Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard plays a single mother who abandons her eight-year-old child in the movie, Angel Face (Guele d’ange.)
The new film is showing in the Un Certain Regard section of the 71st Cannes Film Festival which opened on May 8.
The mother, Marlene, abandons her daughter Elli in a small town near the French Riviera in Vanessa Filho's debut film which is attracting interest among cinephiles. Marlene meets a man in a nightclub during a night of excess, and it is her daughter who must make her face up to her gross irresponsibility as a parent.
Because the movie stars Cotillard its critical or box office progress will be watched with interest but Variety has given it the thumbs down.
"Not many are likely to mistake what Marion Cotillard does in Angel Face for great acting, as the glamorous French star gives a performance so phony it feels like a Saturday Night Live parody of a white-trash trainwreck, downright pathetic in its attempt to achieve what came so naturally to relative amateur Bria Vinaite in last year’s, The Florida Project," seethed the critic from that esteemed periodical.
Earlier this week, Marion was joined at Cannes by Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, Jessica Chastain and Lupita Nyong'o in a photocall for the movie 355. The women play international spies in what is believed to be an all-female attempt at a Bourne Identity or James Bond-type vehicle. In the course of their mission, these feisty ladies become friends and form an alliance of their own, the eponymous 355.
