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CANNES 2007 Competition / France

Demy’s shadow hangs over Love Songs

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For his first time in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, French director Christophe Honoré this morning presented his ambitious musical Love Songs [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
to an international press, as much intrigued as taken aback by his daring feature.

With clear references to the films of Jacques Demy (1964 Palme d’Or for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), the 36 year-old director-scriptwriter brilliantly overcomes the difficulties of the genre, with songs written by Alex Beaupain perfectly punctuating an intriguing story of turbulent emotions in various forms (love, bisexuality, death, sorrow, rebirth).

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With talented performances from a superb Louis Garrel (who has become Honoré’s Antoine Doinel), a refined Ludivine Sagnier, as well as from Clothilde Hesme and Chiara Mastroianni (another reference to Demy’s films and his muse Catherine Deneuve), the film reveals a working class and multicultural Paris, captured with much veracity through the wanderings of several characters along the city’s streets.

Filmed in a very inventive but discreet manner, Love Songs offers a particularly seductive image through this type of mixture, which does, however, have its highs and lows and whose very bourgeois-bohemian Paris feel (with Rohmeresque-style dialogue from its characters, literary references on all levels, graphic artists in a leftist newspaper, the children of a well-to-do family frequenting the working class areas from the Bastille to the Gare de l’Est) will obviously annoy its detractors.

However, the film’s beautiful performances and the great coherence of this daring cinematic project invites respect, a feeling expressed by the international press following the screening.

Composed of three parts (“The Departure”, “The Absence”, “The Return”), Love Songs follows the sentimental life of the whimsical Ismaël (Garrel), who has been shacked up for eight years with Julie (Sagnier). In crisis, the couple have been trying for several weeks to form a love triangle with Ismaël’s colleague, the cerebral Alice (Hesme, star of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers [+see also:
trailer
interview: Philippe Garrel
film profile
]
), when Julie dies from a heart attack after a concert.

“There are Lots of Reasons to Love You”, “It’s Raining Cats and Dogs on Your Genius”, “Delta Oscar Sierra, Death is Dancing”: the songs of this first part are set in a very Nouvelle Vague and nocturnal Paris. Then tragedy ensues with family pressures and philosophical musings (“not one trace of God in the sky”) before life returns to normal (“What good is sobbing. Crying, I did it before you, there’s no point to it”) with the beginning of a new relationship (special mention goes to Grégoire Leprince- Ringuet in his role as a young homosexual in love).

Produced by Paolo Branco (producer of Honoré’s three previous features) for Alma Films, who is also handling international sales, Les Chansons d’amour received €400,000 in Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC ) advances on receipts.

Bac Films will release the title in French theatres on May 23.

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(Translated from French)

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