With “Paris, 13th District,” Jacques Audiard found himself back at Cannes in 2021 for the first time since he won 2015’s Palme d’Or with “Dheepan.” The director skipped the festival for his slightly more mainstream-skewing “The Sisters Brothers,” which went to Venice in 2018, and with this black-and-white ode to love and sex in the City of Lights, found himself back in his rightful place on the Croisette. Now, IFC Films is set to release the movie April 15 in stateside theaters. Exclusive to IndieWire, watch the trailer for the film below.

For this love quadrangle involving three women and one man, Audiard co-writes the film with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” filmmaker Céline Sciamma as well as screenwriter Léa Mysius. The cast includes “Portrait” star Noémie Merlant as Nora, Lucie Zhang as Emilie, Makita Samba as Camille, and Jehnny Beth as Amber, all moving pieces in a chessboard of erotic entanglements.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote out of the Cannes Film Festival last year that “Paris, 13th District” “marries the weightlessness of ‘Manhattan’ with the serendipity of ‘Chungking Express,’” as “Audiard traces a brave new world in which youngish people struggle to build meaningful relationships from connections that are founded upon quicksand. Very horny quicksand.”

Ehrlich wrote that the film convenes around “the idea that people used to get to know each other before they have sex, and now — in the world of Tinder and OnlyFans — people have sex before they get to know each other, and share intimate desires with strangers they’ll never meet.”

The movie is based on three graphic novels by Adrian Tomine: “Amber Sweet,” “Hawaiian Getaway,” and “Killing and Dying.” Tomine is an American cartoonist best known for his “Optic Nerve” series (which “Paris, 13th District” adapts) as well as his long-running illustrations in The New Yorker.

Audiard previously considered love and sex in other forms in his 2012 Palme d’Or contender “Rust and Bone,” which starred Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts, playing the unlikely romantic combo of a killer whale trainer and a boxer. His other films include “A Prophet,” “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” and “Read My Lips.”

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