Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. Starring Lola Créton, Sebastian Urzendowsky, 15A cert, IFI/Light House, Dublin, 110 min
YOU KNOW THE drill. Girl likes boy. Boy likes having sex with girl but not as much as he likes the idea of backpacking around South America with his mates. Girl, aged 15, pines and mewls. “I spend my life waiting for you,” she bawls.
Much sulking passes until she finds a different boy. Then first boy pops up again. Now he likes girl. Now he pines and mewls. “I want you to be my wife,” he simpers. Boo hoo. Hang on. Isn’t this the plot of every Pepé Le Pew cartoon, not to mention every third French flick with the festival circuit in its sights?
Mia Hansen-Løve’s mostly pastoral, beautifully dappled Gallic romance (here come several obligatory jaunts to a secluded countryside villa) takes place over eight years. It’s handsomely shot. It’s astutely, sometimes painfully observed. And yet it potters along to no real purpose or conclusion – unless, of course, the symbolic hat depicted in the film’s closing moments is rather more symbolic than we imagined.
The narrative is cunningly, elliptically structured – one moment the girl’s parents are together, the next scene along, they’re divorced.
Lola Créton and Sebastian Urzendowsky do excellent work as Camille and Sullivan, the pouty, hanger-cheek-boned youngsters in the throes of puppy love and – duck now, readers – coming-of-age growing pains. Sadly, however, watching mawkish adolescents – “I won’t survive!” – isn’t much more fun than being a mawkish adolescent.
Hansen-Løve, director of the equally plodding Father of My Children, may have interesting things to say about how older, wiser folks feel about former lovers, particularly those partners who got there first. But there’s no sense of youth or fun or animation or urgency about the central pairing. Don’t the French have a word for shenanigans?
Naturally, the export-friendly finished product is pretty and sunny and earnest, though if it’s pretty, sunny, earnest pictures of young love you’re after, you’ll probably feel a lot more fulfilled by this month’s Nicholas Sparks adaptation. It’s got Zac Efron, three shapelier acts and a happier ending. Sans chapeau.
