The final clapperboard slammed today, Friday 1 August, on Les Caprices de l’Enfant Roi, which is Michel Leclerc’s 8th fiction feature film after The Names of Love (screened in Cannes’ Critics’ Week 2010 and awarded the 2011 Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay Césars), Télé gaucho (nominated for 2013’s Best Male Newcomer César), The Very Private Life of Mister Sim (earning a Best Actor César nomination in 2016), Battle of the Classes (2019), Not My Type (2022) and Not All Men But...

The cast stars Artus (A Little Something Extra, Block Pass), Julia Piaton (nominated for the 2021 Best Newcomer César via Love Affair(s) and recently at her best in Colours of Time) and Franck Dubosc (How To Make A Killing, Rolling to You), together with Nemo Schiffman (nominated for the 2014 Best Newcomer César thanks to On My Way, and recently glimpsed in The Little Sister), Niels Hamel-Brochen (Top Dogs), Dora Tillier (nominated for the 2018 and 2020 Best Actress Césars via Mr and Mrs Adelman and La belle époque), Suzanne de Baecque (Drifting Laurent, Jim’s Story) and Xavier Robic (of the series La Fièvre).

Written by Michel Leclerc himself, in league with Baya Kasmi (awarded the 2011 Best Original Screenplay César for The Names of Love and nominated again in 2015 for Hippocrates), based on an original idea by the former and Alexandre Castagnetti, the story takes us back to 1651 when Louis (the future Louis XIV) is a young teenager. Rebellion is in the air, so his mother, Anne of Austria, decides to extract her son to keep him safe and replaces him with a lookalike. D’Artagnan entrusts Louis to the care of Cyrano de Bergerac who hides him in the theatre company run by Madeleine Béjart and Molière. As Madeleine and Cyrano discover their shared love of the young Molière, Louis discovers life and its pleasures, art and work, and courage and strategy - everything that will turn this young man into the Sun King.

Les Caprices de l’Enfant Roi is being produced by Isabelle Grellat on behalf of Mandarin & Compagnie and by Guillaume Renouil for Elephant Story, in co-production with Le Pacte (who are managing distribution in French cinemas). The film has been pre-purchased by Canal+ and Ciné+, and enjoys an advance on receipts from the CNC and from the Pays de la Loire region, where part of the 8-week film shoot unfolded (having kicked off on 16 June and also taken the team to Île-de-France). Photography is headed up by Alexis Kavyrchine (awarded the 2021 César in his speciality for Bye Bye Morons and nominated in 2019 and 2023).

For the record, Mandarin & Compagnie recently oversaw production on Alpha by Julia Ducournau (due for release in France on 20 August) and Dalloway by Yann Gozlan (due for release in France on 17 September), and are currently post-producing Safy Nebbou’s Nobody's Son.