Five years after receiving the Donostia Award, Marion Cotillard has returned to the San Sebastian Festival, but this time to compete for the Golden Shell with the family thriller crossed by politics 7h40 ce matin-là. In the film, she plays a former leftist revolutionary who, after 15 years in prison, reunites with the son she abandoned for armed struggle, who is now an adult working as a mechanic in a garage. Like in the thriller about cults Karma, which she presented at the last Cannes Festival, Cotillard moves away from her glamorous image as an official Chanel ambassador. Here she is a tough and opaque woman, who seeks a job as a waitress in a provincial town to be close to her son and watch him; sometimes she talks to him, but without ever revealing her identity, like a silent spy with a secret agenda.

Beyond the talent for orchestrating action scenes – in the film As bestas and the series Antidisturbios–, the filmmaker from Madrid Rodrigo Sorogoyen usually builds his sharp existential odysseys around intimate sequences loaded with dramatic density and attention to detail. Following this pattern, El ser querido opens with a lengthy and vibrant encounter between a father (Javier Bardem), a successful film director, and his daughter (Victoria Luengo), whom he hasn't seen in thirteen years and who offers her the leading role in his new film. In itself, this scene, filmed in close-ups from a distance, offers everything an demanding viewer could ask for: writing of the highest precision, eloquent silences, echoes of John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman, and a duo of actors in a state of grace.