When brokenhearted Maxime (Niels Schneider) arrives at his cousin’s country home he does not expect to be greeted by Daphné (Camélia Jordana). She informs him that his cousin, François (Vincent Macaigne), has to attend to an emergency at work in the city and wont be able to join them for a couple days. Daphné, tipped off by François that Maxime has had a recent brush with tragic romance, invites him to share his tale of woe.
He begins to tell a story of unrequited love in which he ends up as the third-wheel-roommate to his best friend and his girlfriend who also happens to be the object of Maxime’s desire. It may sound like a typical setup for a French melodrama but writer-director (and sometimes actor but not here) Emmanuel Mouret has more up his sleeve than that. When Maxime’s story is interrupted, things switch over to Daphné, who is three months pregnant with François’ child, to share how she and his cousin first met. From here the love triangles (if that’s even the right shape in this case) start to multiply—Daphné had her own case of unrequited love when she fell for a documentarian she worked with before things changed track thanks to a meet-cute with François, who was then married to Louise (Émilie Dequenne). Things only continue to escalate as an undeniable attraction begins to manifest between Daphné and Maxime. More surprises abound as do both betrayals and meetings of the heart.
These narrated romances start and stop, shift from one to the other, and begin to blur into one another the more that they pile up and intersect with the film’s present. There’s something of a Russian doll effect here with love stories inside of love stories. The sheer number of pairings and re-pairings (by my count: ten) can almost make you lose track but Mouret weaves these different timelines and lovelines together effortlessly.
Light on its feet, this series of trysts and heartache are played with a comedic, fanciful tone, and there is, at least for a time, an undercurrent of foolishness at play here in how Mouret portrays these characters who are seemingly slaves to their desires, and yet there is nothing irreverent in the film’s treatment of love. In fact, each feeling, each instance of attraction, is to each character the most serious thing in the world, at least in its inception, and registers as such. Every feeling matters. Beautifully directed, Mouret expertly retains a tonal levity even as the film seriously considers love, romance, and partnership from a philosophical perspective—one that elaborates on itself until the final, surprising moments. One central question is posed: can one resist?
One of the achievements of Mouret’s style is to allow each character’s subjectivity to have its own space in the film. When characters make questionable decisions, or put their feelings above another’s, there is no judgment imposed. We get swept up in each of their emotions. Mouret’s extends a Renoiresque generosity towards the characters and their respective grapplings with love. Characters circle one another, enter and exit each other’s lives, bringing both joy and pain. Everything is depicted as being in motion: characters, hearts, life. There is no storybook alignment, no ideal, no definitive possibility. Love does not begin, end, or continue in a convenient nor tidy way. It moves. We move with it (or against it). There are no villains, no one is intentionally cruel, only inadvertently messy. The ensemble is filled only with sensitive, sympathetic personalities. While each player imbues the film with something unique, there is something altogether special about Macaigne (Eden, Non-Fiction), who is particularly adept at playing characters who behave like assholes and still manages to make you love them. He’s one of today’s best actors and has something of Michel Simon’s buffoonish charisma. Even in François’ lowest moments it’s hard not to feel for him.
Love Affair(s) is pure, bittersweet pleasure. It also reveals unexpected depths as it unfolds, exploring the duality of how love can figure into our lives. On one hand, there is its inexplicability in how and when it strikes us, and on the other, there is our ability to choose, to give in or to resist, and, moreover, how. It is not simply a portrayal of divided or fickle affections nor an exploration of one's ability to love more than one person, but of the multiple (infinite) possibilities that love—and therefore life—can present to us. Love as multiplicity. Mouret renders this in the most tender fashion even as it expresses that which breaks hearts and breaks apart lives because it is also tangled up with precisely what moves hearts and brings lives together
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