So French

Fanny Ardant and Gérard Depardieu, the legendary couple of French cinema, star in Jean Becker’s latest film, “Les Volets Verts“.

An impossible love story

Since Truffaut’s masterpiece The Woman Next Door, Fanny Ardant and Gérard Depardieu have forever symbolized mad love. Forty years later, here they are again, immersed in an impossible love story, in the film Les Volets Verts. The film is an adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon, written in 1950. At 89, Jean Becker adapts it to the cinema, with Gérard Depardieu as obvious. “He is certainly the greatest actor of this century,” says the director. A story full of melancholy, in which we take two sacred monsters of French cinema.

Two legendary actors

In this film, Gerard Depardieu plays Jules, an actor at the height of his glory in the 1970s. A true sacred monster, adored, he triumphs every evening at the theater alongside Jeanne Swann (Fanny Ardant). But the man, with a hard and dry temperament, goes through a complex period: his body is tired of his excesses of all kinds. And Jeanne, tired of waiting for him, left in the arms of another. Jules then becomes painfully aware of having missed his chance. Success is no longer enough for him. He wants, needs elsewhere. A beautiful love story to discover in addition to the performance of these two legendary actors.

The Woman Next Door

The famous actress Fanny Ardant made her first performance on stage in 1976, in “Marie-poupée” by Joël Seria. In this room, she stood out, and made several films on television. Fanny Ardant attracts the attention of a famous director, François Truffaut, who becomes her companion. One of her major roles is in one of the filmmaker’s films, “The Woman Next Door” (1981). She participated in various films, such as “Un amour de Swann” in 1984, or “Family Council” in 1986. We also see her in Le Colonel Chabert” (1994), “Sabrina” (1995) and Par- beyond the clouds (1995). She succeeded in obtaining the César for best actress, with the comedy “Pédale douce” by Gabriel Aghion in 1996. In the 2000s, she played major roles, as in the film by François Ozon “Eight women” (2002), that of Franco Zeffirelli, “Callas Forever” (2001), as well as the film “Sin noticias de Dios” (2001).She even became a director, in 2009, for her first film “Cendres and Blood”. In 2020, she obtained a second César, that of the best actress in a supporting role, for her interpretation in “La Belle Epoque”.