RETURN OF THE HERO (Le Retour du héros)

Thursday, April 26 – 5:40 pm – Renoir Theatre

North American Premiere | France | 2018 | Comedy | 90 min | In French with English subtitles

Directed by: Laurent Tirard
Written by: Laurent Tirard, Grégoire Vigneron
Cinematography: Guillaume Schiffman
Film Editing: Yann Malcor
Original Score: Mathieu Lamboley
Produced by: Marc Dujardin, Jean Dujardin (JD Production), Olivia Lagache, Laurent Tirard (Les Films sur Mesure), France 3 Cinéma, StudioCanal
Cast: Jean Dujardin (Captain Neuville), Mélanie Laurent (Elisabeth), Noémie Merlant (Pauline), Féodor Atkine (General Mortier-Duplessis)
International Sales: StudioCanal

Academy Award-winning actor Jean Dujardin plays a swaggering, swashbuckling swindler doing his darnedest to bamboozle savvy Mélanie Laurent’s aristocratic clan in this lavish 19th-century drawing room farce-cum-screwball battle of the sexes. He’s an oaf and a cad. She’s an overly prim sparkling wit. She hates him. He despises her. The classic recipe for romance… Or, as director Laurent Tirard says, “It’s a Jean-Paul Belmondo character suddenly dropping into a Jane Austen world.”

Laurent Tirard | French writer/director Laurent Tirard studied filmmaking at New York University, worked as a script reader for Warner Bros., then became a journalist for the French film magazine, Studio. During his tenure there, he interviewed 20 notable filmmakers for his book Moviemakers’ Master Class: Private Lessons from the World’s Foremost Directors (2002). Tirard left the magazine in 1997, began writing scripts for film and TV, and directed two short films. He crossed over into feature directing with The Story of My Life (Audience Award, COLCOA 2005), then co-wrote the hugely successful How to Get Married and Stay Single (2005) for Alain Chabat. His subsequent directorial efforts include Molière (2007), Little Nicholas (2009), Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia (2012), Nicholas on Holiday (2014) and Up for Love (COLCOA 2016).

In Association with: StudioCanal, Unifrance

Labels: Women Make History, Focus on a Filmmaker