Les Chansons d’amour (2007) - film review

Ismaël and Julie are a young couple living in Paris.  To spice up their ailing love life, they invite another young woman, Alice, to share their bed.  The arrangement works out well, until, one day, Julie suddenly dies.  Devastated by this loss, Ismaël and Alice separate – the former mopes around Paris whilst being taunted by Julie’s older sister, the latter starts a new affair with another man.   As he struggles to come to terms with Julie’s death, Ismaël finds himself drawn into a gay relationship with an uninhibited teenager...

Not for the first time, director Christophe Honoré challenges our assumptions and expectations with a film that is breathtakingly original in both its subject and its format.   Les Chansons d’amour is a stirring portrayal of love lost and found in the most romantic city on Earth, yet filmed in a low-key way that suggests a profound sense of melancholia and angst.  The biting realism conveyed by the performances and cinematography is undercut by the artifice of the actors breaking into song at crucial moments in the drama – a bizarre yet brilliant fusion of drama and musical which is rarely achieved as effectively outside the great television plays of Dennis Potter.

Honoré brazenly acknowledges the influence of the French New Wave of the late ’50s, early ’60s with various motifs borrowed from the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache, Jacques Demy and François Truffaut.  Lead actor Louis Garrel even evokes something of the persona of Jean-Pierre Léaud – a charismatic young lover with an anarchic edge to his florid Left Bank romanticism.  Yet this is a much darker film than anything that came out of the stable of the Nouvelle Vague, partly because it deals with the near-taboo subjects of premature death and adolescent homosexuality.

Despite its serious subject matter, Les Chansons d’amour is a much lighter and more accessible film than much of Christophe Honoré’s output to date, although it is still just as truthful and uncompromising in its depiction of human experience.  The gay love affair is particularly well handled, and beautifully portrayed by Louis Garrel and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet with sensitivity, ambiguity and restraint, avoiding the tired clichés, prejudices and explicit excess that we find elsewhere today.  As ever, Honoré is well-served by his immensely talented cast of actors, (with a particularly memorable turn from the magnificent Ludivine Sagnier) – they succeed in making this one of the most engaging and heartfelt of French romantic dramas in recent years, a soulful poem to the eternal mysteries of love and desire.

© James Travers 2008

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