There were many expectations placed on the second film that Léa Seydoux is premiering in the official competition of this edition of Cannes, Léa Seydoux in the official competition of this edition of Cannes, L’inconnue. Partly, it is due to the presence of the French actress, who at 40 years old is already a festival legend: she has presented sixteen films here since 2010 – almost one per year – and won a Palme d'Or for Blue is the Warmest Colour alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos, whom Seydoux applauded on Sunday at the end of the gala screening of the gala screening of Garance. But there was also anticipation to see L’inconnue because it is Arthur Harari's first film after the Oscar for the screenplay of Anatomy of a Fall, the 2023 Palme d'Or that he co-wrote with Justine Triet.

What a brave and exciting film has been directed by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Soudain, which premiered this Friday in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, has the audacity to take all the time and words it needs to reflect on a theme as uncinematic as the care of people with neurological diseases, and it does so through a beautiful story of friendship between two women, the director of a nursing home in Paris who introduces a new humanitarian philosophy at the center (Virginie Efira) and a Japanese theater director with terminal breast cancer (Tao Okamoto).

In a moment of The Silent Friend, the neuroscientist brought to life by Tony Leung (the protagonist of Happy Together in his first role in European cinema) weighs figs in front of the TV. The professor has little to do because he is stranded at a German university in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Until a program with a French scientist catches his attention. The expert argues that plants communicate with us, we just need to find the right communication channel to decode what they are telling us. Spurred on by this idea, the protagonist dedicates his efforts to finding a device that will allow him to connect with the proud ginkgo that presides over the university's botanical garden.

Quentin Dupieux He is the odd sock of French cinema. His films are unlike any other, and often don't even resemble each other. The second act, for example, could rhyme with Yannick, the film he made in 2023 about a spectator who intervenes in a play and the dynamite, a clever prank on a representation of reality, ehem, interruptus. This time, the fiction would be the filming of a sequence of a movie in which the actors (and what actors! Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, the cream of French cinema) enter and leave the story, blurring the boundaries between lies and truth.