Les chansons d'amour

Paris, romance, love songs, and maybe a little Pedro Almodovar mixed in.

Love Songs is just that - fourteen love songs, all very beautiful, probably available on You Tube, tied together with some dialog.

I'm not impressed with Louis Garrel, but maybe I am not supposed to be.

It is Ludivine Sagnier (Paris, je t'aime, Swimming Pool, 8 femmes) that sets my heart a flutter, whether she is singing or discussing the intricacies of three-way sex with her mum. No, there is no sex in the film, it's a romance.

Clotilde Hesme is the third member of the menage a trois.

Part 1 ended in a manner that I did not expect in a romantic film.

Everything changed after the tragedy and a sadness came over the film as people struggled to find love and deal with loss.

It was all about the music, however, and, in that sense, it was a good film.

I'm not sure that even at their most downbeat, Messrs Kretzmer, Boublil & Schönberg could have thought of singing about grey skies raining down thousands of needles - and they were talking about the French Revolution! Anyway, that's the type of lyric written for this quirkily entertaining story that starts with three in a bed. "Ismaël" (Louis Garrel), his girlfriend "Julie" (Ludivine Sagnier) and her friend "Alice" (Clotilde Hesme). That doesn't go so well, indeed life for "Ismaël" generally takes a turn for the worst when tragedy strikes and everyone has to make some practical and emotional adjustments to their lives. As time passes, though, the green shoots of recovery start to emerge - but not where anyone expects them. That's largely down to the enthusiastic "Erwann" (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) who takes this complex but amusing look at the nature of human relationships full circle. Most of the musical numbers don't translate so well into English - the scanning and rhymes can sound a bit contrived, but the gist is there as the songs infill the narrative with some quite emotionally charged scenarios played out amidst the scenery of Paris. It can be cheesy at times, but it's essentially a story about the resilience of the human spirit to reboot and find new love where an old one has gone. Garrel is on good form here, some of his facial expressions just have to be seen as his character attempts to muddle through determined not to take the more obvious routes to happiness - despite himself, half the time. It's not deep and meaningful, but there are some salient points to be taken about grief and rejuvenation - and I did like the ending.

How to put into words a film with this sensorial density? It's clearly not the simplest task. "Congratulations Christophe Honoré" could be a good approach, maybe the best.

As a Portuguese, a traditional nation in the "European standards", I may say that this film surpasses my bounds when speaking of, let's say, "relational experimentalism". Even so, I found it astoundingly beautiful and I guess that picking-up the gay issue would be to diminish a film about life and what we make of it in our nowadays living.

To have lived in France for over a year, eventually helped me out to remark some interesting French particularities in the characters.

I found the humor in this film to be typically French. There's a scene were Ismael is Wrapping a pillow making a baby of it, asking everybody in the room to remain silent not to wake up the child that had just gotten asleep. Then, unexpectedly, he throws the "baby" right out of the window as he gets tired of the staging. This kind of uncompromising performances, risking the ridiculous, were undoubtedly a "déjà vu" for me.

The music is also a key element in the film and gives it a Parisian melancholical aura. The music is often used by 2 or more characters in the form of a dialog where they show their feelings and points of view. As they sing, the scenes are incredible well filmed either outdoor, in the endless avenues of Paris, or indoor in the cosiness of a warm bed in a cold winter night. Sometimes I felt as I was one of the characters right in the scene.

The anguish, the indecision and above all, the solitude are the marking subjects in a film that exposes in a crude manner how individualistic the society is becoming in France, and why not, in Europe.

It's a contemporary (timeless?) film about human relationships. In my opinion, the antithesis of the blockbuster cinema: The extravagance is replaced by beauty, the free nudity is replaced by sensuality and the easy laugh is avoided. The dialogs are intelligent, complex and they have ambiguous interpretation.

At the end of the movie, a phrase synthesizes it all: "Love me less but for a long time".

To assume the compromise revoking the emotional hurricane brought by fleeting relations will bring peace, at last.

A perfect blend of playfulness, joy, sexuality and complete and utter tragedy. All of this is weaved in through the story and, more importantly, the songs themselves. The actors expertly portray every moment of it all, pouring their hearts into the songs whether it's a bouncy battle between two lovers with another lover in between or a lonely sister wishing for just one more hour of hope. I don't want to spoil a really big moment that provides all of that tragedy, but something happens relatively early on that floored me. Louis Garrel is an excellent lead and portal into all of these different people, and the supporting cast rounds everything off without missing a beat. The beautiful Ludivine Sagnier, the heartfelt Chiara Mastroianni and one of the most gorgeous women I've ever seen, Clotilde Hesme, are all brilliant. It swept me off my feet practically right off the bat and kept me floating throughout the whole thing. A fantastic movie, one of my favorites of '08 and of all time, for that matter.

I wish I could see this film at least another 3 or 4 times, before making this comment, but I can't wait telling the world (ah ah) how much I loved it! This film is a huge and wonderful homage to a great deal of things. 'Great things' such as love, life, death... and more 'minor things' (?) such as youth, friendship, music, Paris, actors and actresses, directors such as Stanley Donen, Jacques Demy, etc. And still, this film manages to stay incredibly fresh, new, full of veiled references (I couldn't help smiling with delight, when seeing Chiara Mastroianni under her transparent umbrella, a reference to her mother, Catherine Deneuve, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). And the film goes on like that, like on a tight rope, with actors perched on their frail voices, never ridiculous, always moving and/or witty. It keeps moving (never a dull moment) and it keeps moving you. Never vulgar, never cheap, never shocking. A marvel of lightness. Could it be the unbearable lightness of what we call life?