It’s been a minute since we’ve had a film from indie filmmaker Gillian Robespierre, known for “Obvious Child” (2014) and “Landline” (2017). That said, unlike years of past when indie filmmakers might sit and wait for a green light for years, opportunity is everywhere and she’s been extremely busy directing TV over the last few years, episodes of “Silicon Valley,” “Casual,” “Crashing, “Shrill,” HBO’s “Mrs. Fletcher” starring Kathryn Hahn, and “A Teacher,” starring Kate Mara, which FX just announced was the most-watched show on Hulu ever. While she’s had some solo projects in development over the years, a new film has surfaced for her with a terrific partner in actor Claire Foy (“The Crown,” “First Man,” “The Girl in the Spider’s Web”).
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Deadline reports that Foy and Robespierre will team up for the feature, “The Pisces,” based on author Melissa Broder’s critically acclaimed novel of the same name. Robespierre and Broder collaborated on the script and the story is wild; about a woman and her erotic infatuation with a merman. Perhaps it’s an indie version of “The Shape Of Water” all over again, on the surface, but the trade says more than just the fantastical and an “exploration of the boundaries between pleasure and possession, fantasy vs. reality and the way women choose the men in their lives.”
Here’s the longform Amazon synopsis of the book:
Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika’s home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety — not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound’s easy affection. Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy’s understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.
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Foy will next be seen in Will Sharpe’s “Louis Wain” alongside Benedict Cumberbatch for Amazon. Robespierre is getting ready to shoot the movie “Vegas High” for HBO Max; a ‘90s-set coming-of-age story about a girl caught between two worlds – the fast-paced lifestyle of Las Vegas and her strong Mormon faith and community.
It’s unclear when “The Pisces” will arrive, but given Foy and Robespierre, along with the interesting premise, this is a project we’ll all be interested in checking out when it hits theaters or streaming.
