3 coeurs (2014)
Directed by Benoît Jacquot

Film Review

With 3 coeurs, French film auteur Benoît Jacquot departs from his habitual trenchantly realist style of drama and embraces a form of richly contrived melodrama that cannot help looking like a Truffaut-esque homage to Douglas Sirk.  Like Truffaut, Jacquot has great fun combining genres and the result has more than a hint of Hitchcockian mischief about it, with the far-fetched plot sustained by an underhand partnership between suspense and coincidence.  With its intense portrayal of an affair of the heart (three hearts to be precise) that goes badly wrong, 3 coeurs could easily be mistaken for one of François Truffaut's darker films, although its sharp mockery of the codes of bourgeois respectability owes more to Claude Chabrol.  It's a cinephile's potpourri, but a strangely enjoyable one.   

In virtually all of his films to date, Jacquot has had as his central protagonist a woman, usually a fiercely independent woman in search of some kind of release from her present constraining reality.  3 coeurs breaks this trend as the main character is an ordinary middle-aged man (a tax specialist) who is in need not of freedom but the comforting confinement of married life.  It is almost the exact mirror image of the kind of film we associate with Jacquot and yet the author's distinctive voice is still readily recognisable, as much in the sublime elegance of the mise-en-scène as in the astute and humane writing.  With 3 coeurs, Jacquot appropriates a genre that has gone out of fashion and gives it a new lease of life.  It is arguably his most accessible and compelling film to date.

Benoît Jacquot is particularly adept in his casting of female roles and here he excels himself, availing himself of the talents of not one but three consummate divas of French cinema.  Charlotte Gainsbourg and Chiara Mastroianni are polar opposites, both in their personality and in their style of acting, and this is what makes their casting as two unlikely sisters in Jacquot's film so appealing and so fascinating.  Making the perfect complement to Gainsbourg's impulsive and vital Sylvie is Mastroianni's more introspective, more emotionally fragile Sophie.  They are two very different personalities and yet they seem to be two sides of the same coin, two halves of that elusive femme idéale.  Mastroianni's real-life mother Catherine Deneuve is an obvious and yet also inspired casting choice for the part of the sisters' mother - inspired because her portrayal subtly elicits the opposing character traits of the two sisters, the darkness of one set aside the lightness of the other.

Cast in the lead male role is an admirable Benoît Poelvoorde, once an enormously popular comic performer, now a highly regarded dramatic film actor.  Poelvoorde's flair for playing complex and ambiguous characters has already been revealed to us in such films as Entre ses mains (2005), L'Autre Dumas (2010) and Une place sur la Terre (2013), but the actor has rarely been given the chance to prove himelf as a down-to-earth romantic lead.  3 coeurs allows Poelvoorde to do just that and he impresses not just with the intensity of his performance but also with the sensitivity and authenticity he brings to it.  There are scenes in this film that are astonishing in their emotional impact and Poelvoorde touches the heart in a way he has never done before.

With its slick production values and insanely contrived narrative, 3 coeurs risks being written off an over-polished, far-fetched melodrama of the kind that would seem to be more at home in Hollywood than in a French film d'auteur.  Jacquot certainly overplays the suspense card just a little as he attempts to steer the main character away from the ironic truth that will doubtless send him over the edge, and the film doesn't quite live up to the promise of its opening scenes, a dreamlike nocturnal saunter through the streets of Valence that is infused with a heady romanticism.  Whilst the film may not resonate with the truth and intensity we have come to expect of Jacquot it is nonetheless a satisfying incursion into mainstream territory which succeeds mainly on the strength of its lead performances from a trio of actors who have rarely been as impressive.  Cruel and tender in equal measure, 3 coeurs is a sentimental thriller that is hard to resist.

Film Synopsis

Late one evening, Marc, a tax inspector, finds himself stranded in a provincial town after missing the last train back to Paris.  Whilst looking for somewhere to spend the night he runs into an attractive woman named Sylvie.  They are strongly drawn to one another and end up walking around the town together until the early hours of the morning.  Just before getting on the first train out of town, Marc fixes up a meeting with Sylvie in Paris in a few days' time.  Even though she knows nothing about Marc, Sylvie cannot help keeping the appointment, but to her surprise Marc is not there.  A mild heart attack has prevented Marc from reaching the rendezvous, but when he looks for Sylvie he finds another woman, Sophie and instantly falls in love with her.  What he doesn't know is that Sophie is Sylvie's sister and that the woman he had been looking for has left for America.  Marc decides to marry Sophie and settle in the provincial town where he first met her sister...