EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can reveal the first clip for French director Xavier Legrand’s drama The Successor ahead of its world premiere in Competition this week at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
The film is Legrand’s second film after his critically acclaimed feature debut Custody – exploring issues of domestic abuse – which won Best Director and the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best First Feature at Venice in 2017 and went on to play at a raft of festivals.
That film expanded on Legrand’s 2013 Oscar-nominated short film Just Before Losing Everything.
Canadian actor Marc-André Grondin (C.R.A.Z.Y., Richelieu) stars in The Successor as the newly-announced artistic director of a famous Parisian fashion house.
As he grapples with the stresses of the role, he starts experiencing chest pain. Out of the blue he is called back to Montreal to organize his estranged father’s funeral and discovers that he may have inherited much worse than his father’s weak heart.
“Here, we have a man who can’t cope, who struggles, who is riddled with fear, who loses control and is completely crushed by disaster,” says Legrand of his choice of Grondin.
“It takes a solid actor to be able to delve into these kinds of meanderings, a performance full of fear, tears, snot, suffocation, incontinence and breathlessness. Marc-André was the obvious choice. With his childlike eyes and his vibrant, feverish, fiery, moving, concrete, charismatic, strong, solid, delicate and precise body, as well as being very intelligent and truthful, Marc-André possessed all of the power and contradictions needed for such a part.”
Legrand says the film leads on from his last feature Custody in its explorations of issues surrounding patriarchy.
“Nowadays, we often speak of ‘violence against women’; I’ve often used this expression when promoting Custody. But it somewhat bypasses the main element of the issue. In fact, when talking about ‘violence against women’, we’re quite obviously forgetting to mention the main protagonist from which the problem stems: Men,” he says.
“First and foremost, The Successor focuses on ‘male violence’. How is it that men are also their own worst enemy? It’s fairly easy nowadays to see how patriarchy subjugates women and children, but what perhaps isn’t as obvious and more difficult to admit, because it is handed down and trans-generational, is that it also crushes men, brothers and sons.”
The Successor is a French-Canadian-Belgium co-production lead produced by Paris-based KG Productions, Montreal production house Metafilms and Brussels-based Stenola Productions.
Paris-based mk2 films is handling international sales.
