THE ART OF LOVE

Director: Emmanuel Mouret

Country: France

Year: 2011

Duration: 85 min

Languages: French / subtitled in English

Original name: L'art d'aimer

Category: , ,

Ten scenes about love. Some of these are stand-alone anecdotes, most are in one way or another interconnected. There’s a little comic serial hidden here, with one and the same situation varied several times. One character from what looked like a stand-alone anecdote suddenly appears in a storyline seemingly headed somewhere else – who would have thought?! Nothing in The Art of Love can be predicted, even if in hindsight certain rules and schemes can be detected. But while you watch the film, be ready for anything – and then something else will happen anyway, for such is love: like life and death it is what happens to you / While you’re busy making other plans. (John Lennon, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), 1980).

Emmanuel Mouret’s maybe most intricately constructed film – as well as his most overtly popular and brainy one. Mouret mixes masses of well-worn thus widely beloved cliches about love, sex and the whole damn thing in an intriguing manner: one can delight in the that-again! cheesiness of jokes about sexy neighbors, obsessions with certain bodies, etc., gags seen and heard hundreds of times and still funny – while existential truths in all these tropes and stereotypes become apparent, lending all that one deemed light and maybe even silly unexpected depths and spiritual meanings. How strange we are as women, men and whatever else one desires to be, how predictable, melancholic – because we are such creatures of habits, lovers of images and similes that feel ancient and irresistible! How we long to have a taste of that which everybody wants! How we love the common! How refined the most normal wishes are!

Olaf Möller