Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2018: #62. Benoit Jacquot’s Mr. Casanova

Mr. Casanova

2018 may be a two-hitter for French auteur Benoit Jacquot. Following his latest collaboration with Isabelle Huppert in Eva (which was a shoe-in for Berlin, becoming the director’s third time competing there), Jacquot will reunite with Vincent Lindon (having previously worked together on 2015’s Diary of a Chambermaid) for Mr. Casanova, which will focus on the Italian libertine’s life in London exile at the age of 65, when he loved a 25 year-old-woman who spurned his advances. Jacquot is once again adapting a work by author Chantal Thomas (who penned the basis for Jacquot’s 2012 success Farewell, My Queen).

Release Date/Prediction: Jacquot remains a prolific force in French cinema, often unveiling back to back projects which tend to be ready at the end or beginning of any given year (the last time he competed at Cannes was in 1998 with The School of Flesh, while 2004’s A tout de suite played in Un Certain Regard). With Eva set for the first quarter and filming supposedly beginning on Mr. Casanova in January of 2018, this would seem a likely bet for Venice next September (where Jacquot has competed four times previously, with Seventh Heaven, 1997; Pas de Scandale, 1999; L’intouchable, 2006; and 2014’s Three Hearts (read review).