THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Since Catherine de Rambouillet draws the map of Tendre, Madame de Sévigné writes letters, Madame de Lafayette, Choderlos de Laclos and Denis Diderot weave novels, Marivaux and Musset make theater, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Doillon cinema, France appears as a country where interest in the feeling of love and the art of seduction leads to heights of sentimental casuistry, passionate strategy and moral philosophy.
We could be tired, thinking we know everything about love’s twists and turns, knowing by heart the tirades of conquest, the backfires of avoidance, the false arguments of betrayal; here is a business which always works, in front of the pangs of which one is held, with each new departure, fresh as a roach. Love, similar in this to football, is a constant battle, a burning suspense, the end of which is never written.
Fight against yourself
For more than twenty years, the Marseillais Emmanuel Mouret has followed in the footsteps of this fine tradition. Eleven feature films came out of it, not equal in interest, but always seeking to touch the elegance and the finesse of a national spirit that an ordinary walk, even short, in the streets of our country would make believe that it does not exist any more than butter on a branch. French paradox. We must therefore believe that the spirit resides in the works, and in particular in Chronicle of a temporary liaison, his latest feature film, which quintessentially his subject here. A man, a woman. Either the ba-ba of the heart-catcher. His name is Simon (Vincent Macaigne), her name is Charlotte (Sandrine Kiberlain). Paris. Night bar. Unexpected meeting. All signals, from rhetoric to epidermis, to green.
The score is classic, and we will not say the good that we think of the instruments that play it, between the emotional embarrassment of Macaigne and the brutal naivety of Kiberlain. Their characters therefore resemble what we have become accustomed to recognizing them, to loving them. So he’s married, hesitant, unsure of himself, not ready to dive in but so happy that it’s happening to him. She is a single mother, in the depths of an emotional life that she finds herself ready to fulfill, for an evening or more, without asking to think about it. The contract that is tied makes sense: we will see each other when it suits us, we will not expect anything, we will not claim anything, we will take the pleasure where it is, seeing it coming.
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