Los amores de Anaïs

There's a regrettable, sexist tendency for movies to feature ditzy female characters, who are not just young and pretty, but also young (meaning immature) at heart, and in need of a good strong man to take care of them. 'Anais in Love' is almost one of those films, in that its titular protagonist is indeed a bit juvenile; but she's also strong-willed, proactive, and not looking to be saved on anybody else's terms. Indeed, deviating from the traditional rom-com template, she starts out chasing men then falls for a woman. The problem here is rather the ending, which is underwhelming, bland, and critically not the consequence of the character's own actions. We see Anais careering through various affairs throughout the film, then one of these ends, and with that, so does the film. It feels like there's a missing coda, some concluding section where Anais comes to terms with what she has learnt from her experiences or fails to do so. Instead, the film just ends, oddly inconclusively.

This title popped up in my Amazon Prime and looked like something light and fun. My experience of recent French films has been mixed, with many being overly erotic and taking themselves a bit seriously. This film though was a delight from start to finish. The main character Anais, young and beautiful, absent-minded and clumsy and quintessentially French, dashes around everywhere in a series of gorgeous summer frocks. She is having a relationship with a handsome man her own age but it's already over practically within the first scene. In the very next scene Anais is enrapturing a married man twice her age, although he goes on to leave her frustrated. With a summer job at a symposium (she is a student) in the lavish French countryside, she encounters Emilie, a similarly beautiful 50-something married academic, and quite unexpectedly falls passionately in love with this older woman. I won't spoil it from there, but suffice to say I laughed and cried. I had to rewind and watch the last 15 minutes again as it was so beautifully done. I lamented "overly erotic" films earlier in this review and this title was rated 18+ by Prime but it is perfectly pitched, containing one of the most sensual, tasteful and romantic love scenes I think I've ever watched, without being over the top. I'll be buying the DVD of this film as I can imagine wanting to watch it over a bottle of French red many times in the future. This film is everything anyone would ever want from a modern French romance, perhaps because the story is everything anyone would ever want from love itself.

Sometimes, rarely, you come across a film that is so disappointing that you are sort of reeling from it the morning after, thinking you'd better done the accounting, washed your hair, or stared at a patch on your carpet.

This is one of those blessedly rare films.

This film lives or dies by the amount of sympathy you can summon for the scatterbrained, narcissistic, hyperactive protagonist. If you attracted by her, or aspire to be like her, you may make it to the end.

For the rest of us, what remains is a sort of 21st century French comedy cliche' bingo: manic pixie girl? Check! A touch of Amelie Poulain? Check! Slightly nauseating sex scene with an extremely older guy? Check! Mother who has cancer, because that's what older women do right? Check! A touch of sapphic love? Check!

I gave up about two thirds in. I don't know how it ends but I can sort of figure it out. I am also slightly outraged this has been compared with the much superior "The worst person in the world", which features a similar protagonist and similar themes, but with so much more originality and insight.

This particular movie is a testament of the moral climate of our times. The central character is a young woman living in the affluent West whose actions are dictated by her purely subjective criteria of her own emotional and carnal truth. She is not subject to any outside objective moral code( the obligation to pay the rent to her landlady, the duty to inform intelligibly the foreigners to whom she sublets her appartment about the dangers of certain electrical devices, the fact that her older lover has already a wife, the need to honor her obligations towards her academic supervisor) and everything and everyone has to succumb to her personal quest for self-realization and romantic/sexual interest.

She is very charming and lovable( the female lead is ideal for the role) but hardly a paragon of domestic virtue or a model of a responsible citizen.

She is the embodiment of the western ideal of hedonistic self-actualisation which makes Islamists and Russian ideologues and Chinese Communist Party officials so furious in its insistence on personal choice over tradition and the demands of the collectivity.

Of course this bacchanalian celebration of "anything goes" stumbles over the disapproval of venerable if declining institutions of the West itself such as the Roman Catholic Church. I quote from paragraph 61 of the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium issued by Pope Francis: "...We recognize how in a culture where each person wants to be bearer of his or her own subjective truth it becomes difficult for citizens to devise a common plan which transcends individual gain and personal ambitions." There is a saying attributed to de Gaulle: "How can you govern a country that has 245 kinds of cheese?" The French officials of today must come to terms with the reality of inspiring collective action and prosaic restraint to millions of self-willed hedonists if the behaviour depicted in the movie is representative of a large enough segment of modern French society.

Young and beautiful and irresponsible as an Olympian goddess Anais lives her life as she pleases giving to the pleasure principle precedence over the reality principle if one is to use Freudian terminology. Is such an attitude towards life feasible and sustainable in a long-term or collective level? Is it mature from a psychological standpoint? Is it sinful from a religious point of view? Can significant segments of the affluent West live in such a manner overcoming the realm of necessity and achieving the realm of freedom?

It is a seemingly light movie but if engaged in a deeper manner it raises fundamental questions.

Anais Demoustier and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi give stellar performances and their romance will be included in the anthology of cinematic lesbian romances. Comic interludes as well as certain scenes with sombre undertones interspersed with the frantic activity of Paris and the beauty of the French countryside make for a very appealing result which reinforces the image of the West in general and France in particular as a permissive heaven-on-earth or a society where social bonds are so loose that its collapse is imminent-depending on your point of view.

Either way a must-see if one wants to feel the modern western zeitgeist.

Another one of those-almost uniquely French-light but sensitive, flippant but deep, seemingly inconsequential but thought-provoking, inviting shedding after viewing but stubbornly lingering in one's memory; beautifully acted, beautifully filmed; this offering (discovered on a UK free film channel) comes from a long line of similar French films going right back to Eric Rohmer's works and earlier.

Inevitably, one has to have sex scenes, but thankfully the French still know how to portray tasteful eroticism, an art that the American cinema rarely found. My one adverse criticism would be over the director's sometimes edgy camera work (hand held?) that I found a bit fatiguing.

Are the Japanese the only other world cinema consistently putting out these oeuvres?