Modern Love (2008) Reviews

• Love is not like in the movies

  Davido-22008-03-26

  Modern Love is a slightly odd format of a film within a film, which some might find disturbing, or contrived. The sub-film: Modern Love features the ever excellent but sadly underutilized Alexandra Lamy (Marianne) gets off to a bad start with gallery director and Brad Pitt look alike Stéphane Rousseau (Vincent) but everything works out "just like in the movies" in the end. Highlights are Vincent's knight on white charger rescue of Lamy at the altar and the excellent duet sung in sign language - a classic piece of cinema. In the real world things are not so easy as we followed the tangled lives of cute but boyish Bérénice Bejo (Elsa) Stéphane Debac (Jérôme), France's fairytale princess the Duchess of Savoy Clotilde Courau (Marie) who anglophones will probably know from Piaf and Pierre-François Martin-Laval (Eric). Eric is the author of the film within the film but is brutally dumped by Courau before a brief encounter with Bejo. There is a funny sequence at a Party where Bejo meets Debac who is her ideal man (doesn't like football, good looking, sensitive, improbably lives on a boat in the center of Paris). It is obvious to the viewer that we are not in Kansas, Toto but Bejo manages to dig a deep hole. However in the end no-one in the "real world" really ends up happy. All very gallic, in the end one wishes for more of the musical escapism of Lamy and Rousseau.