July 25, 2008
'Songs': in three-part harmony
(A) For the beguiling and bittersweet Love Songs, French writer-director Christophe Honore has imaginatively strung together the plaintive music and lyrics of 13 Alex Beaupain tunes, some of them already extant, others written specifically for the film. So well-integrated are the songs, which enrich the story and its characters immeasurably, that dialogue flows into them with an easy naturalness. An attractive and talented young cast brings this graceful film alive in all its tenderness and emotion.
Louis Garrel's Ismael cuts a romantic figure, a tall, lean Paris journalist with dark eyes and tousled dark hair. His lover, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), agrees to a menage a trois with Ismael's colleague, Alice (Clotilde Hesme), to please him, but the arrangement takes an unexpected swerve that propels him in new directions and provides him with new insights - some painful - into himself.
Ismael is nothing if not magnetic, even if he is often moody and melancholy. Julie's family, most notably her beautiful sister, Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni, who resembles her late father, Marcello, rather than her mother, Catherine Deneuve), is much taken with him, as is the brother (Gregoire Leprince- Ringuet) of an ex-boyfriend of Alice's, who also is captivated by Ismael.
Despite being surrounded by such loving concern, Ismael nevertheless experiences the loneliness of self-discovery. Mastroianni's gravitas and insight as Jeanne anchors the film as Garrel's shallow Ismael gradually moves toward a burgeoning maturity.
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Love Songs will inevitably recall Jacques Demy's classic 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, although in Umbrellas all the dialogue was sung as well as Michel Legrand's memorable lyrics. Whereas Umbrellas has become timeless in its depiction of romance, Love Songs strikes a strongly contemporary note in its calm acceptance of the fluidity of desire and emotion.
>>>Love Songs (IFC Films) Starring Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Chiara Mastroianni. Directed by Christophe Honore. Unrated. Time 95 minutes.
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