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CANNES, FRANCE: There’s a scene about 70 minutes into director Arnault Desplechin’s newest drama offering Frère et Sœur (Brother and Sister) where a distraught Alice (played with gusto by Academy Award-winning French actress Marion Cotillard) enters a pharmacy. Alice, a hugely famous stage star, is fulfilling a prescription for anti-depressant medication after her parent’s lives hang in the balance post a motor accident. It’s this event which sees her come face to face with her brother, the hot-tempered Louis (Melvil Poupaud), whom she hasn’t spoken to in 20 years.
“You know nothing about my life,” a usually put-together Alice screams at the pharmacist as she takes eight tablets instead of the recommended two. “You don’t know what I endure!”
When it comes to her relationship with her brother Louis, what exactly she has endured remains a little unclear. Unable to get past a long-festering envy of each other’s successes, the once-close siblings, now in their 50s, cannot co-exist in the same room without it inciting some sort of physiological response in both of them. (In one scene, Alice faints when she spots Louis at the hospital.)
What Cotillard gets incredibly right is Alice’s complicated and often nonsensical outbursts associated with facing the unexpected mortality of a loved one, or in this case both of her parents. Even when delivering a huge insult to her brother or telling her doctor she needs medication, Cotillard does it with a smile on her face. A smile so warm and saintly, it’s a jarring juxtaposition to the intent and meaning of her words. In this, it’s also incredibly real.
Indeed, the scene in the pharmacy is all but the second time we don’t see Alice smiling through her pain.
“She is a rough character. Rough, like a rough diamond,” Cotillard tells a room full of journalists at a press conference in Cannes, her accent ever so eloquent and soft. “There are very dual feelings within her – opposites. I think [Alice] deeply loves people, she’s just never known how to express this. I think she deeply loves her brother.”
“Marion made me cry. I don’t know how she managed to act this, but I knew she was repairing the hurt a lot of us have within us,” Desplechin adds.
In order to portray the distance between Alice and Louis, Cotillard tells the Cannes press room she wasn’t her warm, friendly self to Poupaud on purpose – at least while in production.
“I felt [while shooting] the film it was necessary to remain at a distance from Melvil, and not become too close,” Cotillard says. “I didn’t want to explain things to him in any way. I was quite pleased at the end of the shoot and to be able to say, ‘I’m sorry’. I said, ‘I wasn’t very warm’, and in fact I avoided him on purpose. When we were being made up in the morning, I ensured our paths didn’t cross. I don’t know, I had the impression that this really created a good feeling and I’m very pleased now we can talk together normally.” Below is some scenes from the premiere here in Cannes.
“When it comes to a loving relationship – when you don’t dare to look at someone, when you don’t dare to love the other person – there’s that magic moment when you look deep into the other person’s eyes,” she adds.
There’s a lot being said by critics about Desplechin’s Brother and Sister. The Guardian’s Peter Bradley writes “there’s not one line of plausible dialogue”, and Guy Lodge’s Variety cites it as “making no bones about its dialled-to-11 melodramatic agenda.” When you see the film, you can understand how film critics could feel these things. But while their jabs are at the filmmaking (the actors break the fourth wall numerous times, which is an interesting decision), none could argue that Cotillard and Poupard don’t make for a fiery, highly watchable on-screen duo. In fact, because the dialogue is so simple, it takes really great actors to be able to turn them into feelings for an audience. Watch the trailer below.
At its heart, Brother and Sister serves as a strong reminder of the importance of familial relationships; a nod to make that call to a loved one, to say the thing you’ve been meaning to say, or to repair old woulds. There is a heartbreaking scene between Alice and her father, Abel, where she asks him about why he didn’t finish his studies, and he asks her about her relationship breakdown with Louis – things the father and daughter hadn’t discussed up until this point. So why do we wait?
And if Cotillard’s performance doesn’t win you over, perhaps her itty-bitty sequinned mini shorts (by CHANEL, naturally) will – as spotted outside Le Majestic Hotel here in Cannes.
