THE ART OF LOVE (Emmanuel Mouret)

Emmanuel Mouret’s gentle comedy about the ups and downs, the fun and frustration of love is an entirely likeable film. The cast is talented (and, particularly the women, ridiculously attractive) and the screenplay provides some fun situations and amusing lines, it’s well played enough to generally be involving, despite being fluffy in dramatic terms. It’s a cream puff; insubstantial, but pleasant enough.

Or, at least, it would be. The thing that stops The Art of Love from working as well as it perhaps should is the slapdash feeling of the film’s structure. For about 40 of its 85 minutes the film cuts quickly between stories and characters, focusing on most just once and for a short time. The only short story that continues as its own tale is that of Francois Cluzet and his stunning, but eccentric, new neighbour played by Frederique Bel. Otherwise stories like that of Gaspard Ulliel and Elodie Navarre, as a young couple unsure if they want an open relationship, or about Ariane Ascairde’s character telling partner Philippe Mangan that she wants to be with other men are left by the wayside.

The structure completely changes in the second half of the film, which one long story about best friends Boris (Stanislas Merhar) and Amelie (Judith Godreche), Amelie’s friend Isabelle (Julie Depardieu) and the complicated romantic machinations that happen when Boris confesses his love for Amelie. It’s not that this stuff, which takes up the whole of the film’s second half, is bad, just that it doesn’t fit with the first half, which hops nimbly from story to story. The film ends up feeling like a series of shorts and a TV episode that someone has jammed into a single theatrical programme.

That said, it’s very likeable, often quite funny (Frederique Bel and Francois Cluzet are very funny together) and never less than enjoyable, it just doesn’t feel like a single film.

3 / 5

GOODBYE (Mohammad Rasoulof)

Goodbye is a film as interesting for what lies behind it as for what it is. Director Mohammad Rasoulof is not allowed to leave Iran under most circumsatances, and has recently been sentenced to a year in prison by the government that wants to stop him a colleagues like Jafar Panahi from making films. Set against this background Goodbye‘s story of Noora (Leyla Zareh), a young woman struck off as a lawyer and scraping together money to flee Iran is fascinating.

Rasoulof goes to great pains to show how difficult the process will be for Noora and the lengths to which she has already had to go to try to ensure that wherever she lands won’t send her back – she has got pregnant for this purpose. Slowly, Rasoulof immerses us in Noora’s life, relying on Zareh’s fine performance to draw us in. This works to a degree, and the film is visually arresting, but there is sometimes a nagging feeling that Rasoulof needs to get out of first gear. With the exception of a tense scene when Noora’s house is searched there’s not much sense of the threat pressing in on Noora that makes it so desperate for her to get out.

It’s never uninteresting, and is worth seeing for anyone remotely interestied in the current situation in Iran, but Goodbye does plod a little despite Zareh’s absolutely real work in the lead (she’s in almost every frame) and Rasoulof’s confident direction.

3 / 5