‘Nobody would forgive me if I told the truth’: new film about pacifist turned Nazi collaborator divides France

In Les Rayons et les Ombres, Jean Dujardin plays a real-life press baron partying during the horrors of the second world war. Director Xavier Giannoli discusses bringing this still sensitive topic to light Xavier Giannoli’s new film Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows) is told from the postwar perspective of Corinne Luchaire, a French actor who was once hailed as “the new Garbo” but grew too close to the Nazis during the German occupation years. As Luchaire records her thoughts on a borrowed tape recorder, she struggles to reconcile her unfaltering devotion to her father, the once-powerful press baron Jean, with his 1946 execution for treason. Her wilful blindness collapses as the Jewish director who helped launch her career visits her cramped flat. When Corinne, played by newcomer Nastya Golubeva Carax, enquires after his sister, he reveals that she died in a concentration camp. “I didn’t know,” murmurs Corinne, only to be met with the devastating reply: “Did you even try to ...

Mikey Madison: from Tarantino bit part to hot tip for an Oscar playing a sex worker

The actor, who stars in Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, talks about the reaction of the strip club community to the film, how she managed to learn Russian, and her lucky break in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

You know what it’s like: you’ve ordered an important package, but you can’t be at home when it’s delivered so you ask a friend to take it in for you. So it was for Mikey Madison, except the item was a professional-grade dancer’s pole and the person she co-opted to help out was her father. “I was filming a different project,” says the 25-year-old American actor, “and I said, ‘Dad, can you please install this thing in my house?’ He was like, ‘Of course, sweetie.’ And I think it was good I asked him. He had kind of an idea what the film might be, so he was able to watch it and not be completely surprised.”

That film is Anora, in which Madison stars as an exotic dancer called Ani, a performance that’s already generating lots of talk of a best actress Oscar nomination. Ani is working in a Manhattan strip club one night when she is assigned to entertain the playboy son of an oligarch, Ivan, played by Mark Eidelstein (an actor sometimes described, enticingly, as “Russia’s Timothée Chalamet”). They hit it off and Ivan hires Ani for a week, drastically upending her life: she goes from living in a shared apartment, bickering about why there’s no milk in the fridge, to padding around a mansion with a lift, daily maid service and a cryotherapy chamber. In a fever dream of expensive booze and drugs, the new couple descend on Las Vegas where, almost inevitably, they get married in a chintzy chapel: “Fuck yeah, I do,” Ani tells the registrar.

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