Bizarre Louvre Triangle

Christophe Honor's menage-a-trois musical hits all the right notes.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jun 18, 2008

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THE AMOUR, THE MERRIER: Alice (Clotilde Hesme), center, gets cozy with her co-worker (Louis Garrel) and his girlfriend (Ludivine Sagnier). (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The characters in Christophe Honoré's Love Songs live life at such an animated pitch that you almost don't notice when they begin to sing. They don't break into song so much as slide into it, as if its steady, rhythmic pulse, the push and pull of melody and counter-melody, were always present under the hubbub of their lives, just waiting for them to listen closely enough to hear it.

Nearing their 30th birthdays, Ismaël (Louis Garrel) and Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) are a blur of constant motion, unable or unwilling to slow down long enough to take stock of their lives. They live together, and have for some time, but they can't seem to agree on the status of their relationship: Are they boyfriend and girlfriend, fiancés, or already a de facto married couple? Do they even love each other, and what does that mean?

Complicating, or perhaps clarifying matters, Ismaël and Julie are involved in an ongoing threesome (what she calls "une histoire à trois") with Ismaël's co-worker Alice (Clotilde Hesme), who at various times seems to be gay, bisexual and/or celibate. Nothing is simple in these characters' lives, and the romantic ties that bind them only twist into greater tangles as their situations become more complicated.

Alex Beaupain's songs, a slick hybrid of rock and pop, predate the script, which only adds to the disconnection. But both score and script have their roots in the story of a mutual friend of Beaupain and Honoré's, who, in Honoré's words, "disappeared," and the period of mourning and adjustment that followed. Without giving away a completely unforeshadowed twist of plot, suffice it to say that the already-complicated threesome splinters, and those who remain find themselves drifting into unknown territory.

Beaupain's songs aren't the usual verse-chorus-verse stuff, and some of them would sound overwrought even were they placed in a less naturalistic context. A line like, "Keep your saliva as an antidote/ Let it trickle like venom down my throat" sounds no better in French than it reads in English. But there's a marvelous scene early on where Ismaël and Julie quarrel in song and Alice plays the intermediary, urging them to let her be "the bridge between you," grabbing at their hands as they try to walk away from each other. In the course of a few minutes, Ismaël and Julie go from hurling obscenities at each other to almost kissing and making up.

Honoré stages most of the songs in the streets of Paris, but this is Paris as we've rarely seen it before in movies: as a place where people live and work. When Ismaël ascends from the Métro station in front of the magnificent façade of Gare de l'Est, the camera stays on him as he begins to talk (or rather sing) on his cell phone. The celebrated tourist destination is just part of his landscape, present but unremarked-upon. There might be a subtle critique implicit in the shot, pointing out that Ismaël's immersion in his own problems blinds him to the world around him. But it also captures, without making a big deal of it, a central fact of city life, the way that, over time, the out-of-the-ordinary becomes the accepted.

That process dovetails with the movie's approach to sexuality, which it regards as not just fluid but essentially unbounded. Alice, who has proclaimed herself interested only in women, takes up suddenly with a comely Breton she meets at a night club, and her new beau's brother, Erwann (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), develops a fierce crush on Ismaël, waiting like an eager puppy outside the newspaper where he works. Honoré's world isn't a pansexual utopia, but one where the characters define themselves rather than seeking to match prefabricated definitions. Ismaël is unnerved and then put off by Erwann's advances, but when he relents, there's no sense that he's crossed a line, merely that he's changed his mind. It doesn't hurt that the cast of Love Songs is so uniformly gorgeous that even a Kinsey zero is likely to feel a same-sex tug. The lyrics may be unfamiliar, but the tune is irresistible.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Love Songs | Written and directed by Christophe Honoré | An IFC Films release

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