The art of the character poster is alive and well in France at the moment. Jean-François Richet's glossy blockbuster on the worlds first Private Detective, François Vidocq is no exception. Vincent Cassel is playing the criminal turned criminologist, who enraptured writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Balzac, to hopefully wash out the taste of the 2001 Pitof directed disaster.
With The Emperor of Paris, a cast of talented actors with interesting faces, has been assembled, including Denis Levant, August Diehl, Olga Kurylenko, and Freya Mavor, all of whom get lovely, textured character posters that emphasize both the faces and the clothing of the period. (A Full Gallery is here.)
But I wanted to highlight the main One Sheet for the film, by French design firm, Silenzio Communication, which also feels like a character poster, with its epic-city map of Paris in the background. (Full disclosure: The algorithms of the internet know me well enough that I get Instagram ads for wall sized posters of city maps from around the world, how they know this, I have not a clue.) It is simple, it is classy, and while hardly innovative (massive blockbusters rarely are) it does the job very, very well.