Les Bien-aimés (2011) - film review

From Paris in the 1960s to London in the first decade of the third millennium, Madeleine and her daughter Véra flit from one amorous adventure to the next, living for the moment and taking all the opportunities that life offers.  But not every love affair is without its consequences, its upsets and its disappointments.  As time goes by and gnaws away at one’s deepest feelings, love becomes a harder game to play...

After failing spectacularly to find an audience for his self-indulgent gay-themed odyssey Homme au bain (2010), writer-director Christophe Honoré returns to much safer ground with Les Bien-aimés (a.k.a. The Beloved), his second flirtation with the musical comedy genre after his previous hit Les Chansons d’amour (2007).   It is the kind of film that Honoré does best and which plays well to a sophisticated French audience, one that shamelessly looks back to the halcyon days of the French New Wave whilst tackling, with a modern auteur voice, themes which today’s spectator can readily engage with.  Les Bien-aimés is Honoré’s most ambitious film to date, an emotional epic that crams four decades into a generous runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes, subtly suggesting how world events (notably the AIDS epidemic of 80s) have influenced male-female relationships and attitudes towards free love over that period.

Given the scope of the film, it is perhaps surprising that Honoré manages to retain his trademark intimacy, that knack he has for taking us into the inner worlds of his protagonists so that we may experience something of their personal traumas, with the minimum of dramatic artifice.  That he achieves this so successfully in this film is in no small measure down to the calibre of cast that he assembles, the most distinguished ensemble of acting talent to have graced any of his films to date.    Catherine Deneuve appears to be as at home in Honoré’s idiosyncratic universe as the director’s former collaborators Ludivine Sagnier, Louis Garrel and Chiara Mastroianni - all have that rare gift for projecting their character’s insecurities, particularly a desperate need for a love that can never be met, through an assured persona which completely belies such emotional fragility.  Legendary filmmaker Milos Forman (of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame) and American actor Paul Schneider are unexpected additions, bringing an international flavour to the tasty Honoré bouillabaisse that goes down surprisingly well.

That Christophe Honoré is a devotee of the French New Wave is apparent in all of his films, but perhaps never as visibly as in Les Bien-aimés, which is his most blatant homage to the directors who have influenced him most, notably Jacques Demy and François Truffaut.  Beginning in 1963, when the Nouvelle Vague was at its peak of popularity in France, the film looks like a stylish collision of Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Truffaut’s L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977).  The upbeat tone of this opening instalment, which depicts bright young things revelling in a new era of permissiveness, makes a stark contrast with the place the film ends up at in its melancholic final episodes.  It is not clear whether Honoré is making an ironic point about our tendency to see the past through rose-tinted glasses (1963 was, after all, just one year on from the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that came close to triggering World War Three) or whether he really is acknowledging that the world is now a much darker place than it was forty years ago.  Honoré’s narrative device of comparing the experiences of a mother in the 1960s with her daughter in the present day would suggests the latter, until we realise that the mother’s happy-go-lucky youth may simply be a naïve construct of her daughter’s imagination.  The grass always appears greener when we try to look through the eyes of others.

Coming so soon after Les Chansons d’amour, Les Bien-aimés does at first come across as a director’s cynical attempt to cash in on an earlier success.  However, whilst it does tread similar ground and repeats some of that earlier film’s motifs marginally less successfully (the musical numbers are nowhere near as good), it is nonetheless a substantial piece of cinema in its own right, to be noted for the sensitivity with which the characters are drawn and the skill with which Honoré weaves complex emotional crises into a deceptively simple narrative.   Catherine Deneuve once again works her magic with a heartrending portrayal of a mother who must live not only with her own regrets but also with the knowledge that she cannot shield the person she most loves from life’s cruelties.  Meanwhile, her on-screen and off-screen daughter Chiara Mastroianni proves herself her mother’s equal with a riveting performance that is easily one of her finest to date.  For the sentimentally minded, Les Bien-aimés is an engaging emotional rollercoaster, one that can hardly fail to play havoc with those delicately tuned heartstrings.

© James Travers 2011

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