Thanks to “Once,” the charming Irish indie that just won the Oscar for Best Song, we’ve recently learned to love the realist movie musical. But will we still love it when it has subtitles at the bottom?
French director Christophe Honore’s “Love Songs,” out Friday, is tons more classically romantique than “Once” but does bear some resemblance with its “actual actors singing songs, but not as a musical,” says Honore, “like Jean Renoir, and the films of the New Wave, where in a regular narrative film actors would break into singing and convey emotion through a song.”
“Love Songs” centers on a young man (Louis Garrel, of Honore’s “Dan Paris”), his girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier) and the other woman they’re sleeping with (Clotilde Hesme) as they navigate the uncharted territories of managing a threesome, dealing with sudden tragedy and, finally, the addition of a younger man (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet) with a crush on Garrel’s character.
Honore tips his hat to the 1964 Catherine Deneuve musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” by dividing his film into three sections (“The Departure,” “The Absence” and “The Return”); his lead, Garrel, suggests a “Breathless”-era Jean-Paul Belmondo with his constant clowning. But there’s one glaring difference that sets the film apart from its New Wave predecessors.
“Those movies tended to be quite Puritan and never deal with homosexuality,” says Honore. “It was always very literary flirting between a man and a woman. [‘Love Songs’] is a vision that’s very particular to my view of people, of always trying to avoid any sexual clichés. My characters could not be reduced to gender or sexual identity.”
Indeed, with the exception of Leprince-Ringuet, all the main characters swing both ways without so much as a raised eyebrow.
Still, the jury is out as to whether the uninhibited Parisian joie de vivre will be lost in translation. British reviews have tended toward the sarcastically critical, while incensed French viewers submit online comments in protest:
“This is a typical French film,” one wrote to London’s Time Out. “I did not and do not expect British audiences to understand it.”
“For [an] English (or any foreign) reviewer who has not spent years living in France and does not speak French, the subtleties of the film will be lost,” another wrote.
And a third summed it up for the Times Online in a more colorful way: “There is a French expression for that: ‘Avoir de la merde dans les yeux.'”
This being a family newspaper, we’ll let you translate that one for yourself.