While we await next week’s line-up unveilings to complete the full Croisette picture and ponder if the likes of helmers Clara Roquet (Libertad), Mari Alessandrini (Zahorí), Carolina Markowicz (Toll), Mounia Akl (Costa Brava Lebanon), Laura Baumeister (Daughter of Rage), Cécile Ducrocq (Une femme du monde), Banu Akseki (Sans Soleil), Simón Mesa Soto (Amparo), Agustina San Martín IV (Los abismos) and Arnaud Malherbe (Ogre) might fit into the sidebar plans, Critics’ Week have revealed their first official selection in Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet‘s comedy, Les Amours d’Anaïs.
The film supported by Arte France Cinéma, the CNC and Critic’s Week own Next Step programme, this is being selected as the section’s 60th anniversary film. Shot in August of 2020, Les amours d’Anaïs stars Anaïs Demoustier (with whom the filmmaker last worked with on her award-winning short – see below), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and actor Denis Podalydès who has three films in Cannes this year with Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception and Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Oranges sanguines.
Anaïs is thirty and struggling financially. She’s got a boyfriend she’s not sure she loves anymore. She meets Daniel (Denis Podalydès), who immediately takes a fancy to her. But Daniel lives with Emilie… whom Anaïs also fancies. The story of an ever-changing young woman. And that of a burning desire.