Je vous aime (1980) - film review

After breaking up with her latest boyfriend, Alice looks back on her life and remembers her past loves.  Although she is still only in her mid-thirties, Alice has had many partners, all of whom she has loved intensely, for a while.   There was Simon, a temperamental singer-songwriter, who helped her to rear her son Jérôme.  When this relationship turned sour she switched her affections to a young saxophonist, Patrick, with whom she had a daughter.  Then Julien, a prosperous travel agent, entered her life, only to be supplanted by Claude, a bookseller.  For Alice, love is like a flower which lasts only a short time and is soon gone, although the fragrance lingers...

One of director Claude Berri’s few digressions into the realm of sentimental drama, Je vous aime is distinguished by its stellar cast and its honest portrayal of the transience of human relationships.  In its day, the film was quite controversial, although it is essentially no more than an updated version of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, challenging the desirability and viability of long-term relationships, whilst exposing the pain and tragedy that the alternative offers.     

In one of her most perfectly calibrated performances, Catherine Deneuve offers a convincing portrayal of a woman who is tormented by her emotional integrity, refusing to conform to the bourgeois dictat that she should stay with a man she has ceased to love.   The character Alice has some similarity with Deneuve herself and you can’t help but wonder on the extent to which the actress drew on her own experiences in achieving such an authentic characterisation.  There is a poignancy in Deneuve’s interpretation that cuts much deeper than most of her other screen portrayals, revealing a heart-rending fragility coupled with an extraordinary strength of character.  

Although the performances are beyond reproach (the chemistry between Deneuve and Gainsbourg is particularly remarkable), the film’s languorous pace and jumbled narrative structure (which relies on nested flashbacks to a dizzying degree) prevent it from having quite the impact it merits.  Berri’s direction lacks the assurance of his subsequent films (which include the superlative Jean de Florette) and there are times when the film feels like a train stuck in a tunnel.   The flashback structure, which could have worked well if handled more deftly, does little to mask the flimsiness of the narrative and the banality of the dialogue, and all it really achieves is to weaken the film’s coherence.  Fortunately, such is the power and exquisite charm of Deneuve’s presence that the film not only holds together but also triggers the appropriate emotional responses.  Je vous aime is far from perfect but it manages to be an engaging film, a thought-provoking reflection on the tragically ephemeral nature of love.

© James Travers 2010

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