Dir.: Christophe Honoré

"Many people have a soul that loves to swim. They are commonly known as lazy."

Another Parisian delight by Christopher Honoré, Love Songs confirms that the polarizing Ma Mère was but a bump in an artistic path ardently committed to exploring the winding avenues of contemporary romance. Divided into three parts that chart the effects a woman's love and death has on friends, family, and flames, the film has invited obvious comparisons to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but really it's continuing where the splendiferous A Woman Is a Woman left off, detailing the complexities of the ménage à trois Jean-Luc Godard's film was preluding to and seemed impossible more than 40 years ago.



The tremendously talented and handsome Louis Garrel plays Ismaël Bénoliel. Prowling the chilly, rain-swept streets of Paris like a disconsolate cat, pursued by at least four actual or potential lovers of various genders (one of them a ghost), Ismaël is a classic lonely hero of French cinema. To be specific, he belongs to the socially disconnected, emotionally damaged tradition of the French New Wave protagonists. Love Songs, in-competition at the '07 Cannes Film Festival, is part of an on-going effort to reanimate the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague in the context of a new century and a vastly different French society.

You could describe Love Songs, in fact, as a blend of Godard's and Truffaut's wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar's acrid polysexual comedy, which were never far apart to begin with (given the difference in climate and native temperament between France and Spain). But Honoré is also tapping into another French tradition, one he hinted at in his lovable and miscellaneous Dans Paris, also starring Garrel. Love Songs, after all, is a musical - one that blends young love, bedroom farce and tragedy. The result is a romantic, bittersweet experience one can conceivably fall in love with, and Honoré's best film so far.

Built around 14 doleful, funny, dark, dance-floor-accented songs by French pop composer Alex Beaupain - the film was written to fit the songs, rather than the other way around - Love Songs follows Ismaël's progress through a bumpy ménage à trois with his long-time, 28-year-old girlfriend Julie (Ludivine Sagnier, Swimming Pool) and vivacious brunette Alice (Clotilde Hesme, who co-starred Garrel in Regular Lovers). As Alice sings to her two bedmates in one of Beaupain's best numbers, "Je suis le pont entre toi et toi", or "I am the bridge between you." It's clear that Ismaël and Julie are passionately in love but wrestling with the usual big questions about commitment and the future. Alice is an intriguing detour for both of them, and a mode of communication on the way to stay together or break up.

Neither of those things happens, and while I can't totally avoid a spoiler, it's better if you don't know too much about the sudden and devastating tragedy that descends on this awkward threesome. Let's just say that Ismaël is sent wandering sleepless from place to place, unable to find much solace with Alice, Julie's charming parents (Brigitte Roüan and Jean-Marie Winling) and younger sister Jasmine (Alice Butaud, one of Garrel's girlfriends in Dans Paris), and avidly fleeing the attentions of both Julie's older sister Jeanne (the marvelous Chiara Mastroianni) and an idealistic, gay Breton college student (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) who's developed a massive crush on him.

If Ismaël's ultimate destination (in one of the loveliest, most improbable balcony renditions of Romeo and Juliet imaginable that will move even the most idiotic homophobe alive) surprised me, and if I felt that Love Songs ended a little too abruptly, the fact is that I didn't want it to end at all. At first it's startling when Garrel and Sagnier move from naturalistic dialogue into a pop song - performed in their own pleasant, natural, non-professional singing voices - but Honoré soon wraps you in his distinctive universe of realism and artifice, erotic comedy and heartbreak. It's a seductive, absorbing, treacherous realm, photographed with un-showy grace by Rémy Chevrin, who makes an unadorned Paris look truly divine.

Unlike John Carney's fabulous Once, Honore's musical isn't a latter-day backstage musical, but an honest-to-God, burst-out-into-song-when-speech-is-no-longer-sufficient event that few filmmakers, other than iconoclasts like Lars von Trier, Francois Ozon or Alain Resnais, have the guts to attempt. And unlike its reference point - Demy's Umbrellas - it's strikingly realistic. Honoré has taken a dozen of mostly pre-existing Franco-pop songs and seamlessly woven them into his plot (although a few of Beaupain's lyrics sound a lot better sung in French than they read subtitled), effortlessly capturing the footloose youthfulness and fancy-free sexuality of the early New Wave without compromising his own vision, and always making clear this story is happening today.

