After disappearing in the wake of the 2019 Cannes fiasco that was “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” a 3.5-hour nightclub experiment never released theatrically, but which I found utterly transfixing, Abdellatif Kechiche is back.
Back in August, Kechiche premiered “Mektoub: Canto Due” at Locarno, nearly a decade after production began. A trailer has now been released, with English subtitles, ahead of its French release next month. It looks wonderful.
Shot eight years ago and trapped in post-production purgatory ever since, ‘Canto Due’ has become something of a legend. I’ve written, numerous times about it.
Kechiche hasn’t released a film since ‘Canto Uno’ in 2018. Since then, he’s faced financial collapse, total industry exile, and, most recently, a stroke that left him with speech difficulties. a recent report from Liberation has sources believing ‘Canto Due’ might be his last film.
Nothing about the ‘Mektoub’ trilogy has ever been simple. Kechiche is the same filmmaker who sold his Palme d’Or — for “Blue Is the Warmest Color” — to fund editing on ‘Canto Uno,’ and reportedly shot a ridiculous 1,000 hours of footage for ‘Canto Due’ with the same cast: Shaïn Boumedine, Ophélie Bau, Salim Kechiouche. His obsession was always the same: to capture fragments of real life, no matter the cost.
However, what came next was a film he shot on the side, ‘Intermezzo,’ a full-blown Cannes scandal, a 3.5-hour club odyssey, thrown together from 18 cameras — all improvised, actors dancing and mumbling over ’90s house music. Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux was intrigued enough by a rough cut to invite it to the festival, in competition.
The backlash hit hard. A non-simulated sex act between Bau and her real-life partner triggered outrage, especially after she stormed out of the Cannes premiere, unaware Kechiche had kept the scene. With unpaid music rights and legal complications, the film became unreleasable. A shorter, sanitized cut was quietly assembled, but never shown.
Kechiche then vanished, reportedly editing solo at his house, with no backing as distributors Pathé and Wild Bunch pulled out. Then in 2024 came Riccardo Marchegiani, a low-profile figure who was taken by the raw footage, and ended up financing a new post-production push aimed at Cannes 2024. Kechiche never signed off on the submission. The festival rejected the cut.
In 2025, a near-director’s cut was again submitted, this time to Cannes sidebar Directors’ Fortnight, with Kechiche’s supposed blessing. That too was blocked. Sources say it may have been linked to Fortnight organizers allegedly needing sign-off from Bau’s team — it never came.
Now, with great reviews out of Locarno, ‘Canto Due’ is being released in December in France. It’s still unclear what version will screen — the one from Locarno was 130 minutes — or how much of it was actually completed before Kechiche’s stroke. However, after years of legal, financial, and personal chaos, any version is close to a miracle.
