THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Lisa (Stacy Martin) and Simon (Pierre Niney) love each other: she works in the hotel industry, while Simon deals drugs in the beautiful neighborhoods. Their life is turned upside down the day one of their clients overdoses in their presence – instead of calling the police, Simon disappears, leaving Lisa behind. It was only at the edge of the Indian Ocean, years later, that they would find themselves, by chance, still in love. But Lisa is now married to Léo (Benoît Magimel), a wealthy businessman older than herself, while Simon is employed in the hotel where the couple is staying.
Photo novel twists
Nicole Garcia encloses a classic love triangle inside a classy film noir form, way Death insurance (1944), by Billy Wilder. It is, at least, the air that is given Lovers, which, under the pretext of frozen classicism, develops a world of pure surfaces, eludes depth and advances with improbabilities and twists of a photo novel.
The slightest situation thus gives the impression of being observed from miles away: as proof, the embarrassed and expeditious manner in which the director films the confrontations between two social classes, interrupts a scene or a dialogue as if for fear of having to watch it until ‘at the end.
By dint of avoidance, the film misses its subject, that is to say the fascinating dilemma between social comfort and absolute love, and believes to paint the lucid and implacable portrait of a globalized economic elite, but ends up making its own glossy and aboveground aesthetic.
French film by Nicole Garcia. With Stacy Martin, Pierre Niney, Benoît Magimel (1 h 42).