"Mireille et Lucien" is a nice Belgian little film in which Philippe Blasband, its writer-director, manages to encapsulate an unexpected romantic encounter, the birth of a mutual love, the formation and the consolidation - after a few hitches - of a couple. No easy feat in no more than 22 minutes and 58 seconds, but Blasband (who, three years later, would direct the amazing "Un honnête commerçant") fares quite well in the given circumstances. Of course there are ellipses and narrative shortcuts but, on the whole, the intended goal has been reached. This is in fact a special love story : nothing to do with Claude Lelouch's cha-ba-da-ba-da "Man and a Woman" or the tear-jerking "Love Story". Told in a slightly quirky tone (the small-time gangsters, the crazy car collision), "Mireille et Lucien" deftly avoids saccharine sentimentality. Likewise, the romance unfurls not in a haze of dream and fantasy but in a realistic everyday environment (the plain streets of Schaerbeek, one of Brussels' working class areas). As a result Mireille and Lucien are real people. They may not make us dream but, by way of compensation, we grow fond of them for being our neighbors. And how couldn't we be fond of them ? Two human beings, battered by life, who try to reconstruct themselves while supporting each other, can only attract sympathy. On the male side, there is Lucien Pointeur, an ordinary man who was condemned for the rape of a minor and has just been released after seven years in prison. On the female side, Mireille (this is not her real name), a young woman whose younger years have been marred because of a degenerative disease. Played to perfection by two wonderfully unaffected actors, Serge Larivière (a short chubby bespectacled man without apparent charm) and Aylin Yay (as good in dreamy restraint as in verbal logorrhea), Mireille and Lucien exist in three dimensions. So, if you are up to a love story that is not the standard romcom, if you like stories oscillating between drama and comedy, if you like real people on the screen... this one is for you.
