Abdelatif Kechiche returns with the “real” following Mektoub My Love: First images

Six years after having tired the Cannes festival -goers with his endless Intermezzo, still unprecedented in theaters, the French filmmaker returns with the third part of his saga in competition in Locarno.

Abdellatif Kechiche’s film buff is mounted very high until its golden palm for Adèle’s life In 2013. She extended despite the reserves of Léa Seydoux on the methods of a filmmaker who exhausts all the possibilities of a sequence even if he enables hell to her performers at the time of filming. Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos had simulated sex scenes for several days for the needs of the film. An “violent” experience had deplored the actress.

Léa Seydoux evokes the Kechiche method

Mektoub my love: canto uno In 2017, free adaptation of a novel by François Bégaudeau, The wound the realhad perpetuated the fascination for the work of an author adept at long time, the exploration of adolescent language (including that of bodies) and a sensuality which circulates between beings.

The film told the itinerary of Amin, an apprentice screenwriter for a summer in Sète in 1994. Back in his hometown, he met his cousin Tony as enterprising with the girls that Amin is reserved.

You could see in this story an autobiographical part. Amin would be double Abdellatif Kechiche. Armed with his camera, he observes more than he participates in the sensual round that surrounds him.

Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno (Critique)

The endless interlude

In 2019, Mektoub My Love: Intermezzopresented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival was necessarily expected. The press screening of this false suite will however cool the spirits. Kechiche’s camera is praising in short-cling to its actresses hanging on pole dance bars in a nightclub for almost three hours. The film without script plays the overlap. An endless cunnilingus scene not simulated in the toilets of the nightclub definitively poses the question of the relevance of the filmmaker’s gaze on the beings he films.

The main actress Ophélie Bau will not attend the official screening of the film in Cannes and will not show up alongside the rest of the team the following days, leaving a discomfort.

The Revolution of the Metoo movement started in the turmoil of the Weinstein affair two years earlier, then encouraged the world of cinema to question certain sexist practices. THE Intermezzo from Kechiche and his “male look” are immediately disqualified. The film does not come out in theaters (it remains unprecedented to this day) without anyone knowing if it is about the will of its author, its producers or a problem of musical rights.

“The most important thing for me was to celebrate life, love, desire, bread, music, body and try the most free cinematographic experience”, said the filmmaker at a press conference on the Croisette.

Back in grace?

Since then, Abdellatif Kechiche has been discreet. In 2022, on the sidelines of the Montpellier Festival Cinemed, he had questioned the relevance of the editing of his film presented in Cannes and affirmed to work on the “real” following his Mektoub My Love.

“I spend my time there, for all these years. I only did that: going up, going back, trying … I hope soon the end of Mektoub.“”

The second part – or the third if we take into account The Intermezzo ! – Baptized Mektoub my love: canto due will thus be presented in a few weeks in competition at the Locarno, Switzerland festival. We know almost nothing about this film. The official synopsis has the merit of brevity: “The real suite of Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno. “

The Swiss Festival unveiled on its website the first photos of Canto dueand its duration (2h14). The casting takes up the same as the previous opuses including Ophélie Bau. This film would be the result of a montage from images already filmed at the time of the first part.

The return to grace of the one who had so much breathtaking us with Dodge Or The seed and the mule Did it come? Answer at the beginning of August on the lake city.

Mektoub my love: canto due. Of Abdellatif Kechiche. With: Shaïn Boumedine, Ophélie Bau, Jessica Pennington, Salim Kechiouche, Andre Jacobs, Hafsia Herzi … Duration: 2h14. Indefinite exit.