Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987)

Purely Joyful Movie!

just watch it!

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Finding the first title in Rohmer's loose film series to be the most interesting one out of the group,I got set to watch the final in the series,with the hope that Rohmer would wrap things up in a similar fashion.The plot:Starting a new life for herself, Blanche meets a woman called Lea,whose care-free nature soon leads to them becoming friends.Catching a glimpse of him,Blanche goes to ask a handsome guy called Alexandre out,but is disappointed to learn that he is already going out with an arty women called Adrienne.Feeling down over being the only one that is single,Blanche soon finds the tide to change.View on the film:Bringing the curtain down on the series,writer/director Éric Rohmer & cinematographer Bernard Lutic collide the two major visual motifs of the movies via all the interior scenes being pulled back to their barest, breached white form,and the great outdoors being drizzled with floral colours and a breezy atmosphere. Continuing his theme of the bourgeoisie,the screenplay by Rohmer takes a refreshingly comedic slant,which while never outrageously hilarious does inject the title with a dry wit that gives the criss-crossing romances between Blanche and Lea a charming zest,as they tell each other comedies and proverbs.

I must not be an Eric Rohmer fan. This is the second of his movies I've seen, after A Summer's Tale, which I disliked although I'm a big fan of Melvil Poupaud. Both movies are trite and tedious.Boyfriends & Girlfriends is a boring movie with boring, shallow people talking nonstop about themselves, which, from what I've read, is Rohmer's specialty. When I ask myself, Why would he be interested in people like that? I have no answer. Maybe he identifies with them. Maybe he finds them fascinating.I love movies in which nothing much happens except character development, but there has to be something interesting about the characters. The most interesting thing in this movie is an unnaturally clear, turquoise-colored, antiseptic lake that a couple go windsurfing on. I've never seen a lake like that in my life. These shallow people live in a sterile, artificial city that looks like a brand new shopping mall (and it's a real place, not made up for the movie), so maybe the lake is artificial too, like a gigantic swimming pool on a golf course.Everything about this movie screams emptiness and artificiality, so at least it is consistent. Maybe vacant people in a vacant city symbolize something important to Rohmer and his fans, but they just bore me. I'm very interested in lots of things, but spending almost two hours watching petulant, spoiled, shallow people irritate and bore each other isn't one of them.I'm giving it a star for consistency, which alone is enough to lift it a little way off the bottom of the barrel.

Not the best film of 1987; Au revoir les enfants was better, but one certainly worth your investment of time.Writer/director Eric Rohmer is not giving us the typical French vistas of outdoor cafés and artists, but is showing the lives of materialistic and shallow French yuppies in the French suburbs outside Paris. The Eiffel Tower is only seen in the remote distance.They focus on looks alone in choosing boyfriends.Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet - Chocolat) and Lea (Sophie Renoir) are friends. Not BFF, but just two twenty-somethings that hang and discuss men.Lea has Fabien (Eric Viellard), and Blanche is enchanted with Alexandre (François-Eric Gendron).Blanche gets herself in a situation where she is involved with Lea's boyfriend, while Lea is off sampling others. Although they pretend to be friends, the constant flirting takes it's toll and they end up in bed. But she still won't commit out of fear of hurting her friend.So, what does she do when Lea announces she has broken up with Fabien for good? She realizes that Alexandre is an unattainable dream and goes off to find Fabien. Meanwhile Alexandre and Lea hit it off.The laughs are plenty as the two friends try to get their love lives together without hurting the other.Nothing deep; like watching an episode of Friends, but cute and enjoyable with Chaulet and Renoir providing excellent performances.

I am not a fan of Eric Rohmer. The pace of most of his films is very slow, they are full of dialogue, and often I react to his characters with a distinct desire to slap them in the face and shout "get a life!".However, this one is different, it is a real gem. Yes, the pace is slow, yes the film is loaded with dialogue, but these characters are believable. We see relationships develop, new ones arriving on the scene and old ones being broken up. The drama is the drama of real life, the characters are ordinary (perhaps a bit better looking than ordinary) young people living in a Parisian suburb, there are no extraordinary things happening to them, just ordinary things. While Rohmer's story is realistic, it is still pleasantly realistic. It is just as romantically heart-warming as, say, While You Were Sleeping, but it does not have to force us to suspend our disbelief.One piece of advice many people will fail to appreciate: if you are a non-French speaker, try to see this in a dubbed version, not a subtitled one! The dynamics and meaning of the dialogue in this film is much more important than the original sound, not to mention that subtitles could hardly keep up with this amount of dialogue.