L’Amoureuse (1987) - film review

Eight girlfriends meet up at a resort on the Normandy coast to celebrate the birthday of their friend.  The nine friends are each on the rebound from some emotional crisis but they manage to amuse themselves, mainly by trying to seduce and humiliate any men they can find.  Two of the young women, Elsa and Camille realise that their friend Marie has fallen in love with an American tourist, Dick, and decide to play the role of cupid.

In this engaging comedy-drama, Jacques Doillon manages to portray the irony, pain and childlike idiocy of young love with the skill of a poet and the insight of a man who has a profound understanding of human nature.  The film compares the experiences of eight young women (each brought to life by a wondrously talented actress) who are, in one way or another, becoming disillusioned with romantic love.  With its raw, naturalistic cinematography (redolent of the New Wave directors of the 1960s), this is a film which is both cruel – almost to the point of cynicism – and disarmingly playful.

With its use of confined spaces and a bleak coastal setting, this manages to be one of Doillon’s most intense films, but it is also, paradoxically, one of his lightest.  All of the actresses who appeared in this film were virtually unknown at the time but some – notably Marianne Denicourt, Agnès Jaoui and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi – soon went on to enjoy a prolific career in French cinema.  Interestingly, if you arrange the first letters of the first names of the eight actresses in the film (or, equally, the names of the characters they play), you obtain the word “Machiavel”.  Was this mere coincidence or a clever in-joke on the part of Jacques Doillon?

© James Travers 2003

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