Love Songs
Directed by Christophe Honoré
at the Paris Theatre & IFC Center
Can anyone revive the movie musical? The blatant disasters of Rent, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Across the Universe and Sweeney Todd suggested that filmmakers weren’t thinking hard enough about how the form is supposed to work. Christophe Honoré’s approach in Love Songs is to brave this precarious genre by complicating it. Like last year’s Dan Paris, this is another of Honoré’s fluidity-of-sexuality tales. As the title suggests, Love Songs is deliberately unconcerned with the rules of the genre but dedicated to exploring possibilities of emotional expression and romantic celebration.
The longtime live-in Parisian couple Ismael (Louis Garrel) and Julie (Ludivine Seigner) take in an extra body, Alice (Clotilde Hesme), a co-worker at Ismael’s trendy magazine. When this threesome spins out of control (partly by the rampant force of young adult appetite, partly through tragedy), Ismael finds himself a mournful loner who is unexpectedly pursued by—and attracted to—a new suitor, eager Breton student Erwann (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), the brother of a guy who had dumped Alice.
Rather than clarifying the to and fro of contemporary sexual freedom, Honoré uses songs by Alex Beaupain that lay out each lover’s personal agenda. Ismael, Julie, Erwann and Julie’s sister Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni) all sing philosophy. The songs, written in a declamatory style, articulate desire, frustration, self-loathing and individual ambition. It’s not a traditional collection of musical seductions and dance numbers (in fact, there’s no dancing besides a few frolicking p.d.a.’s). This deconstruction is daring and should be intoxicating; but, instead, what Honoré brings to the movie-musical genre doesn’t improve upon its past bold experiments.
To adequately appreciate Honoré’s project you should know the antecedent he references: That would be Jacques Demy’s 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s still an extraordinary movie, one of the peaks of what’s been called 1960s High Modernism. Like Umbrellas, Love Songs is divided into three sections, “The Departure,” “The Absence” and “The Return.” But instead of imitating Demy’s operatic approach where every line of dialogue was sung, or following Demy’s awesome, color-coordinated visual design that reified romantic fantasy as an everyday condition, Honoré shoots in a quite conventional “realistic” way (which is itself a stylistic trope, but one that contemporary filmgoers mistake for truth).
Anyone who thinks Honoré has made the movie-musical more realistic will overvalue the expository style of Beaupain’s compositions. One song rages against nature, one dwells on death, another features stink-finger lyrics. Even the best of them have a solipsistic, Jacques-Brel-meets-emo sameness. Honoré prefers lo-fi realism to the aesthetic joyousness of Umbrellas. But heads up: Demy’s classic wasn’t merely a musical or a date film; it was an avant-garde proposition that the emotions stirred by movie-musicals were profound. Umbrellas innovated a new hermeneutic, a new paradigm. How odd that Honoré’s attempt to appease contemporary smartness winds up mundane. He’s made the first mumblecore movie-musical; it’s an experiment that calls attention to itself rather than changing a viewer’s life as Demy’s masterpiece did.
Honoré’s interest in Gen-X attitudes feels genuine. He gets outside more than mumblecore does and shows an affection for street life and scenes of family rituals. But he’s also subject to generational narcissism. His constant star, the self-infatuated Louis Garrel, is more of a pet than Jean-Pierre Leaud ever was for the French New Wave (there are references to Leaud’s Bed and Board and The Mother and the Whore—the latter compounded with Close Encounters when Ismael whistles the sci-fi theme in anticipation of a menage a trois). Garrel’s sexy profile and unmuscled body suggests a Cocteau androgyne like the cover illustration of The White Paper, yet he undeniably represents Honoré’s sense of male privilege. (“You have to be bold if you want to hold on to me,” he sings to Erwann.) Ismael’s sexuality inspires the focus of every song—whether Julie’s dissatisfaction, Jeanne’s parkside obsequies or Erwann’s pre-coital pillow talk (which is the high-point of the movie, because Leprince-Ringuet’s vibrato and intense stare work better than the other singing actors).
Love Songs articulates sexual frankness far beyond the recent spate of mainstream movie-musicals. (The flamboyantly gay Hairspray was as radical as a feather boa.) Yet there’s no heterosexual or gay emotion here that was not already implicit in Umbrellas. That was the secret inspiration for Francois Ozon’s musical 8 Women and Ducastel-Martineau’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy: Both were more exuberant movie-musical experiments than Love Songs. Yes, Honoré’s characters sing what can’t be said in spoken language, yet in Demy, something greater—something metaphysical—was glimpsed. This is less. For all his skill and intelligence, Honoré flattens Demy’s grace into perfume-ad chic, thus, falling short of the essence that made movie-musicals once seem miraculous.
