A first clip from Martin Provost's comedy drama Love Letters has been revealed ahead of its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival, giving audiences their earliest look at a film that pairs Fabrice Luchini with Carole Bouquet (Deadline).

Luchini plays a recently retired literature professor forced to reinvent himself. The character delivers a final lesson to his students, his wife leaves him that same night, and three encounters with different women help him chart a new course. Luchini is best known internationally for his Venice Best Actor-winning performance in Courted (Deadline).

The cast reads as a roll-call of French cinema. Carole Bouquet, a former Bond girl from For Your Eyes Only, stars alongside Chiara Mastroianni and Emmanuelle Devos (Deadline). Behind the camera, Guillaume Schiffman — the Oscar-nominated cinematographer of The Artist — shot the film.

Provost reteams with long-time production partners François Kraus and Denis Pineau-Valencienne at Les Films du Kiosque, which leads the production. France 3 Cinema and Umedia serve as coproducers on the France-Belgium project (Deadline; The Hollywood Reporter).

The film has already drawn attention on the market side. Screen International reported buyer interest in the project — marketed internationally under the English title Love Lessons — in the weeks before Locarno's lineup was unveiled (Screen Daily). Memento will handle the French release, scheduled for November (Deadline).

Locarno screens Love Letters on the Piazza Grande — the festival's 8,000-seat open-air venue — with Provost, Devos, and coproducers Vera Michalski Hoffmann and Denis Pineau-Valencienne in attendance. The festival runs from 5 to 15 September (Deadline).

For a film about starting over, the festival circuit is the beginning of its own new chapter: a Piazza Grande premiere, a French release three months later, and international buyers still circling before a single public ticket is sold.