Stéphane Brizé’s true breakthrough, the charming Not Here to Be Loved, feels familiar to a Finn because of the tangos and the people struggling with communication. Down-to-earth and tender, this tragicomedy naturally brings to mind the cinema of Aki Kaurismäki. The melancholic, minimalist love story of a withdrawn, lonely widower and a young woman preparing for her wedding doesn’t rely on grand words but rather on the body language of the dance floor and the music.
The weekly routine of Jean-Claude (Patrick Chesnais, seemingly born for the role), a fifty-something bailiff with a heart condition, is broken only by Sunday visits to play Monopoly with his grumpy father (Georges Wilson, who made his debut in 1946) at a care home. At a dance class, however, the man is partnered with Françoise (Anne Consigny at her most delicate), a woman clearly younger than he is, who is just as uncertain about her life as she is about her upcoming wedding.
These lonely people, unable to communicate, find one another in the whirl of the dance floor, and even beyond it. It seems that for some in France, emotions are just as hard to convey as they are here in Finland, and the problem is passed down from one generation to the next – like from father to son in Brizé’s intimate film.
Timo Malmi