Cannes festival draws veil over erotic film starring Emmanuelle Béart and Michaël Cohen

Critics will not be able to see love story that features the king and queen of French cinema

• Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
• The Observer,
  
• Sunday 16 May 2010
• Article history

The organisers of the Cannes festival have a habit each year of selecting one film with unusually explicit sexual or violent content. Last year Lars von Trier's Antichrist caused outrage with its portrayal of sadistic and masochistic acts, and in 2004 the British director Michael Winterbottom shocked audiences with his erotic romance, 9 Songs. Two years earlier Gaspar Noé pushed back the boundaries at the festival with Irréversible, which featured a prolonged rape scene. This year, in contrast, the festival is accused of deliberately keeping the most provocative French film of the season out of all its selected screenings.

Ça Commence par la Fin, which tells the story of the apparent disintegration of a couple's passionate physical and emotional relationship and which stars the husband and wife team Michaël Cohen and Emmanuelle Béart will not now be seen by the hundreds of international film critics who descend on the Côte d'Azur each May. The film company behind the production has come to Cannes for the festival, but has been denied a public platform to publicise its new release. The decision to exclude the erotic love story from both the main competition and the critics' selections on the Croisette has reportedly puzzled Cohen, who also wrote and directed the film, and fans of the two actors are now speculating that the failure to select the film has caused a rift within the Béart-Cohen household. Despite the snub to her husband, the actress has unexpectedly decided to attend the closing ceremony next weekend and is due to walk up the red carpet alongside other festival celebrities, including film director Tim Burton, president of the Cannes prize-giving jury this year, fellow juror Kate Beckinsale and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who starred with Willem Dafoe in Antichrist last year.

"I don't understand how a love story can provide such hatred on the part of certain viewers. It's practical to be one's own actor, one can allow everything, one doesn't impose any limits on oneself," Cohen has said in defence of his work.

Friends of the couple, king and queen of French cinema since their marriage three years ago, have suggested that the selection panel was frightened by the uproar that surrounded the von Trier film last year and so has overlooked the film as a way of avoiding criticism. This weekend a spokeswoman for the festival said there was no need for the panel to justify its decisions on each choice.

The new film, like Irréversible, tells its story in reverse and opens with the end of the relationship between Gabrielle and Jean, played by Béart and Cohen. The plot centres on the difficulty of terminating a damaging love affair. The intensity of the passion of the early days of the relationship haunts Cohen's character and he repeatedly replays their early sexual encounters in his head. The screenplay for Ça Commence par la Fin is based on Cohen's novel of the same name and is said to contain sustained close-ups of sex between the stars.

Béart, 46, met her 39-year-old husband on the set of the 2006 film Le héros de la Famille. She is the daughter of the singer Guy Béart and began her film career posing for film-maker and photographer David Hamilton. She went on to international fame after her role in Manon des Sources in 1986. In 1984 she married French actor Daniel Auteuil. The marriage lasted 10 years and the couple had a daughter, Nelly, born in 1992. Béart also has a teenage son from an earlier relationship with composer David Moreau. Cohen is best known in the US and Britain in 2006 for the low-budget horror film Eel.