Eloïse

Eloïse's Lover, originally entitled Eloïse (2009) was directed by Jesús Garay. It is listed as a film in Spanish, but it's actually in Catalan, the language of the region that includes Barcelona.

This movie is, unfortunately, a pretty stereotypic lesbian love story. A young college student is more or less engaged to a fine young man, but she's clearly not in love with him. She meets an intriguing and beautiful lesbian woman, and the rest of the film is fairly predictable. We know from the outset that the young student is in the hospital in a coma, but we don't know whether or not she will recover. That's the biggest suspense of the plot.

Still, the movie has its good points. Both Diana Gómez as Àsia (the young student) and Ariadna Cabrol as Eloïse (the out lesbian) are very beautiful. It was interesting to get multiple shots of the university in Barcelona, and it's rare to find a film in Catalan in Upstate New York.

In my opinion, this isn't a film that you must see, but it's worth watching if it's readily available. It will work well on DVD, if that's an option. We saw it at Rochester's Little Theatre, as part of the wonderful ImageOut:The Rochester Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

This film is a kind of something you will watch again and again. Because in this film the end, is really the end. This film ends beautifully. Makes you want to watch again and again. My analogy is, this film is like a small and very sharp knife, and also smeared with sedative so that it won't hurt you, at least me. ^_^ I won't spoil anything. This is not a film to make you feel happy. This film is all about watching how happy the character Asia. How happy she had been, in the end, how happy she was. Since i like to see something beatiful, in the end i feel happy. You'll understand when you've watched this!!

The obvious thrust of the narrative is toward a central lesbian romance, plainly seen even in film posters, and queer representation that is welcome. But 'Eloïse's lover' also endeavors to present a more complete narrative all the while, with a progression toward that relationship that feels more natural, compared to other pictures one could name.

One can't help but feel that the premise, as described anywhere that one may read it or see it depicted, is a bit misleading. Before we know it half the runtime has passed, then two-thirds, then still more, and the plot has advanced so slowly - in every regard - that it almost feels to have gone nowhere. 'Eloïse's lover' wants to be seen as championing a romance between its leads, while also making it feel organic - yet by the time it begins to meaningfully bear fruit, the picture is near its very end. There's a sense that, as the saying goes, this movie wants to have its cake and eat it, too.

This is much more about the narrative as a whole, the tale of a young woman coming to learn what she wants of life, and to that end the story being told is engrossing and poignant. The ending is sharp and biting, made ever more so by the love Àsia (Diana Gómez) and Eloïse (Ariadna Cabrol) share - and the forces that have worked against them all along, not least of all some despicable displays of homophobia. There is an artfulness to director Jesús Garay's arrangement of shots that one does not anticipate in such a feature, a bent that bolsters a flow that tends to feel a bit lacking.

'Eloïse's lover' is not entirely fulfilling, but it's an engaging feature all the same, with swell performances from stars Gómez and Cabrol, and worth checking out if you're generally inclined.

This Catalan-Spanish teen lesbian movie very much anticipates the later Cannes-winning French film "Blue is the Warmest Color". Like the later film, it is about a sexually confused girl in her late teens who becomes involved with an older female artist who is much more of a committed lesbian. This results here though in tragedy as the heroine begins the movie in a coma after an accident and the rest of the movie is told in flashbacks.

In America movies like this are called "gay interest", which implies--unfortunately accurately in many cases--that they may not hold much interest for anyone else who is NOT female and gay. But then again, many lesbians might justifiably scoff at some other "lesbian" movies like "Room in Rome" which seem a lot more interested in hot girl-on-girl action than in seriously portraying believable lesbian relationships. Even "Blue is the Warmest Color" fell victim to this latter criticism by people who couldn't see beyond the 15 minutes of hot sex scenes to consider the REST of the three-hour long movie. This film though is more immune to that criticism since there is really only one graphic lesbian scene near the end of the movie, long after most horny frat-boy types would have lost interest. Most of the movie is fairly believable if somewhat pedestrian female romance. The best scene by far is the startlingly filmed night swimming scene where the lovers break into the university pool after hours. This scene is so beautifully filmed and lit, you perhaps won't question why they turned on all these lights if they weren't supposed to be in the pool. This scene really transcends the rest of the movie and eventually returns later as a metaphoric image for the heroine's deep and perhaps irreversible coma.

The coma plot is perhaps a little melodramatic and reminiscent of trite Hollywood crap like "If I Stay", but that is perhaps an unfair criticism since this movie came out years earlier. Despite the melodrama though, this is not nearly as dramatically compelling as "Blue is the Warmest Color" (and is also only about half the length). Diana Gomez, as the young university student, and Ariadna Cabrol, as the older artist, are both muy pretty girls with beautiful bodies even if they're not nearly as strong of actresses as Adele Exarchopolous and Lea Seydoux in "Blue" (but they also both have a lot more nude scenes than than Chloe Moretz in "If I Stay"). Some individual scenes are very impressive, but the movie as a whole is bit slight and rather cliché. But it also matters what you choose to compare it to. It is worth seeing at least.

I am not a lesbian, or even a female, but I found the movie to be poignantly thrilling. I think far too much is made of ... what? Novelty? I recall a passage in the George Orwell's book Nineteen-Eighty-four in which on one tryst Winston observes a peasant woman hanging out laundry and singing an old ditty that women must have sung for millenniums. Some things need to be re-experienced again and again. Love is Mount Fuji, described by thousands of Haiku poets and still begging to be once more described. Critics don't seem to know this. That's why the book and movie Love Story made the critics look like the insulated stuffed shirts they are. Eloise's Lover presents first love in a heart-wrenching, soul- searching, suspense-loaded manner that artists should all emulate. The flashback technique in the movie kept my mind and emotions on edge. I could not sleep for several nights wondering what if ....