One name among the list of prizewinners at Cannes may surprise many American moviegoers for the rubric under which it appears: the award for Best Director went to someone who, here, is mainly known only for his work as an actor: Mathieu Amalric, for his film “On Tour” (“Tournée”), in which he also stars. As an actor, he has worked with the cream of French cinema (such as Arnaud Desplechin, Luc Moullet, Eugène Green, and Benoît Jacquot); here, he’s most widely known for his roles in “Munich,” “Quantum of Solace,” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”; he’ll next be seen here in Alain Resnais’s “Wild Grass,” which opens June 25th. (London’s Telegraph has a good 2008 profile of Amalric, by Murphy Williams.) But “On Tour” is the fourth feature that he has directed (along with a half-dozen shorts); of the other three, I’ve seen one, “Le Stade de Wimbledon” (“Wimbledon Stadium”), from 2001, and it’s not about tennis. It’s the story of a woman (Jeanne Balibar) who heads off to Trieste in search of information about an enigmatic writer who never wrote. One of the loveliest aspects of the film is its sense of documentary—the attention to practical details and atmosphere in the locations where they were filming, the sense of the filmmaker conducting an investigation with his camera that parallels the one that the woman undertakes in her journey. I just came across an interview with Amalric’s cameraman for “On Tour” and for “Wimbledon Stadium,” Christophe Beaucarne, who describes their way of working:

When I worked with him on “Wimbledon Stadium,” I realized that we had the same photographic sense. When we shot in unattractive locations, such as the corridor of the Mercure Hotel, we said that, instead of adding light to make it look prettier, it was better not to worry about it and work some other way…. I took advantage of the hall lights on a timer, I just had a fill light and a reflector on the floor and I positioned the actors so that they were illuminated by the hall lights. When the light goes off, we enter into their intimacy and suddenly it tells a story…. Everything is a little like that; when we see a place that’s better than the one we had originally chosen, we can change at the last minute to see what we think is better.

This offhanded method has a lot to do with the movie’s subtlety, grace, and depth. (The trailer, without English subtitles, is above.) I’m impatient to see “On Tour” (which, I hope, will come to the New York Film Festival this year) as well as Amalric’s other two features, “Mange ta Soupe” (“Eat Your Soup”) and “La Chose Publique” (“Public Affairs”).