Directed by Christophe Honoré
at the Paris Theatre & IFC Center
Can anyone revive the movie musical? The blatant disasters of Rent, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Across the Universe and Sweeney Todd suggested that filmmakers weren’t thinking hard enough about how the form is supposed to work. Christophe Honoré’s approach in Love Songs is to brave this precarious genre by complicating it. Like last year’s Dan Paris, this is another of Honoré’s fluidity-of-sexuality tales. As the title suggests, Love Songs is deliberately unconcerned with the rules of the genre but dedicated to exploring possibilities of emotional expression and romantic celebration.
The longtime live-in Parisian couple Ismael (Louis Garrel) and Julie (Ludivine Seigner) take in an extra body, Alice (Clotilde Hesme), a co-worker at Ismael’s trendy magazine. When this threesome spins out of control (partly by the rampant force of young adult appetite, partly through tragedy), Ismael finds himself a mournful loner who is unexpectedly pursued by—and attracted to—a new suitor, eager Breton student Erwann (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), the brother of a guy who had dumped Alice.
Rather than clarifying the to and fro of contemporary sexual freedom, Honoré uses songs by Alex Beaupain that lay out each lover’s personal agenda. Ismael, Julie, Erwann and Julie’s sister Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni) all sing philosophy. The songs, written in a declamatory style, articulate desire, frustration, self-loathing and individual ambition. It’s not a traditional collection of musical seductions and dance numbers (in fact, there’s no dancing besides a few frolicking p.d.a.’s). This deconstruction is daring and should be intoxicating; but, instead, what Honoré brings to the movie-musical genre doesn’t improve upon its past bold experiments.
To adequately appreciate Honoré’s project you should know the antecedent he references: That would be Jacques Demy’s 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s still an extraordinary movie, one of the peaks of what’s been called 1960s High Modernism. Like Umbrellas, Love Songs is divided into three sections, “The Departure,” “The Absence” and “The Return.” But instead of imitating Demy’s operatic approach where every line of dialogue was sung, or following Demy’s awesome, color-coordinated visual design that reified romantic fantasy as an everyday condition, Honoré shoots in a quite conventional “realistic” way (which is itself a stylistic trope, but one that contemporary filmgoers mistake for truth).
Anyone who thinks Honoré has made the movie-musical more realistic will overvalue the expository style of Beaupain’s compositions. One song rages against nature, one dwells on death, another features stink-finger lyrics. Even the best of them have a solipsistic, Jacques-Brel-meets-emo sameness. Honoré prefers lo-fi realism to the aesthetic joyousness of Umbrellas. But heads up: Demy’s classic wasn’t merely a musical or a date film; it was an avant-garde proposition that the emotions stirred by movie-musicals were profound. Umbrellas innovated a new hermeneutic, a new paradigm. How odd that Honoré’s attempt to appease contemporary smartness winds up mundane. He’s made the first mumblecore movie-musical; it’s an experiment that calls attention to itself rather than changing a viewer’s life as Demy’s masterpiece did.
Honoré’s interest in Gen-X attitudes feels genuine. He gets outside more than mumblecore does and shows an affection for street life and scenes of family rituals. But he’s also subject to generational narcissism. His constant star, the self-infatuated Louis Garrel, is more of a pet than Jean-Pierre Leaud ever was for the French New Wave (there are references to Leaud’s Bed and Board and The Mother and the Whore—the latter compounded with Close Encounters when Ismael whistles the sci-fi theme in anticipation of a menage a trois). Garrel’s sexy profile and unmuscled body suggests a Cocteau androgyne like the cover illustration of The White Paper, yet he undeniably represents Honoré’s sense of male privilege. (“You have to be bold if you want to hold on to me,” he sings to Erwann.) Ismael’s sexuality inspires the focus of every song—whether Julie’s dissatisfaction, Jeanne’s parkside obsequies or Erwann’s pre-coital pillow talk (which is the high-point of the movie, because Leprince-Ringuet’s vibrato and intense stare work better than the other singing actors).
Love Songs articulates sexual frankness far beyond the recent spate of mainstream movie-musicals. (The flamboyantly gay Hairspray was as radical as a feather boa.) Yet there’s no heterosexual or gay emotion here that was not already implicit in Umbrellas. That was the secret inspiration for Francois Ozon’s musical 8 Women and Ducastel-Martineau’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy: Both were more exuberant movie-musical experiments than Love Songs. Yes, Honoré’s characters sing what can’t be said in spoken language, yet in Demy, something greater—something metaphysical—was glimpsed. This is less. For all his skill and intelligence, Honoré flattens Demy’s grace into perfume-ad chic, thus, falling short of the essence that made movie-musicals once seem miraculous.
