A film by Emmanuel Mouret
With: Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, India Hair, Damien Bonnard, Grégoire Ludig, Vincent Macaigne, Éric Caravaca
Joan, no longer in love, leaves her partner Victor, the father of her daughter. Joan is convinced her decision is morally justified, but it comes back to bite her when Victor subsequently disappears, leaving her overwhelmed with guilt. Her best friend Alice, for her part, is an advocate for marriages of convenience, relationships devoid of love but built upon affection, which she finds more bearable than passionate love. But Joan’s friend Rebecca sees love as an adventure, and is involved in a secret relationship with Alice’s partner. These are three close women who are light years apart in their attitudes and moral beliefs. Three women who try to defend their ideas and assert their choices.
Our rate: **(*)
Emmanuel Mouret delivers not one, but several of his secret tales. In classical music, we could easily speak of variations. In his highly recognizable style, imbued with frivolity, banter and the psychological conversations of characters with pronounced emotions, he pursues a work that he himself has always placed on the side of those of his comparses who have seized on the subject of love in cinema (as others have in literature or music), from Rohmer to Truffaut, Lubitsch to Allen. One good word follows another, encounters multiply and chance, fate or providence generously invites itself to spice up the existence of the main characters, in this case three friends chosen for their contrast. More to the point, as Camille Cottin tells us at the press conference, the film could have been called An Honest Woman. Here, Mouret takes malicious pleasure in confronting three different women, united by a bond of friendship which, it is assumed, will be unbreakable, despite their contrasting temperaments, deep-seated convictions and personal trajectories. With a mixture of subtlety, fun and frivolity – which is the charm of his cinema – he questions the relationship between sincerity and honesty towards others, but also towards oneself. He also questions scruples, the permanence of the amorous state, the search for or, on the contrary, the flight from passion and its torments. He imagines several possible consequences to this relationship, from the most tragic (the ultimate drama, a broken destiny) to the lightest (the resurgence of a seemingly extinguished love). By multiplying his proposals in this way, Mouret sometimes gains in dynamism, even in overall joviality (despite the omnipresence of the tragic part, and even its latent inexorability), with a few particularly well-crafted dialogues or situational twists that leave their mark. But it also loses intensity, abandoning along the way, or reducing a little too much, the first stones laid, obvious material for identification, which will cease to act as soon as a new plot comes to close the first. Less is often more, one might be tempted to say, even if sometimes too much is never enough, an adage that might explain the omnipresence of classical music throughout Emmanuel Mouret‘s work, but here even more than usual, in permanent superimposition. These minor shortcomings offset the rather obvious success of another of the director’s intentions, namely to draw on the (presumed) very nature of the actresses, to offer a permanent contrast, and thus eschew dogmatism. If there is such a thing as moral truth, it can only be found in the subjectivity of a person, their way of being, their relationship with others, and their own way of apprehending that same truth. When questioned on the subject, Emmanuel Mouret admits that he didn’t cast India Hair, Camille Cottin and Sara Forestier with no ulterior motive as to the image they might project of themselves, and therefore their supposed nature, when the latter more or less recognized themselves in their parts (India Hair felt a deep part of herself pierced, Sara Forestier, on the other hand, felt that she was composing a character at odds with her own convictions – about betraying her best friend without too many apparent scruples, Camille Cottin revealing very little of herself).