EXCLUSIVE: Veteran French filmmaker Catherine Breillat, whose latest film Last Summer (2023) played in Cannes Competition and scored multiple César and Lumiere nominations, is next writing and directing The German Cousin, an adaptation of Georges Simenon novel The Krull House.
Breillat is re-teaming on the project with her Last Summer producer Saïd Ben Saïd of SBS Productions, producer of Elle and Cannes 2026 Competition entry The Man I Love.
Filming is being lined up for late 2027 on the project about small-town groupthink in 1930s Europe; Simenon’s 1939 novel is considered a prophetic study of race hatred and mass hysteria. Pyramide International is handling sales and is at Cannes discussing the project with potential partners.
The synopsis reads: “At the very edge of the city, on the border between the industrial outskirts and the countryside, directly facing a lock — the central character of the story — stands a modest grocery café: Chez Krull. It has belonged for thirty years to a family of German immigrants who became French citizens. Yet Cornelius Krull, the patriarch, speaks only a German dialect and never utters more than two words. This venerable man of few words, the family’s tutelary figure, seems to conceal heavy secrets.
“On the eve of the Second World War, the few nearby residents prefer to shop in town rather than “feed the Krauts.” The grocery survives thanks to passing bargemen and the drifters from the outskirts who frequent the café. Maria, austere and deeply pious, runs the business with an iron hand, obsessed with making the family’s origins forgotten. Joseph, her eldest son, is completing a thesis on pneumothorax and preparing to become a doctor. Liesbeth, the youngest daughter, practices the piano relentlessly and dreams of concerts abroad. Anna, the self-sacrificing one, keeps the house while listening to Fréhel, Maurice Chevalier, or Berthe Sylva on the radio.
“The family’s fragile balance is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Hans, a flamboyant German cousin who has come to “perfect his French.” Elegant, carefree, provocative, he immediately charms Liesbeth and deeply irritates the others. But behind his apparent ease, Hans is an impostor: everything about him is calculated. A virtuoso liar, a social tightrope walker, he observes and manipulates.
“When the body of a young woman, strangled and raped, is found in the lock, the Krulls’ fate is overturned. Already suspected during previous tragedies, the family becomes the target of rumor. Joseph, too awkward with women, is quickly singled out as the culprit. Signs of hatred multiply: insults, vandalism, threats. Soon, the crowd gathers and further tragedy is in the air.”
Breillat, who has had five films play at the Cannes Film Festival, told us today: “I find in Simenon’s novel a singular modernity, a resonance with our own era. However, in order to preserve its universality and subtlety, it seems essential to me not to transpose it crudely into the present day, but rather to retain its dimension as a parable.”
The filmmaker expanded: “The novel opens onto perspectives far broader than a mere family chamber drama. Like Proust, who was reproached for being a “digger of details,” claimed himself: it is precisely the details that matter. I deeply share this idea, and it is also one of cinema’s privileges, particularly through the close-up. Details give strength and meaning to a scene. They also make it possible, in a period film, to avoid an excessive deployment of means: mastering the frame, the number of extras, the visible elements, is a way of preserving accuracy without creating artifice or giving an impression of lack. I have always lacked resources, never details. I am often my own prop master. In this respect, Simenon’s novel is material of remarkable richness, full of subtleties, gestures, customs and habits observed with an almost clinical acuity.”
She continued: “Beneath the guise of a muted family chronicle, the story shifts, through the eruption of a horrific crime, toward something far more terrifying: the dissolution of the individual into the crowd. When the crowd acts “as one man,” its opinion becomes “collective opinion.” The phenomenon of lynching has always fascinated and terrified me, whether physical or mediated. The lyncher always assumes the mask of the vigilante: the supposedly legitimate crime, in eyes blinded by anger, justifies the one he himself is about to commit. More generally, all forms of fascism begin this way. To me, this novel is a parable — both distant and incisive — of our own era: that of a society driven by a thirst for collective and summary justice, at the expense of complexity, doubt, and the individual.”