Jennifer Lawrence Gets Her First Cannes Premiere. (It’s a Risky One.)

Years ago, at the peak of the “Hunger Games” phenomenon, Lionsgate spent heavily on lavish parties to promote the franchise at the Cannes Film Festival. Private villas were rented and transformed into extravagant replicas of the movies’ opulent Capitol, complete with servers in eccentric wigs, chocolate fountains that flowed for hours and enough colorful macarons to feed a small city.

Though the organizers had clearly missed the film’s critique of capitalist excess, the “Hunger Games” villa parties were still a decadent good time. But what’s surprising is that for years, those soirees were the only thing that ever lured the series’ star, Jennifer Lawrence, to Cannes. Despite being the kind of glamorous, Oscar-winning actress the festival loves to showcase, Lawrence has never starred in a film premiering at Cannes until now.

At a Sunday news conference for the movie “Die My Love,” she seemed just as surprised. Turning to her director, Lynne Ramsay, Lawrence said, “I really cannot believe that I’m here with you and this happened.” But the film, which is already the subject of awards chatter for Lawrence’s no-holds-barred performance, is another indication that the 34-year-old actress is itching to push further into darker, riskier material.

Adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, the drama stars Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as Grace and Jackson, a young couple struggling with Grace’s postpartum depression. At first, she just appears a bit listless, muttering to herself and snapping at chatty cashiers who try to draw her into conversation. “Everybody gets a little loopy the first year,” advises her mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. “You’ll come back.”

But Grace doesn’t. As tension continues to build with Jackson, she begins acting out in increasingly upsetting ways — hurling herself through a glass door, stripping down to her underwear at a child’s party — just to feel anything that might snap her out of her stupor. Though the film is not an easy watch, Lawrence dives into her character’s descent with full commitment.

At the news conference, the actress said she was four months pregnant with her second child when she began shooting the film. “I had great hormones,” she said, “which is really the only kind of way I would be able to dip into this sort of visceral emotion.” Still, she had to draw a strong line between herself and the character.

“As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do,” Lawrence said.