August 16, 2008
"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 aven...( read more)ues 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.
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