Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2017: #54. Anne Fontaine’s Marvin

Marvin

Director: Anne Fontaine
Writer: Anne Fontaine, Pierre Trividic

Having premiered her 2016 French-Polish production The Innocents out of Sundance 2016, French director Anne Fontaine will have her fifteenth feature Marvin, a film inspired by Edoard Louis’ novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (roughly, Ending Eddy Bellegueule) ready for 2017. At one point announced as a project for Andre Techine, Fontaine has taken over the adaptation with screenwriter Pierre Trividic (who penned Pascale Ferran’s adaptation of Lady Chatterly) which tells the story of a young man who is shunned by peers and family when he comes out as gay in his small town. Apparently Fontaine’s film version takes the narrative into the man’s young adulthood, which is not so in Louis’ novel. Headlined by rising star Finnegan Oldfield (of Bang Gang, Nocturama, and Les Cowboys), Fontaine also casts notables like Catherine Mouchete (who’s 1986 title Therese was part of the visual inspiration for The Innocents) and Charles Berling. She also reunites with several performers, including Vincent Macaigne but even more notably, Fontaine will feature Isabelle Huppert (who starred in her 2011 film My Worst Nightmare), in a brief supporting turn as a variation of herself, a famous actress named Isabelle.

Cast: Finnegan Oldfield, Charles Berling, Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Macaigne, Catherine Mouchet, Catherine Salee

Production Co./Producer(s): Cine@ (Philippe Carcassonne), P.A.S. Productions (Pierre-Alexandre Schwab).

U.S. Distributor: Rights available.

Release Date: Fontaine’s films have appeared everywhere, as she’s competed in Venice (1997’s Dry Cleaning), Locarno (2001’s How I Killed My Father), and has appeared in Un Certain Regard with Augustin (1995) and out-of-competition with Oh La La! (2006) in Cannes. Lately, she has premiered several titles either at Sundance (2013’s Adore, 2016’s The Innocents) or coinciding with TIFF (My Worst Nightmare, or 2014’s Gemma Bovery). With filming completed this past fall, it would seem Fontaine could either return in some form to Cannes for her first time in a decade (and even longer for Venice) or bow once more at TIFF.

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