Berenice Bejo Dwells on the Past; Replaces Binoche on Corbet’s “The Childhood of the Leader”

Sometimes life doesn’t play out like in the movies, or rather, sometimes the movies don’t play out like in real life. Actor-director Brady Corbet can fondly look back at Olivier Assayas’ Sils Maria as proof (he plays an author courting the A-lister) that Juliette Binoche was his first choice, but due to scheduling conflicts, a Cosmopolis-like reunion between the actress and Robert Pattinson will have no longer be the case. Variety reports that the matriarch role now goes to Berenice Bejo, the Oscar nominated actress who saw her last film (by hubby Michel Hazanavicius) get panned in Cannes, will next be featured alongside Melanie Laurent and Audrey Tautou in Tran Anh Hung’s Eternity. The Childhood of the Leader is now set for a November shoot in Budapest.

Gist: Co-written by Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker) and Corbet, this is a chilling fable about the rise of fascism in the 20th Century tells the story of a young American boy living in France in 1918 whose father is working for the US government on the creation of the Treaty of Versailles. What he witnesses helps to mould his beliefs – and we witness the birth of a terrifying ego.

Worth Noting: Bejo was featured in Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s Inferno — an experi-docu on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (see clip below).

Do We Care?: Perhaps the age difference works in the favor of the character, Bejo has the goods and we certainly know she can scold children as witnessed in The Search.