Love Songs
Love Songs, Christophe Honoré's musical
trifle about loves lost and lorn on the streets and in the apartments
of Paris, doesn't come into its own until around the halfway point.
The story about a girl, a boy, and a girl living together in the big
city is basically a beautiful, sophisticated soap opera punctuated by
the occasional musical number. The threesome of Ismael, Julie and
Alice is fairly well played by the brooding Louis Garrel (best known
as Eva Green's creepy brother Theo in Bertolucci's The Dreamers),
Ludivine Sagnier (the bombshell from Ozon's Swimming Pool), and
Clotilde Hesme (new to me, though she appeared with Garrel in Regular
Lovers, directed by the famous elder Garrel, Philippe). A plot twist at around the half-hour
mark throws the relationship into disarray, but the film doesn't find
its emotional core until the gentle, boyish-looking Erwann (Grégoire
Leprince-Ringuet) shows up, crooning sweet nothings at Ismael until
the latter succumbs — it's the first time any of the film's songs feels more than utterly perfunctory.