Tahar Rahim is Lou Ye’s ‘Bitch’

In many ways, Cannes is like Disneyland. It’s a lieu where dreams come true, where an actor can be plucked from obscurity, as was the case for Tahar Rahim – whose mind-numbing, break-out performance in A Prophet has landed him a wealth of future acting parts, and it’s a place that helps sustain a career in filmmaking when you’re banned from pursuing the profession in your own country, as was the case for provocateur Lou Ye. French trades are reporting that the very busy Rahim, will play the male lead in Bitch, a film that will surely be a hot topic film at the festival in 2011. 

A France-China co-production that will be filmed in black and white, Bitch is a 2008 Cannes Atelier project which we reported on here, and is based on Jie Liu-Falin’s best-seller book that was banned from publication but made the rounds on the internets. Imagine that. In a nutshell, this is about a young Beijing professor who leaves her job to follow a new love to Paris, who in turn abandons her. Alone in a new city, she encounters another man, and this is where the film will take a serious detour. Casting for the female lead should be announced shortly, with filming to take place in Paris and then relocating to Beijing. Here is a lengthy, marketplace synopsis below… 

Mathieu says, if she were a prostitute, for sure Flower would make a lot of money. He says she’s a born bitch. Any profession other than a prostitute would indeed be a waste of her gifts. Maybe he’s had few numerable women in his life, even though he boasts himself a veteran of love affairs; or maybe he just says it as a compliment to her, even though his flattering always goes too far, but no matter how, she can never be a prostitute. It’s not that she has a substantial prejudice against this ancient profession, but because she would never choose an occupation that completely has nothing to do with the past 30 odd years of her life and experience.

She had her dreams before. But, what could a thirty-something Chinese woman possibly do in Paris? Get married, have babies and be an indifferent housewife? It seems there’s never such a possibility for her. Maybe she’s had similar chances, but she keeps missing them one after another. Continue her study to get a doctor’s degree? But what can piles of diploma help with a wretched lonely old woman? She’s always been trying to motivate herself to be tough, but she is never a superwoman. In her dictionary, superwoman is a woeful and helpless word, which will chill her to the bone. You can’t blame her for that. She just believes in a woman’s life, there should be something closer to the heart other than vanity, or at least to a woman like her. She could go through all the hardships to come and study in France, but study is not her one and only purpose, or we could say not her real purpose.

She comes to France just to follow a man, a man who had brought surges to her heart. But it has been proved that he doesn’t love her at all. She falls in love with someone else later as well, even though that’s something she’d rather not to do. When a forceful romance vanishes into the air, sheer blank is the only thing left behind in the woman’s life. She’s not able to add any color or content because she refuses everything. All her passion and thoughts concentrate on the man, while that man has walked away from her. He would never look back. His charming blue eyes would never again stare at her with all the affections. He would never say to her, “ I love you. I love you very very very much. I’m all yours. You’re my angel, my princess, my heart, my baby…” But what can she do? Besides weeping, what else can she do?

Nobody would see her tears and nobody would want to. There’s nothing in front of her but the endless rows upon rows of indifferent gray buildings. The faint sunset glow shines on the tip of the Eiffel Tour, which seems within her reach but yet forever unreachable. She has no idea right at the same moment, where he’s wondering around at some corner of this distant ancient town. The first time she cries, he slowly walks up to her, holds up her chin in his hands and softly kisses off all the tear drops on her cheeks. Then he probes with his slightly salty tip of his tongue, presses it against her trembling lips. She tries to resist but fails. He sucks and cruises between her scarlet lips. In the end, she is melt by this sweet but scorching current. She allows him to peel off her clothes and she allows him to cast his scalding kisses all over her body. She says to him, “I want you…”

However, when she cries endlessly again and again, he gradually loses his tender patience. In the beginning, he tries to cheer her up, saying, “You’re too beautiful to cry”, but later, as he loses his patience, he just says coldly, “You can’t cry. Your tears prove nothing but you’re not happy when you’re with me. I want you to be happy.” Then he leaves, because he doesn’t want to see her tears, because he wants her to be happy. However, she would never be able to make it clear to him, all that she needs is nothing but a kiss of the same heat and same humidity. That’s where all her happiness rests.