European Films

The only real musical in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival competition is Les chansons d’amour (Love Songs), and it is French author and writer-director Christophe Honoré's (Ma mère, Dans Paris / Inside Paris) most accessible film to date. This in no way means that he relinquishes his auteurist roots: many of the trademark touches of a Honoré project are actually amplified here and with good reason, since musicals are larger than life by definition and the best ones are a reflection of their makers’ personality as seen through a magnifying glass. A line-up of young French stars should help at the French boxoffice, though outside of Francophone territories the film will face the uphill battle of mostly unknown names and the innate difficulty of translating the lyrics that are an integral part of the story.

 

The titular chansons d’amour are culled from new as well as older work of composer Alex Beaupain, though many have been rearranged to fit the story and create a certain harmony between them. The composer seems not so much interested in catchy tunes per se as he is in the meaning of the sung text and the accompanying music. Though this would seem to against the grain of a good musical -- which one does not have at least one catchy tune? -- it actually works to Honoré’s advantage here because it allows the story to calmly yet continuously push forward, uninterrupted by big production numbers that inspire awe but also distract from the matters at hand.

 

Combined with a mise-en-scene that does not distinguish much between spoken and sung scenes, it gives the effect of one of the most un-musical-like musicals that have recently graced the screen. Its formal honesty will be startling for those used to the baroque tongue-in-cheek musicals that are made nowadays; Moulin Rouge! this is not. The highly associative style of the lyrics will likely present a problem for non-French-speakers, though, and how much or how little will get lost in translation will play a big role in the reception of the film abroad. The  English subtitles caught on the print in Cannes did not really do the French justice.

 

French actor Louis Garrel -- who here teams up with Honoré for the third time -- and his co-stars all do their own singing. Garrel plays Ismaël, an emotionally immature young man who is in a relationship with the blonde Julie (Ludivine Sagnier, already caught singing in Ozon's 8 femmes). The raven-haired Alice (Clotilde Hesme, also Garrel’s lover in his father’s Les amants réguliers / Regular Lovers) is the self-proclaimed bridge between the two, acting as the third person in a ménage à trois for which Ismaël’s bed is much too small.

 

When Julie discusses the threesome arrangement with her sister Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni) and her mother (Brigitte Roüan) -- as characters in French films are wont to do -- it becomes clear it is not really what she was hoping for. Not much later, when attending a concert, she dies of cardiac arrest (or a broken heart in musical language).

 

Mourning is something of a Honoré obsession; it has played a role in all of his films and even in the screenplays he co-wrote but did not direct, such as Gaël Morel's Après lui (After Him), which plays in one of the sidebars here in Cannes. In Chansons d’amour it even gives the film its structure, as it is divided into three episodes: The Departure, The Absence and The Return (something it shares with Jacques Demy's musical Les parapluies de Cherbourg / The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which starred Mastroianni's mother Catherine Deneuve and which is a clear inspiration).

 

Jeanne worries about Ismaël and tries to connect with him, which he seems to reject. Alice tries to find solace in the arms of a handsome youngster from Brittany (Yannick Renier, from Nue propriété / Private Property), whom she soon dumps, but not before his school-going younger brother Erwann (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Voleurs de chevaux / Horse Thieves) has had a chance to eye up Ismaël.

 

Are the characters completely believable? No. Are the feelings the characters talk and sing about pinpointed with a precision that seems to have become a Honoré trademark? Very much so. It is this quality that makes Les chansons d’amour a good film -- if not necessarily a good musical.

 

 

Buy the DVD at: amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr.