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.
