‘Three Friends’ Review: It Doesn’t Get More French Than This Well-Directed if Clichéd Tale of Love, Marriage and Adultery
To say that French director Emmanuel Mouret has had one thing on his mind since he started making features two decades ago would probably be an understatement. If you take the English-language titles alone of his prolific oeuvre — 11 features, including the latest — you get a fairly good idea of the subject dearest to him: Shall We Kiss, Please, Please Me, The Art of Love, Lovers, Caprice, Love Affairs, Diary of a Fleeting Affair…
The question, perhaps, is whether anything but love and sex actually interests Mouret. After making a few slapstick-style comedies early on, the director has decided to focus almost exclusively on people falling in and out of affairs and relationships. And if his first few films were inspired by both Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, his work since then draws heavily from the worlds of both Eric Rohmer and middle-period Woody Allen — up to using the Woodster’s trademark Windsor typeface in his opening credits.
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Love and sex are certainly on everyone’s mind in Three Friends (Trois amies), which follows a trio of highly educated, fairly well-off female intellectuals going through major relationship crises at the same time, to the point that their stories wind up intertwining. Handsomely directed and tactfully performed, it shows Mouret reaching a peak style he’s been perfecting from film to film, or from one onscreen tryst to the next.
But it also feels like a caricature of what many imagine French romantic life to be like: When people aren’t cheating on their significant others, they’re spending a lot of time talking about it. Or else they’re doing both. And whereas Mouret’s early work offered up a fair dose of visual comedy, his new feature is so verbose that it becomes exhausting.
One welcome addition in Three Friends is the character of Victor (Vincent Macaigne), who narrates the story from beyond the grave. At the start of the film, Victor’s long-term relationship with Joan (India Hair), a fellow teacher in a high school in Lyon, is suddenly in jeopardy when Joan realizes she’s fallen out of love with him. Desperate and utterly depressed, Victor dies soon after in a car accident, leaving Joan on her own.
The storyline following her long period of guilt and mourning, then her gradual awakening to the possibility of a new romance — or several new romances — is the most moving and credible of the three plots in Mouret’s drama. It’s too bad he didn’t focus more on Joan the entire time, instead of overindulging in clichés when delving into the stories of her best friends, Alice (Camile Cottin) and Rebecca (Sara Forestier).
The former also teaches in the same school and has been in a long, stable partnership with éric (Grégoire Ludig), a man she claims loves her more than she loves him. “Synchronized love is very rare,” she tells her besties, justifying why it’s better to find someone that you’re content with on a daily basis than jumping into a torrid romance filled with drama. Little does she know that éric has been having an affair with Rebecca, a museum guide and aspiring artist filled with the passion Alice seems to lack.
Just describing these stories can provoke some major eye-rolling, and although Mouret doesn’t always take them where you expect him to, the endless discussions on love — the allure of it, the power of it, the dangers of it — can quickly grow tiresome. If there were a drinking game where you had to do a shot every time a character used the word amour in Three Friends, you’d wind up being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.
This doesn’t mean the film lacks charm, and Mouret has a way with actors that shouldn’t be dismissed. Forestier gives one of her best performances in a while as a woman desperately looking for happiness with the wrong guy. Macaigne, who steps in and out of the story as Victor’s melancholic ghost, is more subdued than usual, drumming up some emotion as he watches Joan recovering from his death.
The cast is rounded out by Damien Bonnard, playing a teacher and respected author who not only replaces Victor, but way-too coincidentally moves in next door to Joan. And finally there’s Eric Caravaca, who portrays a famous painter whose phone number Alice sees in one of her dreams, eventually calling him up and starting an affair of her own.
Teachers, artists, writers, painters — and also a musician that Joan meets toward the end of film — are Mouret’s entire universe here, and it feels so hermetically sealed off that it becomes a cliché as well. Like Woody Allen with his Upper East (or West) Side, the director limits himself to a very specific, very white intellectual milieu in Lyon, which is a city that’s grown increasingly diverse over the years, especially in its surrounding suburbs.
At this point in his career, Mouret is less interested in exploring that real world, whether in Lyon or elsewhere, than in telling the same story over and over with slight variations. One can see the attraction in doing that — and in terms of French audiences, Mouret’s last few films have performed better than the rest — but perhaps it’s time for the director to get out of his comfort zone and fall in love with something else.
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