Honoré works fast and cheap on the margins of the French cinema mainstream; his four features so far haven't tackled heavy social issues like race or immigration, and with the exception of Ma Mère they aren't sexually explicit. (Love Songs is remarkably chaste, given the subject matter: there's very little on-screen nudity, let alone sex.) So he really hasn't been recognized at home as anything beyond a niche art-house director with a '60s obsession, and he has zero profile outside of Europe. This inexpressibly tender and lovely picture confirms what I've known for a few years: he's developing into a major talent, one who can accomplish a great thing: to make the spirit of classic French films come alive in a new world.

"I think we grossly underestimate our sorrows, in general."

Almost every single review I've read so far of Dans Paris has described it at least once as a homage to the French New Wave of the 1960s transplanted to the present day. Although I don't fancy being repetitive, that really is the best way to describe this film - as an authentic anthem and tribute to filmmakers such as Truffaut, Godard, Melville or Resnais, and their respective films.



Writer-director Christophe Honoré's film is inspired by both his own family and his deep appreciation for French cinema. Dans Paris is a rarity of a film. Genuinely honest, unpretentious and delightful. Alternately sober and effervescent, heavy-going philosophizing or charmingly simple. It has a vivid emotional realism that is alternately funny and sad, and, at heart, inspirational. Every frame is gorgeously composed and it truly feels and looks and feels like a love letter to the City of Lights.

Honoré reunites the male protagonists of his first and second features - Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard and My Mother, respectively - for his third, and by far best film. Romain Duris (L'Auberge espagnole, The Beat My Heart Skipped) plays Paul, the moody, depressed older brother to Louis Garrel's (The Dreamers, Regular Lovers) carefree hedonist Jonathan. If you add to those two already naturally talented young actors, and following its sincere homage to the French New Wave, veterans Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier as the brothers' divorced parents, you get Dans Paris' first quality: sublime, near-perfect acting.

The film opens with three people in a bed (in a completely non-sexual way) on an early morning in a Parisian apartment; they are Jonathan, in the middle, one of his girlfriends, Alice (Alice Butaud) on one side and Paul on the other. He wakes up, tiptoes his way out of the bed onto the Eiffel Tower-view balcony and then addresses the audience, by looking directly into the camera. Garrel's affable Jonathan proposes to be a narrator in the film's story. Story that starts with Paul's recent life in the country and his failing relationship with his needy, unhappy girlfriend Anna (Joana Preiss). Christmas-time, Paul returns to the family flat in the city, where he takes over his little brother's room and refuses to get out of bed, much least to go out. Both Jonathan and their dad Mirko treat him kindly, but fear that he may go down the same path as his sister who committed suicide during a depression.

Now, I bet that synopsis makes the film sound a bit... depressing. It is. And it isn't. Another one of the many understated qualities of Dans Paris is Honoré's spot-on understanding of depression. Paul's self-exile in the bedroom includes moments of engagement and even humour, providing a multidimensionality to a character who could have easily been just another bore stuck in stagnation. So, while it certainly has a dark, downbeat side for dealing with depression and melancholia, it also has a subtle optimistic and 'less French' side, with the message that anyone who can fall can also pick himself up.

Louis Garrel continues to prove himself as one of the most talented and utterly charming young actors working today. From the opening, with Jonathan addressing the audience, he captures our affection in an almost unfairly easy and effortless way. His approach to life is high-spirited, to say the least. In less than 24 hours - the time in which the film takes place - he sleeps with no less than three girls, but Garrel and Honoré make sure we don't mistake him for a womaniser. Think of The Dreamers' Theo a lot more enthusiastic about life and living in the 21st century. The chameleon-like Romain Duris also shines next to him, delivering a performance of controlled extremes within the domain of pure truthfulness and intensity. One scene in particular, after a suicide attempt of Duris' character, between him and Garrel on a bathtub, is simply jaw-droppingly haunting and powerful.

Honoré's mise en scène makes sure to capture Paris' magic, by glimpses at the Eiffel Tower through the family's windows or the boulevards Jonathan uses as his playground. A lot of things happen in Dans Paris that don't in ordinary films. Songs are spontaneously sung, books read quietly and aloud, and the Seine is jumped into several times. All of this seems quite 1960s. Then again, Honoré's choice to use cell phones as well as a lot of direct film references - including two large poster of Van Sant's Last Days (featuring Garrel's former co-star and friend Michael Pitt) and Cronenberg's A History of Violence - reminds us this is happening now, and places Dans Paris in a wider historical framework. All that said, the personal disconnections and interpersonal bonds the film explores are timeless. Cinema is timeless.

