The Salt of Tears

But for all of the film's focus on romantic relationships, it offers precious little in terms of behavioral or textural specificity.

Renato Berta's cinematography lends an expansiveness to its ordinary settings, both urban and semirural.

The Salt of Tears starts aridly, in scenes of a bus-stop encounter of two young adults that in short order becomes a fragile romance, but it soon rises very high with its fusion of brusque candor and unspoken yearnings.

While "The Salt of Tears" threatens to devolve into a sympathetic male gaze with each new turn, Garrel actually manages to burrow within those boundaries and deconstruct their flaws from the inside out.

Philippe Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple without humor or wit.

The Salt of Tears fits [Garrel's] characteristic mould of economically told intimate dramas.

The Salt of Tears hovers around repulsive aspects of society without fully committing to its own unpleasantness…

Seemingly flat and messy, but ultimately, it is playing with the audience's perception and aims to provoke and create discomfort. [Full review in Spanish]

The pointless, pretentious narration and overcast black and white cinematography make "The Salt of Tears" play like a parody of French cinema of the '60s

The plot is indebted to every Eric Rohmer film concerned with the vagaries of love. But Garrel takes his characters more seriously than Rohmer does.