Just over a decade before hitting this year’s Cannes Film Festival with the musical crime comedy Emilia Perez, Zoe Saldaña supported a different crime film on the Croisette.
Guillaume Canet’s star-studded Blood Ties focused on Chris Pierzynski (Clive Owen) getting out of prison for a violent crime and moving into the home of his brother, Frank (Billy Crudup), an NYPD detective. Co-starring Saldaña as Vanessa — who sparks a romance with Frank after he arrests the father of her child — the film also starred Mila Kunis, Matthias Schoenaerts, James Caan and Marion Cotillard, who is Canet’s longtime partner. Canet helmed Blood Ties from a script he co-wrote with James Gray (who directed his own Cotillard-starring drama, The Immigrant, which also premiered at Cannes in 2013).
Blood Ties hit theaters stateside in March 2014, and THR’s review deemed it a “lethargic, needlessly extended drama” but noted the “impressive cast.”
Boasting its own memorable cast is writer-director Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, in which Saldaña stars opposite Selena Gomez, Édgar Ramírez and Karla Sofía Gascón. Set to premiere in competition this year, the Spanish-language musical centers on an escaped Mexican cartel leader (Gascón) who seeks sex-reassignment surgery to affirm her gender and find a fresh start.
