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A year after Saint Laurent Productions made its high-profile debut with Pedro Almodóvar's gay cowboy Western film Strange Way of Life, the fashion house's movie production division has returned to the Cannes Film Festival with a trio of offerings in the main competition: Emilia Perez from Jacques Audiard, The Shrouds from David Cronenberg and Parthenope from Paolo Sorrentino, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Anthony Vaccarello, creative director for Saint Laurent, is also credited as a producer in all three of the films. As befitting a fashion house, he and his team were responsible for the wardrobes.
Saint Laurent's Cannes Film Trifecta
Emilia Perez stars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Édgar Ramírez. It follows the story of a lawyer who helps a cartel boss disappear by turning him into the woman he has always wanted to become. Audiard is best known for directing the 2018 film adaptation of Patrick deWitt's 2011 novel The Sisters Brothers, starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix.
The Shrouds stars Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt. It follows the story of a businessman, a widower, who is still grieving the death of his wife, and copes through his controversial inventions. One of these is thought to allow the living to observe the dead in their shrouds. Cronenberg's last film was the 2022 sci-fi horror Crimes of the Future, starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart.
Parthenope stars Dario Aita, Celeste Dalla Porta, Silvia Degrandi and Isabella Ferrari. It is an epic tale of a woman in search for her happiness through her summers. Sorrentino described the lady to Variety last year as someone “who bears the name of her city but is neither siren nor myth.” The director previously helmed the 2022 Academy Award nominee for best international feature film The Hand of God.
Vaccarello and his directors
It's quite a feat for any company to count three films in its slate so the projects are quite the feathers in Saint Laurent's cap. The production company is Vaccarello's brainchild, unveiled in April 2023 before the start of last year's Cannes Film Festival.
He explained the reason for the creation of the Saint Laurent film division and said, “I want to work with and provide a space for all the great film talents who have inspired me over the years.”
Sorrentino told THR, “Working with YSL was first and foremost a pleasant surprise for me because I understood from the beginning that their role was that of a pure film producer. An intelligent and generous producer with whom I interacted with great freedom and in a profitable manner, and with whom I shared a single objective: trying to make the best movie possible.”
Cronenberg said it was thrilling to launch his film in Cannes with the fashion house.
He stated, “Saint Laurent became involved in the production at a very early stage, and therefore were able to shape with the power and design strength of their team, and particularly Anthony Vaccarello, many important aspects of the film's principal characters.”
Vaccarello has always deemed film important to him. Like many designers, the creative director thinks of film and fashion as two sides of the same coin. Many design houses like Saint Laurent, Gucci and Chanel work with filmmakers by partnering with them on advertisement campaigns, short films and special programs.
Fashion and film go hand in hand
The fashion house's film credits include Gaspar Noë's short film Summer of '21, launched in December 2020, which featured Saint Laurent's newest collection at the time. Before that, in 2019, Saint Laurent also worked with Wong Kar Wai when he curated a series of short collectively known Self 05. In 2022, the house partnered with Noë again for another short film Lux Aeterna which premiered in Cannes, all before the production company was formed.
The fashion house worked with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch in the 2021 short French Water, which starred Julianne Moore, Chloe Sevigny, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Indya Moore and Leo Reilly. This short also featured the house's collection.
Last year, the fashion house had another short film with Jean-Luc Goddard's Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars'. Its first film, Strange Way of Life, was also released in 2023, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.
Vaccarello and Saint Laurent announced that they will reunite with Jarmusch in his upcoming film, Father Mother Sister Brother, with Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Tom Wait, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat.
THR sources said that the feature film will be in the form of a triptych — meaning divided into three parts. The movie's IMDb page describes the story as that of “estranged siblings reunite after years apart, forced to confront unresolved tensions and reevaluate their strained relationships with their emotionally distant parents.”
Jarmusch's arguably most famous film is 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive, which starred Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as vampire lovers.
