Les Chansons d'Amour
Starring: Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Chiara Mastroianni, Clotilde Hesme
Director: Christophe Honore
The film: Just like the titles for his previous films - Ma Mere (My Mother), Dans Paris (Inside Paris) - Christophe Honore's Les Chansons d'Amour has a handle that could only described as banal (it simply means 'love songs'). Unlike his previous two films, however, this latest outing is as straightforward as its name suggests: there are no hints of dark emotional twists (as in the incestuous emotions in Ma Mere) or ironic pastiches of French New Wave aesthetics (as in Dans Paris): it's an utterly sincere musical about love lost and gained, expressed through evocative songs.
The film is effective and entertaining, with Honore conjuring excellent all-singing performances from his actors, set against classic Parisian cityscapes (in the city's 10th arrondissement, rather than the more working-class, surly outskirts) harking back to the imagery invoked by his nouvelle vague predecessors. The story is simple: a free-flowing love triangle between three young Parisians - Louis Garrel's foolhardy Ismael (right), his girlfriend Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Alice (Clotilde Hesme), friend and part-time lover to both - is cast asunder by a death. The surviving parties are left to reflect on their existence and discover redemption in their own separate ways - for Louis, in the shape of Erwann (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), who, like the director, is gay and a Breton.
Comparisons with Jacques Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg are nearly inevitable, and in certain aspects Les Chansons seems heir apparent to the mythical status of the 1964 classic. But only to a point: Honore's film is sometimes too camp, thus undermining the emotional intensity the director seems intent on building around the tragedy at the centre of the proceedings. While the Algerian war cast a long shadow over Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo's unrequited love in Umbrellas, nothing of the sort can bring the gravitas needed to ground Les Chansons' fraught relationships.