The Names of Love: movie review
French comedy 'The Names of Love' mixes gravitas and friskiness to the point of becoming annoyingly superficial.
Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin are shown in a scene for the film 'The Names of Love.'
Music Box Films
French comedies, at least the ones that get exported, tend to be talky and a bit risqu茅. Clothes will be taken off, especially those belonging to nubile young women.
All of this accurately describes 鈥�The Names of Love,鈥� but then it has to go and spoil things by also trying 鈥� not very hard 鈥� to be socially conscious. I鈥檓 not saying that seriousness and nudity cannot coexist, even in France, but the mix of gravitas and friskiness here is annoyingly superficial. The film鈥檚 tone is 鈥渃rowd-pleasing,鈥� but which crowd exactly is being pleased?
Baya Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier) is a neohippie who has taken that old mantra 鈥淢ake love, not war鈥� to a whole new level. A radical liberal, she makes it her mission in life to convert right-wing men by sleeping with them 鈥� the theory being that, in the throes of passion, one is most susceptible to suggestion. This is a funny idea, and I鈥檓 surprised director Michel Leclerc, who co-wrote the film with Baya Kasmi, didn鈥檛 fully dramatize an actual bedroom conversion. But it鈥檚 typical of the film鈥檚 scattershot approach that these tidbits are sprinkled about without any follow-up. Too much of 鈥淭he Names of Love鈥� is a joke book posing as a movie.
The film鈥檚 mite of gravitas is that Baya, who is half Algerian, has a tragic family history bound up in the French-Algerian war, and the man she falls in love with 鈥� a liberal 鈥� has a similar history with the Holocaust. Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin) is a veterinarian scientist who, while dapper, is most comfortable performing necropsies on geese. As the film keeps reminding us, he鈥檚 never met a free spirit like Baya. We have, though. Past history aside, she鈥檚 the generic gamine of frisky French comedies. I guess Arthur never gets out to the movies much.
Leclerc works in a lot of early Woody Allen-ish stylistic devices, such as having the adult characters narrate childhood flashbacks, and a few of the sequences are clever. (Arthur鈥檚 father, even as a young man, is portrayed as an old man, because Arthur can鈥檛 conceive of his father as ever being young.) There are also a few moments, such as the scene where a teenage Arthur tries to seduce a girl by bringing up his family鈥檚 Holocaust past, that are daringly funny but, as usual, go nowhere.
As the Algeria-Auschwitz stuff continued to intrude, I became more and more uncomfortable. Instead of using these elements for black comedy, Leclerc throws them into the film as a diversion from its essential silliness. In a way, he鈥檚 doing the same thing young Arthur is: He鈥檚 trying to seduce us with seriousness.
Forestier won the 2011 C茅sar 鈥� the French Oscar 鈥� for best actress, and the film itself also won the C茅sar for best original screenplay. I鈥檓 sure that all the riffs about anti-Arab prejudice and anti-Semitism had something to do with those awards, but riffs is all they are. And Forestier, who is the new 鈥淚t鈥� girl in French cinema, is all too self-consciously pleased with her prancing. Gamblin, by contrast, spends most of his screen time looking flummoxed 鈥� as I suppose he should. He鈥檚 not alone. Grade: C+ (Rated R.)