Riding high after taking Best Film at the César Awards — beating out Nouvelle Vague, It Was Just an Accident, and Case 137 — for her Orizzonti-premiered L’Attachement (The Ties That Bind Us), which preemed this past February, Carine Tardieu will be heading to Cannes next month as one of the eight filmmakers in the Investors Circle, and kicking off production on her sixth feature film project shortly after. La vie obstinée lines up a savoury trio of players — we find with upcoming Cannes competition film La Vie d’une Femme (by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet) duet of Léa Drucker and Melanie Thierry quickly re-teaming on this new project and completing the trio we find Benoît Magimel. Screen Daily reports that Karé Productions produces. Tardieu will be looking towards submitting for the Cannes competition next year.
Working with themes of isolation, grieving amongst others, moral reckoning and perhaps human comfort at the expense of fragile natural systems, this is based on the 1967 American novel All The Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner, this is set in the 1970s and sees a couple (Magimel/Drucker) retreat to the Normandy countryside after losing their 25-year-old son in a surfing accident. There, they meet a single mother (Thierry) and a free-spirited young man (Félix Vannoorenberghe) who force them to confront their pain and embrace life again.
Tardieu has been to prestigious A lists fests for all of her five features including two trips to the Croisette with her debut La Tête de maman (2007) — which was selected for the Critics’ Week section while her third feature Ôtez-moi d’un doute (2017) was a Directors’ Fortnight selection.
