If the song is right, and life is but a dream, what should the dreamiest part of all that merrily, merrily, row-row-rowing possibly be, but love?OK, none of us really need reminding that love is mostly mystery and illusion, but there's a whole contingent of filmmakers out there who relish drumming that message into our heads every chance they get. Just this week, we have two new movies to remind us once again.
Down With Love and He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not are both movies obsessed with romance, but you'd be hard pressed to call either of them truly romantic. Romantic-fantasies, maybe (with the emphasis squarely on the second half of that composite), but even then, there's nothing particularly lovable going on in either.
Take He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, a curious creation that initially appears to be about one thing and then turns out to be entirely about something else. The movie's semi-successful game plan begins by wrapping itself around the stuff of dreams and winds up in a cold sweat, as pure nightmare.
The film's opening shots couldn't be dreamier: Flowers fill the frame, enormous bundles of perfect, drop-dead gorgeous pinks, yellows and blazing reds. Then, from amidst the most perfect bundle of them all, emerges the beatific face of Audrey Tautou, a rose of a girl more often described as a gamine than as, well, a girl.
Tautou, for those who might not know, is the adorable pixie we all fell in love with in Amelie. She's Julia Roberts' smile crossed with the elfin allure of Audrey Hepburn (another classy gamine), and He Loves Me makes clever use of that sweetly iconic Tautou presence to initially pass itself off as just another movie about love and all things Amelie-like. That first impression is critical, since the movie is soon doing everything it can to subvert it.
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not isn't the easiest movie to describe because so much of its success depends upon the element of surprise. Very little in the film is what it first appears to be. The smoother and shinier the surface, the more certain you can be that cracks are sure to appear. In fact, those cracks are probably already there; it's just that the movie hasn't yet made us aware of them.
Tautou plays Angelique; an upbeat young art student whose world seems filled with flowers, sparkly baubles and bright red candy hearts. Everywhere she goes, she's accompanied by a pleasantly groovy little song that sounds a bit like a French pop version of the theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And why not? If ever a girl could turn the world on with her smile, it's Audrey/Amelie/Angelique.
Everything's coming up roses for Angelique, who, as the movie opens, has just been awarded a prestigious art scholarship, is ensconced in a big, beautiful home, and is in love with a handsome, sensitive doctor who, although married, has promised to leave his wife at the earliest opportunity. Angelique's France (director Laetitia Colombani's hometown of Bordeaux, actually) is a place of smiling faces, endless opportunities and bright, sunny colors so fragrant we can almost smell the sugar and spice wafting through the air.
There's trouble in paradise, though. Angelique's handsome doctor (Samuel Le Bihan) begins breaking dates and seems to be becoming increasingly evasive, prompting the girl's anger, frustration and confusion. Eventually, her friends become concerned and warn Angelique about the danger of believing too much of what the charming Doctor Loic says.
But is Loic actually such a cad? The real question posed by the film is who can be believed here?
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is really two movies for the price of one, a sort of He Says, She Says in which the film's story plays through twice, told once from Angelique's point of view, and then again from Loic's. Simply put, one of these narrators turns out to be as unreliable as they come, and psychosis, revenge and even murder soon bubble to the surface. Gradually, the charming Euro-romance of the first part of He Loves Me transforms into something not too far removed from a Hollywood thriller a la Fatal Attraction.
It's not too terribly difficult to figure out the film's secrets, but I'll try not to give away too many of them. Gaps in the storytelling and significant actions that we hear about but never actually see (they mostly occur off-screen) are only some of the early warning signs that there's more here than meets the eye. Carefully composed images and clever editing further the impression that things are happening in the characters' lives that actually aren't.
Each time the lovers' story repeats, we see it with fresh eyes, as details that we had assumed were established are fleshed-out, re-arranged and sometimes flat-out contradicted. Fantasy becomes cold reality, as the perfectly symmetrical, fake candy-hearts of the movie's introduction are replaced by the clinical medical illustrations of messy, blotchy organs hanging on the doctor boyfriend's wall. It's not exactly subtle, but the movie just can't resist periodically nudging us to pick up on its clues, symbols and tres witty allusions.
The twin tales of He Loves Me dovetail and then collide, but the movie's ultimately not much more than a glib riff, one that constantly threatens to become the Hollywood thrill-machine it periodically references, and in the end succumbs to. It's all entertaining enough the first time we're experiencing it, but not really clever enough that we'd probably want to watch it again.
What staying power the film possesses flows mainly from a combination of cheap but satisfying thrills and the realization that, in the end, the movie's fantasy world seems so much more convincing than its case for reality. When all is said and done the flesh and blood lovers in He Loves Me barely appear in each other's narratives. But the dreams, projections and fantasies of those characters are so rich that we hardly notice, adding fuel to the argument that most of our best stories, even the love stories, are ultimately all about ourselves.
Another pair of lovers who barely seem to be sharing the same world are the main players in Down with Love, a jumbled misfire that strains to emulate those candy-color Doris Day-Rock Hudson romantic farces of yore, but winds up just lying there.Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger are the would-be lovers in this convoluted mess, and their on-screen relationship generates even fewer sparks than previously managed by Doris and Rock (and he didn't even like girls). There's scant chemistry between the performers and even less sense to this self-consciously silly story of a swinging womanizer (McGregor) jumping through hoops to get a proto-feminist writer (Zellweger) to fall for him.
I say proto-feminist, because Down with Love takes place in the early 1960s (as did the Rock-Doris flicks), and the movie's primary concern is to replicate the style of that era, or at least of its movies. Down with Love gets that part right, at least; the clothes, cars and colors are spot on, the sound stages and backdrops are Technicolor-vivid and blatantly (and deliberately) fake, and the soundtrack is wall-to-wall space-age bachelor pad music.
The movie doesn't quite have the guts to present itself as full-blown camp, but it does constantly dip its toes in that territory, creating a confused and labored tone that's painfully coy and far too full of itself to be very much fun at all. Double entendres drift joylessly through the air like Austin Powers dialogue on Thorazine, each accompanied by an annoying nudge-nudge-wink-wink from the soundtrack, as the characters go through their paces in a standard war-of-the-sexes scenario, Hollywood-style, from the early days of the so-called Sexual Revolution.
This kind of material wasn't all that much fun even when Doris and Rock were doing it, and it's downright painful to see it exhumed, perfumed and paraded about again. Unlike He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which at least allowed us to believe in the dream of love even while it was shooting a poison arrow through its heart, Down with Love rarely seems like anything but an icy and inert exercise in style. It's a pointless and transparently cynical enterprise, less like the cheerfully hip-retro homage it clearly wants to be, and more like a grotesquely re-animated corpse trying desperately to look sexy.
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
This article appears in May 14-20, 2003.