Lovers (1999)

Lovers is a French romantic film drama first released in 1999, directed by Jean-Marc Barr.  The film stars Élodie Bouchez, Sergej Trifunovic, Mathias Benguigui, Jean-Christophe Bouvet and Irina Decermic.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Jeanne works in a Parisian bookshop when she meets Dragan, a struggling artist of Yugoslav origin.  The two are soon consumed by a passionate love affair, but then Jeanne discovers that Dragan is an illegal immigrant...

For his first film as a director, French-American actor Jean-Marc Bory attempts to merge the French New Wave cinema of the early 1960s with a comparable experimental approach of the 1990s, Dogme 95.  The latter was pioneered by French director Lars Von Trier with his film Les Idiots and attempts a new form of film making, recording on video tape with hand-held cameras and avoiding artificial light, creating the illusion of spontaneity and intimacy with the subject.  Unfortunately, as this film shows, the two approaches, New Wave and Dogme 95, are fundamentally irreconcilable, and what we get is largely an unsatisfactory distillation of the worst of both worlds.  Barr was also handicapped by the fact that, by the time he made this film, Dogme 95 was becoming unfashionable.

That not with standing, strong performances from the two lead actors (Bouchez and Trifunovic) and some attractive location filming in Paris makes this an engaging and poignant film.  The film’s premise is that love, unlike citizenship, has no boundaries and that, in a better world, may be, people should be allowed to stay where love is.  The film’s ending is heart-rending and masterfully down-played.

The least satisfactory aspect of this film is that it tends to get stuck  in a groove on a number of occasions and doesn’t seem to know when to move on.  On other occasions, things move too quickly and the audience is left struggling to keep up.  Also, having the two lovers communicate in broken English is far from satisfactory.  True, it emphasises the impression of the lovers’ feelings towards one another, by imposing the language barrier which both have to struggle to overcome.  However, it compels the audience to endure some God damn awful dialogue which is a real put off, particularly for English-speaking viewers.  Worse, it looks like a sop to the film distributors in an attempt to make the film more marketable in English-speaking countries.

Despite its noticeable imperfections, this is a film that is worth seeing, if only for its unusual handling of a familiar theme.

© James Travers 2000

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