There are 12 rules of karma in eastern philosophy. In Hollywood, there’s an unofficial 13th: Marion Cotillard will inevitably return to the Cannes Film Festival.
The Oscar-winning actress hits the Croisette this year with two new projects, representing her 14th and 15th premieres on the famed red carpet in the South of France. One is Bertrand Mandico’s dramedy “Roma Elastica,” and the other a literal barn burner from her frequent collaborator Guillaume Canet called “Karma.”
In “Karma,” Cotillard delivers a searing performance as the mysterious Jeanne, a French woman living in Spain. When her godson goes missing, Jeanne flees the country as a prime suspect and is forced to seek refuge with a religious cult she escaped years earlier. Cotillard is subjected to both physical and emotional brutality. She shows up with her usual artistic flare in a genre she’s not visited in some time: an edge-of-your-seat thriller.
“Karma” is her most broadly appealing movie in a decade, one Cotillard said director Canet made intentionally for a wide audience. although a highly visible run in the fourth season of Apple’s “The Morning Show” last year, Cotillard has largely appeared in French language indies since 2016’s “Assassin’s Creed,” a video game adaptation from from 20th Century Fox.
The film capped an impressive run in mainstream show business for an international star, as Cotillard appeared in blockbusters like “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Inception” after winning the best actress Academy Award for “La Vie en Rose.” Her retreat from Hollywood was no accident, she says, rather a decision to commit to raising her children.
“When I do a movie, I have this tendency to choose very deep and intense role. There’s a part of me that goes away. That doesn’t really fit the life of a child,” Cotillard told Variety at the start of the festival. She faced a struggle familiar to many working parents – inhabiting one part of her life fully and regretting being absent from another.
“I would think, ‘If I do this movie, every day I will tell myself I should be with my kids. If I don’t do it, there’s not a day when I won’t think I should’ve done the movie.’ But the choice was very easy to make,” she says. “For years I accepted supporting roles and local shoots, and it might have implied I didn’t work that much. So, my kids were protected from me being crazy in another world.”
Cotillard’s daughter, 9, and son, 15, are encouraging their mother to accept more leading roles in studio films. After spending months in Los Angeles on “The Morning Show,” Cotillard said she called a family meeting to talk about signing up for bigger parts in more mainstream films. “I’m so close to them, and they understand today that I really want to do more movies again.”
But perhaps ones that don’t’ ring as prescient as 2011’s “Contagion,” a Steven Soderbergh thriller that tracked the spread of a deadly pandemic in excruciating detail. Cotillard’s presence may spark some fresh memories, especially as a recent hantavirus outbreak on a European cruise ship spikes anxiety around the world about the possibility of another global health crisis [there’s a reported case only 30 minutes away from Cannes, in the hamlet of Juan-les-Pins].
“It was really something, the second life that film had in 2020,” she says of “Contagion’s” COVID era embrace. “The screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, was such a visionary and wanted something so realistic. I wouldn’t say it was fun to see it [resurface in culture], but it was very interesting.”
Source: variety.com
