THE LAST DIAMOND / Le Dernier Diamant
International Premiere • Thriller, Heist • France, 2014
DCP • Scope 2:35 • Dolby SRD • Color • 108 min
Directed by: Eric Barbier
Written by: Eric Barbier, Marie Eynard, Trân-Minh Nam
Cinematography by: Denis Rouden
Film Editing by: Jennifer Augé
Original Score by: Renaud Barbier
Produced by: Aïssa Djabri, Farid Lahouassa (Vertigo Productions)
Co-producer: Scope Pictures, Bidibul Productions
Cast: Bérénice Bejo (Julia), Yvan Attal (Simon), Jean-François Stévenin (Albert), Antoine Basler (Scylla)
International Sales: Other Angle Pictures
US Distributor: Cohen Media Group • cohenmedia.net
US release date: 2015
The Florentine, a fabled, 137-carat yellow diamond last seen in 1918, has resurfaced and is up for sale in an exclusive Antwerp auction house. Simon, a master thief and ex-con on probation, is coerced into taking on the biggest, riskiest theft of his career, one that involves a long con with the diamond’s dangerously seductive owner, Julia. Simon assembles the pieces of his elaborate ruse, suspecting that he is just another piece of someone else’s jigsaw puzzle. But when no one is who they appear to be, the streetwise don’t make their move until the last mask comes off. In the tradition of Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and The Thomas Crown Affair, Yvan Attal teams up with The Artist Academy Award-nominee star, Bérénice Bejo to bring the sophisticated heist movie roaring back to life.
After a seven-year absence, writer/director Eric Barbier returns with another dip into the world of crime, for which he has become known. His lavishly ambitious first feature, le Brasier (1991), co-written with Jean-Pierre Barbier, told the epic struggle of a Polish miners’ strike in the 1930s. Although the film earned Barbier the Prix Jean Vigo, an award reserved for the most promising of emerging directors, its failure to attract an audience made it difficult for him to mount his next feature. Nine years later, Barbier made Toreros (2000), a noir set in the world of bullfighting. He followed that with the dark psycho-thriller, The Serpent (2007), co-written with Trân-Minh Nam and his first collaboration with actor Yvan Attal. As a young boy, Barbier saw the 1969 version of The Italian Job and became a lifelong fan of the heist genre. With The Last Diamond, he wanted to recreate what he loved most about those earlier films: the pure jubilance of breaking the law coupled with an insistence that the theft is somehow righting a greater injustice. The film, co-written with Nam and Marie Eynard, will premiere at COLCOA before its French release.
