Though we’re likely just two months from Arnaud Desplechin’s next feature Spectateurs! (exclamation point his, but really mine as well) he’s already mobilized an enviable team for the next-next project. Ecran Total reports Léa Seydoux (his collaborator on Deception and Oh Mercy!), Jason Schwartzman, John Turturro, and Golshifteh Farahani (previously of Brother and Sister) are leading The Thing That Hurts, which has just secured financing from the Belgian entity Wallimage and will be supported by CG Cinéma.
Early details are scant, except notice that The Thing That Hurts shoots in Brussels and (per quick translation) “evokes the meeting, following the death of a famous American psychotherapist based in Paris, of some of her patients, who confided in their relationship with the deceased.” Desplechin’s cinema is nothing if not the mingling of memory with grief––these four playing in that world is nearly as sterling a guarantee as the film struggling to receive U.S. distribution. As the result of a 2024 financing initiative, the project likely rolls cameras this year.
Any wait is opportunity to see Deception, featuring perhaps Seydoux’s greatest performance. As Desplechin expressed to me his admiration a couple years ago:
So usually I play all the characters on the set and I misbehave. It’s written in all the guides that you don’t have to act in front of actors; I do all the acting in front of actors. But with this part I never acted in front of her. I was saying, “No, it’s your voice. I want to record and to show and to film your voice. Your way of looking at things, etc. We have to discuss it together and perhaps I can help you here and there with this line, which is difficult, but the result of it will be your life.” That’s why this film is so precious for Léa: she felt she gave something, a part of her, and that was the gift that we shot each day. She’s not like that in all the films, but she’s so unpredictable—because she doesn’t know what she will do the next day. She does not know. She’s obsessed with the right note, to find the right note—the musical note. So she’s saying “I didn’t find it; I have to do another take. I didn’t find it; I have to do another take.”