His acolytes, of which there is a rabid group, will contend that his entire career is success after success, but it still feels safe to say Philippe Garrel‘s been on a roll of sorts in recent years. He’ll follow one of last year’s best pictures, In the Shadow of Women — which more of you can and should see right now — with the Cannes-bound L’amant d’un jour, or One Day Lover, in which his own daughter, Esther Garrel, plays a woman who returns home at the tail end of a failed relationship and finds that her father (Eric Caravaca) is dating a woman (Louise Chevillotte) her own age.
There goes a joke, said either affectionately or scornfully depending on the speaker, that Garrel often produces precisely what most assume is “French arthouse cinema” — black-and-white, gloomy, sex- and cigarette-filled, with musings on matters of the heart taking precedence above anything we might rightfully consider action or momentum. That would seem to be the case with L’amant d’un jour (I’ll refrain from an English title until we officially have one), and thank God: when you’re in the mood for it, his cinema hits a spot nobody is even striving for, let alone achieving, and the presence of his own daughter in this particular story should provide the same interest afforded by his son’s presence in earlier films — an interest that can be immense. That it may not be in Competition does not preclude this from being among the festival’s likely highlights.
See the preview below.
