CANNES DISPATCH
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER
Vincent Cassel admits that his first time visiting Cannes film festival was by hitchhiking. These days the celebrated French actor need not thumb for a lift and he returns to the Croisette with award-winning Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, premiering at Cannes’ Grand Théâtre Lumière on Thursday night. Farhadi’s exploration of voyeurism is playing in competition at this year’s festival and stars Cassel in a dual role alongside French icons Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve.
Huppert plays Sylvie, a novelist who starts spying on two men (Cassel and Pierre Niney) and a woman (Virginie Efira) living across the street, hoping for inspiration for her next book. Hiring an assistant (Adam Bessa) to help her sort her thoughts, Sylvie begins to blur reality and fiction as she writes alternative existences she sees through her telescope..
Loosely inspired by the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Parallel Tales premiered in the famous Lumiere Theatre at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Cassel told festival press that the dual role he played was ripe for playfulness and that he might have been tempted to act ‘less well’ as the fictional character; ‘but it’s not something I was able to do!’
Greg Williams photographed the actor at the famed Carlton Hotel before the film premiered to a five minute standing ovation.
Parallel Tales premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival
