Boyfriends and Girlfriends

" I want to be loved for who I'm, not who I pretend to be " .

When we pick up an Eric Rhomer's film, we are pretty sure how it is gonna be in terms of narration. Having said that, this one depicts the relationship crisis, love and how feelings keeps changing over the time through the four leads who gave very convincing and natural performances. It is slow but grows on you towards the end and gonna put a smile on your face. I liked Blanche's character, which is relatable to introverts and the rest who can't express their inner feelings to a person whom they admire/love as we just get stuck/freeze while we try to strike a conversation with the person we adore and does some random stuff is definitely crazy yet devastating feeling at the same moment. Here the leads have their own take on relations , as they come in and get out of it due to ambiguity but eventually they get what they yearned. Conversations between Blanche and Fabien has more impact than the rest of the movie. A good flick, liked it !!!

This is an entertaining Rohmer movie, with some good ideas and interesting dialogue. However I couldn't believe how bad the actress in the lead role was. It even beats Arielle Dombasle's laughable performance in "Pauline à la plage". In "L'ami de mon amie", it's as if Emmanuelle Chaulet herself is clueless about the character, throughout the movie. Her name in the movie is Blanche, as in "oie blanche" in French, which means a girl or young woman with a prudish upbringing who is candid and a bit foolish.

Unfortunately, in all her scenes Emmanuelle Chaulet is fidgetting, wincing, twiddling her hair or shaking her head any moment, and for no reason. She has no sense of timing or delivery, her body language is either inappropriate, or over the top. In one scene at the café, she can't even utter one, simple line such as "les affaires cult...culturelles" (her job department), without stuttering. Then she giggles like a schoolgirl, when she's supposed to be a serious, grown civil servant. She can't even kiss a (good-looking) partner: her intimate scene in the woods with Éric Viellard is cringe worthy. Utter amateurism. I don't know what went through Rohmer's head, maybe he was having a laugh, maybe he didn't have a choice. Anyway it's no wonder why her career as an actress failed to take off after that. She didn't even have the appeal of prior Rohmer heroines such as those played by Haydée Politoff, Françoise Fabian or Amanda Langlet, for instance. By contrast with her, Sophie Renoir (Léa), Eric Viellard (Fabien) and F-E Gendron (Alexandre) raise the level by giving a much more watchable and relaxed performance.

I like Rohmer's playing with color symmetry and permutation in the actors' outfits, like the blue top/white skirt matching Léa's white top/blue skirt at the evening party, to emphasise the contrasting traits and moods of the characters. The conclusion, a sensible outcome, is satisfying both for the characters and the viewer.

The French film L'ami de mon amie (1987) was written and directed by Éric Rohmer. It was shown with two English titles: Boyfriends and Girlfriends and My Girlfriend's Boyfriend.

The film has five protagonists: Emmanuelle Chaulet as Blanche, Anne-Laure Meury as Adrienne, Eric Viellard as Fabien, François-Eric Gendron as Alexandre, and Sophie Renoir as Lea. (Yes--she's related to the painter and all of the cinematic Renoir family.)

Blanche has moved to a new apartment in Cergy-Pontoise, a trendy new town near Paris. It's there that she meets Lea, who introduces her to Alexandre. Blanche is attracted to Alexandre, but he already has a girlfriend--Adrienne.

It takes a while for the friends to sort themselves out. While the sorting is taking place, they talk and talk--Rohmer's speciality.

And, of course, Rohmer had an eye for attractive actors. All of the women are beautiful, both of the men are handsome, and everyone desires someone else's lover.

This movie is the final installment of in Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series. The film has a solid IMDB rating of 7.5. I enjoyed it, and rated it 8.

P. S. In 1988, Sophie Renoir was nominated for the César Award for Most Promising Actress for her part in this movie.

Eric Rohmer was more than one of the directors who formed the French New Wave. He also wrote a lot of surveys and articles about cinema, especially about his favorite director, F.W. Murnau, out who he wrote his dissertation. His first article that got published in the year 1948 was titled (directly translated:) "Film, art of space." In the year 1962 Eric Rohmer published his academic survey called: "The construction of space in Murnau's Faust." While reading about his surveys and articles, it's no surprise that space in Rohmer's films seems to be as important as the plot.

Eric Rohmer's career started with problems, and it wasn't going forward. But when he got off the ground, he proceeded more purposefully than anyone. When the new wave era ended in 1964, the directors of it started eventually finding their own path. Eric Rohmer started his series of six film, The Moral Tales and continued with Comedies & Proverbs in the 1980's. L'ami de mon amie (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) is sixth and the last one in the series. It builds around the proverb: "My friends' friends are my friends." The comical situations emerge between two women who unintentionally swap boyfriends.

Two women suddenly meet while having lunch. One of the two women is Blanche, she is a skinny, uptight young woman, who is still searching for herself. The other is Lea, she's self-confident and a very feminine person. They both have something going on with men, so the main characters have their opponents; shy Fabien and a true player, Alexandre.

While trying to figure out the space of My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, I can't miss the futuristic city the characters live in. I got the feeling that Eric Rohmer isn't trying to tell a story of four specific people who live in France. To me he's telling about all the people living in these suburbs of Paris. The space of a futuristic city, the city full of postmodern architecture without any past. This theme of the milieu leads to rootlessness. The people of this city have no past, each of them like to analyze and talk about themselves. But none of them really know who they are.

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend offered these kind of things for me. In addition to its intelligent narrative, it is full of hilarious comical situations. Eric Rohmer builds four very interesting characters which will take you on board.

"My friends' boyfriends are my boyfriends."

Rohmer remains in every film extremely honest. Both with us and with his characters. Rohmer doesn't judge, even if he proposes moral stories from the start, but lets us look in the mirror. His characters are exactly what we are. Of course, the central themes in almost all his films are friendship (Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle) but especially sexuality, eroticism, love. And here, we have no negative or positive characters. All the characters, whether female or male, are hesitant (Blanche), inconstant (Lea), confused and bewildered (Fabien) or downright complex (completing the complex with superior arrogance) like Alexandre.

Rohmer always becomes uncomfortable because without being violent (on the contrary) he confronts us with paradoxical situations that even we don't know how we could handle if we were in their shoes. And even if Boyfriends and Girlfriends doesn't rise to the level of subtlety as A Night at Maud's or The Collector they remain in the same often sarcastic but gentle, wry but friendly tone where the dramas are small (even theatrical). It's fascinating the constancy with which Rohmer gives the actors (but especially the actresses) in the cinematic performance that declamatory role as if reciting from their own diary, the almost ridiculous intonation with which they make off-color statements trying to sound profound, the discrepancy between their own dreams and their own (in)actions, the laughable decisions that bring them to the brink of catastrophe.

However, the catastrophe never happens. The somewhat immoral, mundane solutions never let the characters break away from reality. Rohmer forces them to come back down to earth and us to accept that life is exactly like in his films and not the other way around.