Watch Two News Clips From Arnaud Desplechin’s Palme d’Or Contender “Jimmy P.”

Filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, whose 2008 film A Christmas Tale has been a bit of an understated inclusion in the Criterion Collection from a few years ago, is once again competing for the Palme d’Or with his new film Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), and The Playlist has a pair of new clips from the film starring Benicio del Toro as the eponymous Jimmy and Desplechin veteran Mathieu Amalric as the therapist that bonds with him.

This is the director’s fifth film contending for the Palme after La Vie des Mort in ’91, La Sentinelle in ‘92, My Sex Life…Or How I Got into an Argument in ’96, Esther Kahn in ’00, finally with A Christmas Tale in ’08.

Based on famed ethnologist/psychoanalyst Georges Deveraux’s “Psychothérapie d’un Indien des Plaines: Réalité et rêve,” the film is about a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran — played by del Toro — who returns home and struggles with mental illness. It sounds kind of like a less contentious version of PT Anderson’s The Master, but hopefully Desplechin has come up with his own unique approach to a similar story.

With solid leads in del Toro and Amalric, coupled with the fact that all of Desplechin’s new work almost immediately gets put into Palme contention, it puts the film into a good place for the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but anyone’s guess is as good as mine.

Source: The Playlist