Welcome back to the Athens Film Festival after a bit of a hiatus! Today Athens and I are playing host, we hope, to visitors from the White Elephant Film Blogathon, an annual smorgasbord of movie blog reviews we're honored to be participating in. (I hope that dip will be OK sitting out all day....) More details about the blogathon can be found by following the link to Lucid Screening on the right. If you're visiting as part of the blogathon, welcome, have a look around, and come back often!
The first AFF blogathon post today actually comes from a guest programmer, friend of the festival Tasha, who offers her take on her blogathon-approved selection Les Chansons d'amour. It was Tasha who introduced us to the blogathon in the first place. Thanks, T.!
Les Chansons d’amour is a musical, the bittersweet story of a ménage a trios that ends prematurely.
“The mystery of your weary gaze,
A mystery that keeps you in a haze.
The secret of this daze,
Secrets are my true craze.”
The primary relationship in the film is between Ismael (Louis Garrel) and Julie (Ludivine Sagnier); but Julie, not entirely satisfied with the way things are going, invites Alice (Clotilde Hesme) to join in. There is one rather ambiguous scene with the three of them in bed, and then the film cuts back to Ismael and Julie as a couple. As the viewer is left pondering the rather doubtful future of this threesome, Julie abruptly drops dead, and thus the threesome ends. The rest of the film follows Ismael, singing, moping, drinking, walking the streets despondently, and finally discovering a new love.
At the beginning, Chansons d’amour reminded me a lot of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: the young lovers, Sagnier’s blonde hair and white coat, the push-pull friction of heady, romantic love. But after Sagnier’s blonde hair, cute outfits, and shimmering presence disappeared, I began to lose interest; not in the least because Ismael, as played by Garrel, is mopey without eliciting much sympathy. And the musical numbers, even with their odd and ridiculous French-to-English lyrics, become tiresome after a while. Despite the rain soaked beauty of Paris, Chansons d’amour flows uninspiredly, without the charm or immediacy of Demy or Godard’s musicals, and without enchantment.
“Burn when you sink into my bed of ice,
It melts when you hug me like a vice.”
Thanks, Tasha! Sounds like one Athens and I might skip, although we do love bad translations of French song lyrics!
Stay tuned later today, when Athens and I will be reviewing the 1969 spaghetti bloodbath The Strangers Gundown, though we prefer the original title, Django il bastardo.
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