Irish actor Brian Gleeson has joined the cast of Matt Bissonnette’s Irish/Canadian co-production Death Of A Ladies’ Man. The news comes ahead of the Marché at the Cannes Film Festival where the film will be sold by Celluloid Dreams.
The film also stars Irish actor Gabriel Byrne as a hard-drinking, womanising, university poetry professor, and Antoine-Olivier Pilon (Mommy).
Bissonnette (Passenger Side) also wrote the script, which is produced by Ireland’s Martina Niland (Float Like a Butterfly) for Port Pictures and Canadians Corey Marr for Corey Marr Productions and Marie-Claude Poulin for MCP Productions. The film has received financial support from Monte Rosso Productions, Bell Media’s The Harold Greenberg Fund and The Movie Network (TMN), and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Samuel O’Shea has seen better days as the film opens. His second marriage is ending and he has started seeing strange things such Frankenstein sidling up to him in a bar, or his much-missed late father popping in for a chat.
When Samuel discovers he has a brain tumour, which may be the cause of his strange visions, he enters a more reflective period of his life, moving to his family’s remote shack, where he embarks on the novel he has been meaning to write all his adult life and unexpectedly falls in love with a local woman. This trajectory leads Samuel to an utterly unforeseeable happy ending.
The title is inspired by the work of Canadian musican Leonard Cohen and his 1977 album of the same name. Cohen was supportive of the project prior to his death in 2016, and his management continue that support.
Production will take place in Montreal and on the west-coast of Ireland this summer. Element Pictures Distribution will release Death Of A Ladies’ Man in Ireland, with Mongrel Media doing likewise for Canada.