Love Songs (2007)

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.

Wow. I read all the reviews, and the only conclusion I can come to is that all the other reviewers are gay. I'm not. I actually had to close my eyes during a certain scene. I really have no interest in seeing this sort of thing. This was a boring movie about uninteresting people. I'll go further: not just uninteresting, they inspired a sort of low-level loathing, although the main character eventually earned a high-level loathing. There was no cuteness, no clever dialog, no tension, no interesting characters. Songs? Why? They were just out of place. Blah. Now it COULD have been a much better movie--perhaps exploring different ways relatives and friends reacted to her death, or the relationship between Alice and the male character. Alice was just ignored after the tragedy. Does that make sense? Poor Ludivine, she must have needed the money to take this role.

I've been a fan of Louis Garrel ("The Dreamers") and Ludivine Sagnier ("Swimming Pool") for a few years now, so when I heard they were starring in a romance musical, I was really excited. "Les Chansons d'Amour" aka "Love Songs" met, actually exceeded, my expectations. The film is a gorgeous, sometimes poignant and subtly funny look at love and (straight, bisexual, homosexual) relationships in contemporary Paris. Its adorably improvised musical sequences, the beauty of the music and locations, the chemistry of the ensemble cast (Chiara Mastroianni, who looks a lot like her father, the late Marcello Mastroianni, delivers a captivating performance as Sagnier's sister), all add up to the enchanting final result. This is the third film director Christophe Honoré makes with Louis Garrel (after 'Ma Mère' and 'Dans Paris'), and they announced a sequel for 2011. I will definitely check it, but it will be hard to top "Love Songs", since it ended perfectly in my eyes. Whether the sequel will disappoint or not is another story; for now, just enjoy the real gem that these chansons are... "love me less, but love me a long time". 10/10.

It is, of course, possible that I watched a different film to the previous posters, it is equally possible that the previous posters have never seen a Real musical or, indeed a Real French film. Suffice it to say that were it not for Brigitte Rouan and Chirara Mastroianni this would have been a total disaster. If ever two young people deserved each other those people are Ludo Sagnier and Lou Garrel - and if he would hit on Ludo off-screen and keep away from Valeria I'd be a much happier bunny. Christophe Honore has a penchant for sleaze and chances are he figured that the problem with his Ma Mere was that it needed saccharine music and lyrics to disguise the sleaze (Ma Mere, in case you missed it was the one where Lou Garrel got off with his ma, Isabelle Huppert and masturbated beside her corpse though on reflection I guess music and lyrics couldn't have done that much to save it) so this time around he laces the down-market sex with interchangeable melodies having only a beat rather than a tune and lyrics as banal as those Demy wrote for Les Paraplueis de Cherbourg. On the other hand there are some nice location shots of Paris but even here Honore can't resist having Sagnier check out a movie at the Brady, a cinema where Catherine Breillat films play and where Deep Throat played for a couple of years. Go if you must.

I remember watching Bertolucci's The Dreamers and thinking, "How delightfully French!" Whatever we might think about French hospitality (or lack of it) when we dine in Paris restaurants, France has a cornucopia of national traits that can be a joy and inspiration to experience.The Dreamers was set against the student riots of the late 60s. Defiance. A willingness to fight for culture! Demonstrations outside cinemas to preserve true art! A gourmet attitude of tolerance in matters of sexuality (admittedly eroded slightly by recent governments). A passion for life. Cigarettes. An atheistic realism. The religion of good taste. A disdain for work - to let the higher faculties soar - we believe.Against a similar, if more modern background, Les Chansons d'Amour also takes flight. Lifting us in its arms, we have one of those rarest of creatures: an exceedingly French musical. Love, life, poetry, passion, sensitivity, all magnificently exalted in song – quite a lot of songs actually – for your cross-Channel delectation and savouring.Les Chansons d'Amour starts off fluffily enough – Paris streets, a simple boy-girl relationship. But this is no prudish American musical or its furtive British variant. Before long – in a scene charmingly reminiscent of Singin' in the Rain's couch number - we realise Ismael and his girlfriend Julie are involved in a happy threesome beneath the sheets.But love cannot be superficial! We do not need the extremes of Danish cinema – this is no Dancer in the Dark. But we will have tragedy! generation class struggles! heartfelt emotion! and aesthetically intellectual challenge! If you please. And the young cast shall be terribly good-looking without being too pretty-pretty. (And white - one might add, more cynically.) But if there are unbearable tensions, we shall elevate them into song. Pianos shall tinkle and guitars will strum. Tears sublimated by lovely voices as, "the rain falls without a care." Sexual details tastefully and unashamedly scattered through the lyrics.The whole film reeks of style within a suitably unostentatious budget. When Julie unexpectedly collapses at a rock concert, imaginative cinematography intersperses black and white stills of a matter-of-fact ambulance crew with tunefully segued flashbacks. We try to piece together what has happened. The monochrome medical assistants have a documentary-like reality. At other times, clever uses of colour tone cue the intended attitude we should take. Cold and serious (blue) with old-fashioned parents. Or warm and romantic (reds and browns) to forestall any opposition to a homoerotic flirtation (All shades of sexual preference are treated with the same romantic poetry: focus on the person, not their gender, the film seems to say.) If this were a British or American production, the pace would be, "this is what's about to happen, this is what's happening now, and this is what's just happened." Audiences at feelgood musicals are not known for their attention skills. Les Chansons d'Amour, in sharp contrast, is fast-moving and expects you to keep up. Blink and you will have missed a plot development. Are you awake at the back? Isn't cinema for adults as well? A strength of the script and the songs is that there is never any hint of caricature or parody. When they sing, they mean what they say as much as if they had said it. They do not inhabit the fantasy land, however wonderful, of Gene Kelly dancing in puddles, or Julie Andrews running up hillsides. They can get away with lines like, "Your body like a flow of lava washing over me," and make it sound sexy and romantic.I find the end result is genuinely moving.But how will the film fare outside of its home country? The songs make you want to buy the soundtrack – if you can speak French. It is not the standard art-house fare that lovers of subtitled films make into a cinematic diet. Les Chansons d'Amour is unashamedly commercial. But I just wish there were more 'commercial' films like this.