cannes

In a bit of casting kismet, two of the biggest films this year star the same actor: Sandra Huller. Huller was dubbed the “Queen of Cannes” last May after director Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest took both the runner-up Grand Prize of the Festival and the FIPRESCI honors. Huller, 45, stars in the courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall as a woman on trial for her husband’s murder. The film is a carefully structured moral conundrum about truth and perception, and all of it hinges on Huller’s performance . In The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust film unlike any other, she plays Hedwig Hoss, a homemaker enjoying the upward mobility that comes with being the wife of the Commandant of Auschwitz. What Huller does here is understated and difficult to describe, but the specificity in her work is such that you will swear you know what the character smells like.