"Wrong isn't what we're about to do. Wrong is wanting to survive it."

A warning: The prospect of Isabelle Huppert starring in a film called My Mother should not put you in mind of rocking chairs, chocolate chip cookies made from scratch, and phone calls home. You'd do well to remember that the last time many of us saw this actress, it was in the title role of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, in which she put broken glass in the pocket of a rival and stabbed herself in the chest as a means of getting her young lover's attention. That, it appears, was just a warm-up. Heaven help us if Huppert ever decides to star in "The Mother Teresa Story."



In My Mother she plays Hélène, a jaded, luxurious Frenchwoman living in the Canary Islands, where she spends each night in a nihilistic impulse of sex with whomever she can find at local clubs. Her partner in degradation is a young woman named Rea (Joana Preiss); Hélène has a husband (Philippe Duclos) stashed at home, but he's not much in the picture and is soon out of it completely. She also has a 17-year-old son, Pierre (Louis Garrel): dark, leonine, freshly returned from Catholic school, and an Oedipal wreck who lurch between prayers to the Virgin Mary and contests of frenzied onanism not at all related to his mother and her pursuits.

You may have figured out by now that My Mother isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche, where sexual annihilation is the only response to a fallen world, where all moral bets are off, and where a boy's worst friend is his mother. "The pleasure only begins once the worm is in the fruit," Hélène tells her son as part of his indoctrination in the harsh realities of life. Other catechisms include urging Pierre to have public sex with Rea in a late-night subway station while Mama watches. And we're still only halfway down an extremely slippery slope.

Directed by Christophe Honoré, My Mother would be merely another in the recent wave of brainiac French sex provocations (Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, and Haneke's The Piano Teacher) except for a few things. It's based on an unfinished work by Georges Bataille, the 20th-century novelist, essayist, and "metaphysician of evil" whose unstinting pessimism gives the film the rigour it needs to stay just this side of screaming pretentiousness. Garrel is much better here than in Bertolucci's The Dreamers - a puppet show compared with this - and he manages to convey all sides of a very confused boy-man. Honoré and his camerawoman Hélène Louvart keep us continually off-balance with unsettling uses of zooms and chiaroscuro; the visuals are overdone, but to a purpose.

And there's Huppert, who in her early 50s has become her country's great, gloomy Queen of Darkness - Garbo for an age of post-modern kink. She doesn't act here so much as preside over the film's restless search for obliteration, and she gets you to understand both the carnal desire that has kept Hélène young and the knowledge of the void that has prematurely aged her. (What she doesn't have is any fun, but if that's what you're looking for, French cinema is rarely the place to find it.)

Hélène disappears during the last third of the film, leaving Pierre in the care and erotic feeding of her apprentice, a pretty young German tourist named Hansi (Emma de Caunes). The two kids play at the edges of the darkness and get sucked in further than they know how to handle, and just as it feels My Mother is losing its way, Huppert returns to take the film soaring outrageously over-the-top in a climactic scene that will probably send the few remaining theatre-goers bolting for the exits, hands clamped over mouths. They must have been thousands. They missed Pierre's final cry of despair, though - an outburst that unexpectedly connects all the dots of this absurd, obscene, oddly powerful experience. My Mother drops the awful hint that we may never connect with another human being besides the one in whose womb we started out. It's as pleasant as having all of your bodily hair plucked out with a pair of tweezers.

As a mainstream arthouse film, My Mother is an utter failure. As an art piece that'll disturb the hell out of anyone who lays eyes on it, it's as successful as it gets. It will strike at the new Puritanism that has infected America and has seeped into mainstream cinema in other countries as well. That said, it will split the critics and audience alike, 99% call for it to be re-branded as pornography, whilst the other 1% will wax lyrical about its pacing and story, finding the eerie beauty of the setting complementary to the unearthly series of events that unfold. Honestly, I'm not even sure on which side I stand... I just know I love being shocked and dazed, and artful, pretentious French films that are often described as "Eurotrash" do the trick better than most.