29/04/2019 - 53 years after A Man and a Woman won the Palme d’Or, Claude Lelouch is back in the director’s chair working with actors Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant once again

Claude Lelouch will be taking part in the 72^nd Cannes Film Festival (14-25 May) with the third instalment in a trilogy, the first chapter of which was launched internationally on the Croisette back in 1966. This year, The Best Years of a Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Claude Lelouch
film profile] will be shown as an Official Selection special screening. 

The filmmaker is reuniting with Jean-Louis Trintignant (Best Actor Award at Cannes in 1969 for Z, Silver Bear for Best Actor at Berlin in 1968 for The Man Who Lies and César Award for Best Actor in 2013 for Amour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michael Haneke
film profile]) and Anouk Aimée (nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress in 1967 for A Man and a Woman, Best Actress Award at Cannes in 1980 for Leap into the Void), who will be returning to play Jean-Louis Duroc and Anne Gauthier. 

In A Man and a Woman (which scooped the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1966 and was crowned with two Oscars in 1967 – for Best Screenplay and Best Foreign-language Film – in addition to garnering one further nomination in the Best Director category), an inconsolable widow and widower bumped into one another, got to know each other and ended up falling in love, overcome by passion. In A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, which was presented out of competition at Cannes in 1986, the lovers, who had lost touch, were reunited 20 years later: the race-car driver had become a rally organiser and the script supervisor a film producer. They came to realise that many things had changed and that time really does pull lovers apart… In The Best Years of a Life (the screenplay for which has again been penned by Claude Lelouch), Anne and Jean-Louis come together again 52 years after their dazzling love affair. Today, the erstwhile race-car driver’s memory is starting to get a little muddled. In order to help him, his son seeks out the one person that his father was unable to hang on to, but whom he never stops talking about. Anne and Jean-Louis thus get to see each other again and pick up where they left off…

Also featuring among the cast of The Best Years of a Life are Antoine Sire, Marianne Denicourt, Souad Amidou and Monica Bellucci.

As a reminder, Claude Lelouch has presented eight other films in the Cannes Official Selection: Bolero (in competition in 1981), L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure (out of competition in 1972), And Now My Love (out of competition in 1974 and nominated for the Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1976), Us Two (out of competition in 1979), And Now… Ladies and Gentlemen (out of competition in 2002), Roman de gare (special screening in 2007), and the omnibus films Visions of Eight and To Each His Own Cinema (out of competition in 1973 and 2007, respectively). The filmmaker has also been selected twice in competition at Berlin (in 1964 and 1968) and once at Venice (in 1996).

Produced by Les Films 13 and Davis Films, The Best Years of a Life was co-produced and pre-purchased by France 2 Cinéma. Interestingly, the film’s score was composed by the late Francis Lai (nominated for the Oscar in his respective category in 1971 for Love Story and a regular collaborator with Claude Lelouch ever since the famous “Chabadabada” song in A Man and a Woman) and by Calogero. The movie will be released in French theatres on 22 May by Metropolitan Filmexport, which is also taking care of the international sales.

(Translated from French)