LOVERS (1999)
"I couldn't concentrate on anything, I could only think about you."
2.5 out of ****
Starring Élodie Bouchez, Sergueï Trifunovic;
Directed by Jean-Marc Barr;
Written by Barr and Pascal Arnold;
Cinematography by Barr
There are movies which take the everyday stuff of life and through subtle examination make it seem fascinating and fresh, movies which capture the infinite richness of ordinary existence. And there are movies like LOVERS, which take the everyday stuff of life and make it seem, well, mundane. It is the story of a man and a woman who meet in a bookstore and fall in love. There's a bit more to it than that, but not much.
The woman is Jeanne, who works in the bookstore. She is played by the captivating Élodie Bouchez, who is as wonderful here as she was in THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS, where she played a similar young woman: charming and sensible, open-hearted and affectless. The man, on the other hand, is merely feckless. He is Dragan (Sergueï Trifunovic), a Yugoslavian expatriate and painter. He is slothful, wasteful, drunken, pretentious, and self-absorbed, to varying degrees. He is, as Jeanne properly remarks, a spoiled child. But he's an artist, and artists are temperamental, so that's alright. He is, actually, a nice enough guy, passionate and sincere despite his faults, and he charms her when he asks her in faltering French to order an art book for him.
They make a date and have dinner at her place, then make love; she misses work the next day so they can be together. Their relationship seems inspired by the things lovers do in other French movies: smoking cigarettes in coffeeshops, making love in seedy apartments, strolling along the Seine at night. Perhaps French people do this sort of thing in real life too, but I hope they're not quite so clichéd. Jeanne and Dragan cannot understand each other's language, so they converse mostly in English (unlike most people speaking foreign tongues, they never trip over their words). Their attraction deepens.
Dramatic tension develops only when the police learn that Dragan is an illegal immigrant and he is given three days to leave the country. He moves in with Jeanne and avoids the police, determined not to leave. The lovers can't stand the thought of parting. There are occasional squabbles--he's irrationally jealous of her ex-boyfriends, she's annoyed when he comes home drunk at five a.m.--but most of the time they are enamoured with each other. They fill each other's thoughts. In intimate moments, they speak lines which sound like they're reciting bad poetry--which is reasonable enough, since love and bad poetry are often mutually inclusive.
The film was directed, shot and co-written by Jean-Marc Barr, the French actor perhaps best known for his roles in Luc Besson's THE BIG BLUE and Lars von Trier's ZENTROPA and BREAKING THE WAVES. He is a belated member of the so-called Dogma 95 group, which includes von Trier. Their mandate insists on an unrefined, inelegant style of filmmaking: handheld cameras, on-location sound, no artificial lighting, no special effects, no filters, etc., etc.
The style suits the extemporaneous, understated feel of the movie, but it adds nothing, and LOVERS at times desperately needs an added something. While there is an innocent romanticism at its heart which is a refreshing change from the more jaded or manipulative visions of love predominant in contemporary cinema, it's more tedious than touching. It focuses on the down-to-earth details of desire without ever giving a proper sense of the grand passions that drive it. Love is a symphony, but LOVERS makes it seem like chamber music.
So much has been said, written, and sung on the subject of love throughout so many years that perhaps Barr is wise not to aim for all-encompassing statements, but rather to seek insight through observation of the particulars of one relationship. And he is not exactly unsuccessful. The direction is unobtrusive; the acting is first-rate. Jeanne and Dragan seem sweet and authentic. They just aren't terribly interesting. They embody the oldest theme of all, and fail to bring anything new to it.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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