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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Along Came Love review – l'amour, loss and lingering shame in eventful French relationship movie
The title of Katell Quillévéré's first movie, Un Poison Violent from 2010, was taken from Serge Gainsbourg's song Un poison violent, c'est ça l'amour, and the awful toxicity of love is a theme that has run through her work ever since. It is an underground stream that has become very much an overground stream in this new, heartfelt movie. It's robust and a little unsubtle, without the nuances and indirections that govern her best work, but handsomely produced and resoundingly performed, avowedly autobiographical and inspired by her grandmother. Quillévéré has said that her influences are Maurice Pialat for the tough realism and Douglas Sirk for the melodrama and the sense of buried shame. I wonder if there isn't some David Lean in there for the final scene at the railway station. Madeleine is a young single mother played by Anaïs Demoustier; working as a waitress on the Brittany coast just after the second world war, in a uniform requiring her hair to be tied up in a ridiculous white bow, she has a difficult five-year-old son, Daniel. She meets a shy, sweet, bespectacled young man, François Delambre (a performance as sturdily intelligent as Demoustier's from Vincent Lacoste), who is a postgraduate student in Paris, and from a wealthy local family, self-conscious about a limp caused by childhood polio. They fall in love and marry – poignantly, perhaps unconsciously drawn to each other by the fact that each has a secret. François is gay (in an era when this was a serious criminal offence), but with this new relationship has taken an earnest decision to put it behind him. And Madeleine's child was conceived through a relationship with a German officer during the occupation, for which she was shamed and head-shaved by jeering locals in her now abandoned home town – that notorious, ugly French phenomenon of the liberation in which the menfolk, to distract from their own more serious Nazi collaboration, took it misogynistically out on the women. As the 1950s turn into the 60s, Madeleine runs a bar and François pursues an academic career and they drift in and out of a somewhat underpowered folie à trois with an American GI called Jimmy (Morgan Bailey) – a narrative deadend. They become a bourgeois family with another child, a daughter, but François's self-hating homosexuality resurfaces, that part of him without which he paradoxically would not have found Madeleine, the genuine love of his life. Meanwhile, Daniel is angrily obsessed with his biological father, who probably died on the eastern front. This is a very eventful period film that covers a lot of storytelling ground and is acted with forthright confidence. And yet, despite or because of it being based on reality, I found myself not quite believing in the parts or the whole. But its fervency and its eroticism give the film its currency. Along Came Love is in UK cinemas from 30 May.
Irish Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Along Came Love review: Diverting melodrama just about delivers on early promise of knotty personal drama
Along Came Love Director : Katell Quillévéré Cert : None Starring : Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Hélios Karyo, Morgan Bailey, Josse Capet, Paul Beaurepaire, Margot Ringard Oldra Running Time : 2 hrs 5 mins This diverting French melodrama, spanning decades of postwar French life, begins with a promising meld of fact and fiction. Archival footage shows us the sexual partners of now-repelled (or killed) German soldiers having their heads forcibly shaved before public shaming in the town square. We then meet Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), shot in matching black and white, evading the mob, before the film, now in idealised colour, meets her again as a waitress in liberated Normandy. Her family have ostracised her. She is raising a son who believes his father to have died in the war. He may well have done for all Madeleine knows. It is to director Katell Quillévéré's credit that she does not fret overly on any guilt Madeleine may or may not have about fraternising with the enemy. That was then and this is now. Survival is all. As most anybody would, she focuses on living from difficult day to difficult day. READ MORE Help comes in the form of a middle-class student named François (Vincent Lacoste). They fall in something like love and get married, but it soon becomes clear his sexual interests do not lie entirely – or even largely – with women. Fractious toing and froing takes us through France's uncertain 1950s and up into its turbulent 1960s. [ James Bond franchise owners seek more time to defend control of 007 spy's name Opens in new window ] The director does not connect much with wider politics. Anyone hoping for a social history of the times will be in for disappointment. This is the sort of film in which people happen upon news reports on the Vietnam War merely as way of clarifying which decade we have reached. Along Came Love is, rather, a saga of wavering emotional dynamics. The central encounter with a black GI really doesn't work – not least because his dialogue has that flat, disconnected quality you so often get when characters speak English in a film not otherwise in that language. Neither principal seems certain how much affection their character feels for the other in this necessarily compromised marriage. But the film does eventually find balance and power in later sections that confront the miseries into which different classes of ostracisation have forced both Madeleine and François. Along Came Love (which has a deceptive title) does not torture the emotion or tax the brain, but, well acted and easy on the eye, it just about delivers on its early promise of knotty personal drama. It also has important things to say – implicitly for the most part – about the unjust expectations placed on women in French society. In cinemas from Friday, May 30th
