Emmanuel Mouret is arguably the most engaging French filmmaker to have debuted in the last quarter-century. That till recently he remained a sleeper as far as the usual types of recognition go is due to his most endearing quality: He makes very classical films that don’t pander to any zeitgeist.
They’re never visually flashy but always beautiful to look at. They don’t sport obviously “original” stories or “complex” narrative strategies but are playful in their choice of characters, as well as intricately interleaved, pleasantly literary in their build and flow. In eg. Laissons Lucie faire! (2000), the companion of a beachwear créatrice wants to become an apprentice secret agent, while in Please, Please Me! (2009), a wannabe pickup artist finds himself dating the president’s daughter. As for form, eg. the episodic structure of The Art of Love (2011) resembles that of a poem with stanzas and rhymes, or a dance like the Rondo or the Gavotte, while Love Affair(s) (2020) is nothing short of a veritable essay on stories begetting tales triggering memories etc. – in both cases, their lucidity makes the sometimes almost labyrinthine constructions feel perfectly clear, smooth, and forward.
Mouret’s films also don’t engage with any big issues, have little to offer for those needing political pieties – instead, they talk about ordinary matters like love, desire, jealousy, friendship as well as families, jobs and all those little big somethings that get us going most of the time, with some topics getting tackled again and again from different perspectives; in Shall We Kiss? (2007), the request for a perfectly harmless-seeming kiss becomes the reason to tell a story about the vicissitudes of kindness and the unpredictability of impulse and yearning, a subject Mouret looks at again in Chronique d’une liaison passagère, where a friends-with-benefits relationship turns into a love story despite the two people’s best attempts at preventing such feelings.
It is not, by the way, as if these miracles of humility and grace had been hidden somewhere! Mouret’s films were often around at the usual big ones ie. Cannes and Venice, but invariably in the sidebars where his kind of qualities tend to be lost (pace Locarno where L’art d’aimer even played in Competition). Looking backwards, it seems that the move towards the realm of obvious prestige was needed to get the long-deserved serious attention – and what would be more prestigious than a heritage piece based on a firmly canonized classic like Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, which describes the exteriors of the César nominations-showered Mademoiselle de Joncquières (2018) but not its soul whose lightness resembles that of Dominik Graf’s essays in history and literature, while its clarity evokes Robert Bresson, if only because the old master had also tried his hands at this novel.
For all the splendor of Mademoiselle de Joncquières, Mouret’s art is, above all, discrete; it often needs a closer look to understand why they feel so rich. At their core, the films are conversation pieces which is meant here in two ways: as a nod to a very English genre of 18th century painting, and to simply say that they’re about people talking. Mouret’s films are never static – speaking doesn’t mean standing still but also eg. exploring a space while the words flow; there are also various ways of showing the dynamics of a dialogue, eg. by developing an internal rhythm of (showing someone) listening and speaking, of singles and two-shots, facs, the backs of heads and profiles, etc. Mouret knows how to turn talking into a piece of visual music or a verse on space while never getting in the way of the most obvious task at hand: showing people talking and make their ideas and thoughts understood.
In the final analysis, Emmanuel Mouret’s films are timeless in the most congenial, diverting and gratifying fashion: These are works one might not feel in any way hurried to watch because there’s always something more now-or-never, must-know-to-talk-about around – but once seen one knows that a return to them is a given, and that one will be a different person the next time around and therefore the film will be different and new and still the same, the same way relationships change and stay the same.
Olaf Möller