EVERYONE’S LIFE / Chacun sa vie  

 

North American Premiere • Comedy, Drama, Romance • France, 2017

DCP • 2.35 • Dolby 5.1 • Color • 113 min

Directed by: Claude Lelouch

Written by: Claude Lelouch, Valérie Perrin, Grégoire Lacroix, Pierre Uytterhoeven

Cinematography: Robert Alazraki           

Film Editing: Stéphane Mazalaigue

Original Score: Francis Lai, Laurent Couson

Produced by: Claude Lelouch (Films 13), Samuel Hadida, Victor Hadida (Metropolitan Filmexport)

Cast: Éric Dupond-Moretti (The Judge), Johnny Hallyday (Johnny), Nadia Farès (Nadia), Jean Dujardin (Jean), Christopher Lambert (Antoine de Vidas ), Béatrice Dalle (Clémentine), Marianne Denicourt (Marianne), Mathilde Seigner (Mathilde)

International Sales: Metropolitan Filmexport

 

Celebrating his 50-year career, director Claude Lelouch wanted to try something a little more daring and ambitious. So he gathered a veritable battalion of name actors in a provincial town in the Burgundy region. The result is a new film that playfully deconstructs narrative conventions while asking who among us has the moral right to sit in judgment of another? A jazz festival is swinging in the town of Beaune, but 12 men and 12 women have gathered for a different reason. A trial is taking place and they are here for the dispensation of justice, such as it is. Yet each of these judges, lawyers, or jurors--people from every walk of life--has a skeleton or two tucked in a closet: a billionaire who tries to seduce a tax inspector with a diamond necklace, an aging prostitute who confesses to a customer that he may play a role in the memoir she is writing, the real Johnny Hallyday who wants to press charges against a troublesome look-alike.   

 

With a feature count fast approaching 50, writer/director Claude Lelouch remains a fixed point in the firmament of French cinema, a remarkable achievement given his reverence for chance and unpredictability on the set. According to first-time writing collaborator Grégoire Lacroix, the veteran director’s working motto is "accept the inevitable in order to be available for the unexpected."  This approach served Lelouch well in 1966, when his sentimental love story, A Man and a Woman, rocketed him to international fame, along with a Palme d’Or and a Foreign Language Oscar.  Although some have tended to brush Lelouch aside in recent years, his previous film Un + Une (COLCOA 2016) was a major success. Always looking for ways to translate his personal experience onto the screen, Lelouch was inspired this time by a court hearing he attended. From there, Lelouch developed the script with Lacroix, along with his longtime writing partner Pierre Uytterhoeven (with whom Lelouch shared a Best Screenplay Oscar in 1966), and his companion, Valérie Perrin.