To anyone who doubts that director Christophe Honoré
considers himself the spiritual heir to the French New Wave, he proclaims his
affiliation as boldly as he can in the freewheeling first 15 minutes of Love
Songs. After
puppy-eyed scoundrel Louis Garrel surprises his girlfriend Ludivine Sagnier
outside a Paris cinema with an impromptu musical number—reminiscent of
Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg—the couple heads back to their apartment and
into the thick of a love triangle that echoes both François Truffaut's Jules
And Jim and Agnès
Varda's Happiness.
Then, as the lovers lie together in bed, each reads a book with an
appropriately ironic title, in a clear nod to Jean-Luc Godard.
As with Honoré's previous film, Dans Paris, the multiple homages in Love
Songs work in
concert with—and to some extent against—the heady emotional content. Love
Songs starts as a
movie about Sagnier's reluctant attempts to keep Garrel happy by going along
with his selfish ménage-a-trois plans, but then an unexpected tragedy quickly
turns this into a movie about the indelible moments that follow profound loss.
Honoré even tries to record the curious unreality of the first moment, as an EMT team softly
mutters jargon over a corpse while one of the corpse's closest friends makes
out with someone in a nightclub, less than a hundred feet away.
Meanwhile, the characters keep on singing. Honoré and
composer Alex Beaupain have worked up 13 songs, running the gamut from lilting
Michel Legrand-style balladry to Coldplay-esque mid-tempo pop-rock. Frankly,
the music isn't that great, and like a lot of Honoré's audacious
gambits—a burst of fast-motion action here, a Chris Marker-like
succession of still photos there—the "bursting into song" bit comes off
as too intellectualized. For all Honoré's talent, heart, and playfulness, his
best ideas are the simplest, like the lighthearted early scene where Garrel and
a co-worker converse while rolling around in their office chairs, and a pointed
moment when Sagnier recalls some of the best memories of her relationship with
Garrel, and he fails to reciprocate. Love Songs is definitely daring, but too much
of it seems calculated to lead up to a final line about how to guard against
grief: "Love me less, but love me a long time."