Les Olympiades, Birth of Desire at Festival de Cannes

L’équipe de L’Histoire de ma Femme ©YesICannes.com

The race for the Palme d’Or continues on this ninth day of competition with Ildiko Enyedi’s The Story of My Wife and Jacques Audiard’s Les Olympiades.

Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi, winner of the Caméra d’or at the 1989 Festival de Cannes with her first feature film My 20th Century, enters the Competition with A Feleségem története (The Story of My Wife), the adaptation of the 1942 novel of the same name by Hungarian writer Milán Füst. After Un Prophète, Grand Prix du Jury de Cannes in 2009, and his Palme d’Or in 2015 for Dheepan, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard returns to the Competition with Les Olympiades, a ninth feature film that depicts a youthful, effervescent scene in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.

Exploring sexuality

In Les Olympiades, Jacques Audiard explores the daily lives of young Parisians – three girls and one boy – (Lucie Zhang, Noémie Merlant (Portrait of the Girl on Fire), Makita Samba and Jehnny Beth) and narrates the loves of these four characters who are by turns friends, lovers and sometimes both. Through their way of life, as his protagonists explore the birth of desire and their sexuality, the French filmmaker reclaims a neighbourhood in the 13th arrondissement of Paris where he once lived.

Adapted from graphic novels

Co-written with Céline Sciamma (director of Portrait of a Girl on Fire), the black-and-white feature is adapted from the graphic novels of American Adrian Tomine, best known for his funny and melancholy illustrations in The New Yorker.

Reinventing one’s toolbox

With this film, Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi enters as a female author the so-called traditional male mindset. She wanted to infiltrate the “toolbox” that all young boys are given to succeed in life. This film is designed as an invitation to every honest and caring man to refresh and reinvent his toolbox. The plot begins in a café where the master mariner Jacob Storr makes a bet with a friend to marry the first woman who walks through the door. Then Lizzy arrives… With Léa Seydoux (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2013 for La Vie d’Adèle), Gijs Naber, Louis Garrel, Josef Hader, Sergio Rubini and Jasmine Trinca.