A man. A woman. An embrace. Two posters. A twenty -second scene, which has become an eternal image. For the first time in its history, the Cannes Film Festival chooses to celebrate its annual meeting with world cinema through an official double poster. Two complementary visuals, gathered in their momentum, in their movement, in this embrace which has remained engraved in the collective memory of the 7th art for almost sixty years. That of Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant in a man and a woman of Claude Lelouch.
The sea, the wind, the race, the doubt, the thrill of desire and the abandonment in the arms of the other. It is all the fragile power of the meeting that these images condense. Taken from the cult film by Lelouch, rewarded with the Palme d’Or in 1966 and then by two Oscars in 1967, they are much more than simple archive images. Today they resonate with a new force, chosen to embody the 2025 edition of the festival, which will be held from May 13 to 24. Not a poster, but two. A strong, unpublished, almost manifest gesture.
A scene, two looks, a shared emotion
The image of this embrace, filmed on a deserted beach, bathed by a tormented sky and wrapped in a milky light, evokes the ephemeral sublime. A handful of seconds – twenty at most – in a film born from a quick shoot (only three weeks), an idea emerged three months earlier, of an almost improvised bet. And yet these few moments will have been enough to register A man and a woman in the eternity of cinema.
Claude Lelouch has often told the dazzling of this project, the way in which the alchemy between its two main actors-Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant-in the course of improvisations and silences, a film that upset the public with its sincerity. Today, this mythical scene returns in light, reinterpreted graphically by the Hartland Villa studio. The chromatic choice, the iridescent degrades, the vaporous sweetness of the contours reactivate the intensity of a love passion in a world which seems a little more disenchanted every day.
A tribute to two missing icons
Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both disappeared, are summoned here in a last dance. This double portrait is not only a nod to a cult work, but also a vibrant tribute to two major figures of French and international cinema. She, darkened by the Interpretation Prize in Cannes in 1980 for The jump into a vacuum by Marco Bellocchio. He, crowned in 1969 for Z de Costa-Gavras. Two singular, demanding courses, marked by discretion, elegance and a form of luminous melancholy.
The festival thus pays tribute to them through this choice of double visual, where each poster seems to respond to the other: on the one hand, the radiant face of Trintignant in the embracing; On the other, the half-closed eyes of Anouk loved, the hair carried by the wind, in a gesture of withdrawal as well as abandonment. Two posters, two shots of the same moment, two readings of the same thrill.
A poetic, political and human vision of cinema
Beyond the simple beauty of these images, the press release from the festival insists on the meaning of this double poster: “When the time seems to want to separate, partition or submit, the Cannes Festival wishes (Ré) to unite. »» This desire for union, fusion, shared movement, is a subtle response to the fractures of our time. It expresses a desire to resist the dislocation of the world by the power of love, cinema and humanity.
The quote extracted from the film, chosen by the festival, also resonates with accuracy:
– Him : ” In life, when one thing is not serious, it is said to be cinema. Why do you think we don’t take cinema seriously? »»
– She : ” Maybe because we go there that everything is fine? »»
– Him : ” So you think we should go when everything is bad? »»
– She : ” Why not ? »»
This apparently simple exchange questions the role of cinema in our lives: refuge, catharsis, waking dream, mirror of our chaos or projection of our expectations. The 2025 Cannes Film Festival is not content to celebrate cinema as an art: it claims it as an act of sensitive resistance, a way of re -enchanting reality through fragments of pure emotion.
An artistic direction marked with delicacy
The graphic creation of Hartland Villa (Lionel Avignon and Stefan de Vivies), which signs this campaign, extends the gesture of the original film. Pastel colors, blurred textures, pink, orange and blue halos evoke a visual caress, diffuse heat which seems to emanate not from the sky, but from the link between these two beings. “This light no longer comes from the sky, now disturbed from all sides by a fatal news; It arises from the irradiating fusion of two beings who reconcile with life. »»
In a world saturated with frozen images and garish slogans, this poster is distinguished by its silent tenderness, its radiant humanity. She does not impose anything, she offers a memory, an emotion, a possibility. She summons the icon not, but the gesture, not the posture, but the moment. And this is precisely what cinema, to its best, knows how to offer.
In one of his most famous plans, Claude Lelouch filmed the footprint in the sand, quickly erased by the surf. Love, memory, cinema: everything was already there. By choosing to make this fleeting embrace the face of its 78th edition, the Cannes Festival does not celebrate nostalgia. He simply recalls that some images have this mysterious power: they do not disappear. They continue to walk with us, even long after the sea covered them.
Neïla Driss
