L'homme de sa vie

The movie is visually stunning and all the actors did a good job, but it tries too hard to be artistic and it mostly fails.

The two main male characters have deep talks about life, love, family and their meaning, discussion which is constantly shown in flashbacks, repeating the last minute of the previous one, but they lack substance. It tries to be witty, and that it's pretty obvious, but it fails.

The relationship of them is never truly explained, also leaving the viewer with a confusing open ending - again, it tried not to be "in your face", to make you think, to discover things by yourself but it couldn't raise to the stakes raised by itself.

The director, Zabou Breitman wasn't at her first try in the movie industry; now, I don't know how her other films hold up, they don't have a page on Wikipedia, nor on RottenTomatoes and her directed films on IMDb don't have a rating yet (maybe all that means something too), even if released years ago, but if the others are the same, they aren't worthy.

On the bright side, it's cinematography is really great, it has some beautiful shot moments, she knows her way around the camera - too bad they don't integrate very well into the film.

4/10

Summer somewhere in France. A couple and their young son invite family and friends to enjoy a warm rural holiday at their old but comfortable summer house. A neighbor, a middle-aged single man, is invited to join the first night's outdoor party. It is quickly revealed that the man is gay. He and the husband start a tentative friendship. How far will it go?

Beyond the apparently simple plot line, what struck me about this film were the visual aspects. A playful camera delights us with unconventional angles, framing, superpositions and transitions. Combining beautiful cinematography and great editing, the end result is a superb film. The tango music is icing on the cake.

This was just so bad. It should be shown in film course as an example of what not to do. Watching it reminded me of a line from the 1932 movie "Grand Hotel," where Greta Garbo says " People come, people go; nothing ever happens." Ostensibly about the evolving relationship between gay Hugo and straight Frederick, the movie is littered with numerous characters and plot threads that do nothing but confuse. While beautiful to look at, the cinematographer is as confusing as whatever passes for a plot. Repetition does nothing to give meaning to shot after shot. A sad waste of the efforts of a decent cast trying to give meaning to utter BS.

Filmmakers invest a great deal of creativity and inspiration into their work, so I hesitate to write a negative review, but I'm compelled to make an exception here.

What a pretentious, self-indulgent waste of time. It steadily succumbs to self-conscious artiness, drunk on its own sense of contrived poetry.

It's sumptuously filmed, but ultimately shallow, empty, and a little boring. There's a good story waiting to be told that gets lost in useless side plots, languorous panoramas, and tedious conversations.

There's a germ of a very good idea in the screenplay, but I just don't feel that the writers fully grasped what they were undertaking.

Don't waste your time.

This film is so well photographed, produced, acted, scripted, etc., I feel a bit caddish for complaining about any aspect of it.

The photography is beautiful, lush at times, and often original. Much of the story takes place in dreams, or in a dream-like state, and the cinematographer does a good job conveying as much.

The film returns repeatedly to segments of an all night conversation between the two male leads, revealing nothing particularly extraordinary. Their dialog is the kind college kids have when they're talking about The Meaning of It All. But aspects of that discussion are played off against events occurring around them in the days that follow. It's a nice structure, one that lends itself to the dreamy photography.

I think the film could have been truly great if just a bit of the thematic and visual metaphors had been scaled back. This slight excess is noticeable, and that, I think, is a shame. Don't get me wrong--this is so far and away above the quality of most gay cinema it's definitely worth seeing, and thoroughly enjoyable.

I think Netflix has categorized this film as Foreign, rather than as Gay & Lesbian. It's French, so it clearly belongs to the former, but it is also a top tier example of the latter.