You have to feel for Léa Seydoux, the star who was slated to be the all-but-official face of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with four vehicles in the official selection.
Covid intervened, preventing her representing any of them in person.
But the one she’s best in was also the lowest-profile.Placed out of competition in the new Premieres sidebar, Arnaud Desplechin’s “Deception” is a strange, stifling but frequently intriguing attempt to find a cinematic match for the literary voice of Philip Roth, from his autofictional 1990 novel of the same name.
It often succeeds, which is to say the filmmaking often appropriates the self-aggrandizing indulgences and knowingly oppressive masculinity of a work that isn’t among the author’s finest.
But it’s Seydoux’s sly, bright presence, as an obscure object of desire who gradually places the protagonist’s failings in relief, that keeps us involved.That
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