L'important c'est d'aimer

This film is a little more complex than the title suggests. Love is only one of the elements of the picture.

In fact, I would say most of the movie is spent on producing "art" that you are not proud of. This theme is throughout the movie. You get the impression that it is being bolted into your nerves like a physical trauma bolts in disdain.

We also deal with the end of youth and how we cope with it. The film is indeed extremely raw. The scenes are meant to be honest and to the point. We get very little sidestepping when it comes to the point of scenes. Perhaps the actors will discuss things in a roundabout way, but the theme slices through each scene like a scimitar.

On the subject of love. This is very important to the movie as well. Even though there are virtually no signs of it til the very end, there is a longing for it. And that is what most good romances are about. Sydney Pollock once said something to the effect of, the interesting part of a Romance Film is the longing for the connection between the characters. You can have a couple of slow motion scenes of them waltzing through the park and feeding each other fruits, but that isn't what drives the story and the film. Perhaps that is why this film is so good.

A simple story about an actress, her sentimental dilemma , dark atmosphere and one of the most powerful roles of Romy Schneider. In same measure, a dark exploration of compromisses , limits of intense love and pure addiction, Fabio Testi reminding a young Andrei Batalov and offering fair portrait of vulnerable young photographer, under pressure of parent, friend, protectors and the woman who he loves and her, brilliant acted by Dutronc, husband.

A great film , gloomy, bitter but pure honest , proposing not exactly pleasant ways but the truths defining, in its basic dates, its essence.

In short, not comfortable, near bizarre but fascinating for the precise images of vulnerability .

Servais ,a photographer (Fabio Testi) meets Nadine ( Romy Schneider), a B-list actress and he falls in love with her. He'll try with any cost to help her with her career. The movie talks about love as a drug. Servais is in love with Nadine who is his drug. She means happiness and at the same time suffering to him. The film describes a very beautiful love story in a very cruel and dark environment . Movie has nothing to do with the usual American romantic movies. The spectators will see and understand the soul of the main characters. The interpretations are amazing. Romy Schneider is a great actress and she is proving it again in this movie. The first five minutes of the film are outstanding. She doesn't need to talk , her face says everything !! The other actors give their best too. Zulawski makes a very special film which has his stamp. He creates his own world based on how society is structured. I think that L'important c'est d'aimer is a film that either you hate it or love it, there is no middle way. Although, it is a must see for every cinephile!!

This is a film for manic-depressives or people on amphetamines, maybe. I have rarely seen such frenetic activity outside of martial-arts pictures, yet the story is simple: a woman tires of her limp husband (Dutronc)and tries to start up with a much more masculine type (Testi). The milieu is the porn movie business which Schneider's character works in, interwoven with the classical theatre world she would like to belong to.

Romy Schneider got the Cesar award for her performance here; she pulls out all the stops to create this gifted but battered-by-life character. Pity that Zulawski couldn't craft a more balanced film around her.

I'm not surprised to read here at IMDb that Romy called this her best work. She leads a cast of irresistible losers (Dutronc, Kinski, Testi) in the wholly believable debauchery that is so truly the amoral dilemma of the profession Maugham has called "THE show business". The physical electricity of these performers is such that I came away from it thirty years ago thinking that Miss Schneider was Brando's doppelganger. Or perhaps she WAS Brando! After all, they were never seen together, were they? If acting may be defined as the truthful response to fictional stimuli, then this film, which, by the way, must be screening daily in both Heaven and Hell, was perhaps shot in one cosmic take. These actors display - seamlessly - their bodies, their appetites, their loves, egos, ids and superegos. Never mind the sadness, life is for learning.