Borrowing its title from Buñuel’s 1930 film about modern society, Thouin daringly weaves together archival and documentary materials with narrative cinema to explore “the long century” through the life story of an ambitious woman. Dubbed the French response to The Brutalist (2024), this hybrid genre film played to great acclaim in the Cannes Classics section.

Jeanne Lavaur is born in an age defined by turbulence, yet that does not stop her from fervently aspiring to become a countess. Hailing from a modest provincial French butcher’s family, she is armed with cleverness, persistence and immeasurable luck. A chance encounter leads her to cross paths with the nobleman Guillaume, and they form an alliance, propelling her to become precisely what she always wanted to be. But that is just the beginning. A woman’s journey of love, longing and transformation will not only shape her own life but also serve as a blueprint for almost the entire 20th century.

A modern, tempestuous epic that evokes a somewhat forgotten form of screen literature, Thouin’s feature debut reconstructs the past through the form of “archival fiction”. Jeanne, played by the Swiss actress Souheila Yacoub (known also for Gaspar Noé’s Climax (2018)), embodies all of them at once – Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre and other heroines defined by their yearning and striving against the stubborn constraints of their milieu. Thouin has created a tribute to all those women whose stories have never reached the screen, been written about in seminal works of literature or celebrated in verse: “Behind my fascination with Jeanne, the film’s protagonist, lies an interest in what remains off-screen, conserved in the archives.” The director calls the film “a side road through the grand narrative of history”, and since its Cannes premiere it has been described as a homage to the golden age of 1930s French cinema – especially filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo.