Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2021: #56. Laurent Cantet’s Arthur Rambo

Arthur Rambo

Originally pegged as a 2020 hopeful, Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet might be part of a huge wave of former winners competing in 2021’s Cannes edition. For his eighth feature, Arthur Rambo, produced by Marie-Ange Luciani and lensed by Pierre Milon (who filmed several titles for Cantet, including Heading South, The Class and The Workshop), Cantet recruits BPM actor Antoine Reinartz, Rabah Nait Oufella and Sofian Khammes for his leads. Cantet won the Palme d’Or in 2008 for The Class and returned to Cannes in Un Certain Regard as part of the omnibus 7 Days in Havana in 2012 and again to the sidebar in 2017 with his last feature, The Workshop. The two-time Cesar winner won Best New Director in San Sebastian for Human Resources, and returned to compete for the Golden Shell in 2012 with Foxfire. In 2001, his Time Out won the Don Quixote Award after a sidebar premiere and he competed for the Golden Lion in Venice with 2005’s Heading South and 2014’s Return to Ithaca premiered in Venice Days.

Gist: Co-written by Fanny Burdino and Samuel Doux (both of 2016’s Carole Matthieu) Cantet’s latest meant to examine the repercussions of social networks through the rise and fall of a young Maghreb writer Karim D., better known as his alias, Arthur Rambo (a homonym play on the Stallone character and the famed French poet Arthur Rimbaud). A series of racist tweets compromise the journalist’s career in this narrative, based on actual events.

Release Date/Prediction: Shot from September to October 2019, with post-production delayed to the pandemic, we expect Cantet to return to Cannes in 2021 (where this might have likely premiered in 2020), potentially competing in the main competition or Un Certain Regard.