stay on land. After a while, the captain wonders if Lizzy is cheating on him. What else, one would like to ask back, because Jakob Störr (Gijs Naber) looks as amusing as a cotton freighter even when he is not on the ocean. But because this film also looks at his women's story through the eyes of men, the infidelity of the sailor's wife appears to be an unforgivable weakness in character. She breaks the heart of the brave sturgeon, even if it is not he who dies in the end, but her.

“A feleségem története” was based on a novel by the Hungarian author Milán Füst, which was published in 1942. The book “touches the meaning of life in a very direct way”, explained the director of her film adaptation, but anyone who wants to make sense of this sentence in the pictures is lost with Ildikó Enyedi. “The Story of My Wife” is more reminiscent of those co-productions financed by too many partners, which in the old century were called European pudding. The film jumps from Menorca to Paris and on to Hamburg, and with every change of location, the marriage clinch between Mr. and Mrs. Störr loses its grip on the ground. The passion that is evoked here remains stuck in the costumes because, as with Arnaud Desplechin, it has no contact with the outside world.

But Léa Seydoux is still waiting for her triumph. Maybe it will work out with the role of a war reporter in Bruno Dumont's film “France”, which will be shown at the festival tomorrow. Or in Cannes next year.