Johnny Depp’s speedy return to limelight at Cannes raises eyebrows

Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry, a historical drama starring Johnny Depp as Louis XV, is to open the 76th edition of the Cannes film festival on May 16th. The premiere will offer Depp a high-profile return to the limelight following his lengthy legal tussles with former wife Amber Heard. The actor has not appeared in a live-action film since the respectably received biopic Minamata in 2020.

Never an event to shy away from controversy, Cannes confirmed the rumoured news in a release. “Maïwenn herself plays the eponymous main character alongside with Johnny Depp, Benjamin Lavernhe, Melvil Poupaud, Pierre Richard, Pascal Greggory and India Hair,” the statement explained. “Recounting the life, rise and fall of ... King Louis XV’s favourite, the film will be released in French cinemas simultaneously.” Something of a Cannes favourite, Maïwenn, also an actor, has previously competed at the event with the thriller Polisse and the fraught drama Mon Roi.

There will be some eyebrows raised at the relatively speedy reappearance of Depp on (we must assume) the red carpet. A little over a year ago, he lost a libel case against the Sun newspaper for identifying him as a “wife-beater”. Following that, a media circus gathered when he took a defamation case against Heard for claiming she was a victim of domestic abuse. Heard was found liable in all three matters of defamation raised and Depp was awarded $10 million in compensatory damages.

That case became a social-media obsession with warring sides slinging abuse across the digital dispatch box. It will be interesting to see if Depp participates in the usual press conferences. Even if he stays mum, the opening night of Cannes is, by some margin, the most-covered kick-off on the festival circuit. A United Nations of press descends on an event staged at the scale of a continental invasion.

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Cannes has always had an eccentric approach to its opening film, leading with everything from smallish French dramas to commercial epics such as The Da Vinci Code and The Great Gatsby. Maïwenn’s apparently lavish production sits somewhere between those extremes. Emmanuelle Bercot becomes the third film by a woman to open Cannes after Emmanuelle Bercot’s Standing Tall in 2015 and Diane Kurys’s Un Homme Amoureux in 1987.

The full official selection will be announced on Thursday, April 13th. We already know of two high-profile premieres. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic concerning murders among the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, will bring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jesse Plemons to la Croisette on May 20th. James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, fifth film concerning Harrison Ford’s heroic archaeologist, arrives just two days earlier. Cannes tipsters are betting on new films from the likes of Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Ken Loach and Jonathan Glazer.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, produced by Dublin’s Element Pictures, must be considered a potential runner. The Greek director, in collaboration with Element, had previous success here with The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Might festival director Thierry Frémaux stir more controversy by announcing the premiere of Woody Allen’s French-language thriller Coup de Chance? “Maybe Woody Allen’s film will be,” Frémaux said recently when asked about its availability. “We will position ourselves depending on the situation.”

Anything is still possible.