Aching Souls: Love Songs, Declaration of War, Tomboy

Christophe Honore's Love Songs is a dreamy light-kissed romantic musical tragic romance. Because it's French, you know the double-up on romance isn't an accident: when the movie begins Ismaël Bénoliel (Louis Garrel) is in a threesome relationship with two girls, Julie Pommeraye (Ludivine Sagnier) and Alice (Clotilde Hesme). Julie is his girlfriend, the threeway is their mutual desire.

I can't tell you what other French movie's middle-moment is similar to Love Song's without spoiling both movies, but I'll say this movie shares a desire with other movies to explore the emotional trajectory of a single character as the character's life passes through multiple events that could just as well be two or more separate movies.

Love Songs investigates, for example, the role of one's partner's family in one's life when one's no longer partnered with the family, i.e. one's ex's family. When in a relationship, one's partner's family may come close to feeling like one's own, but if one wants to put distance between oneself and an ex, it may be necessary to distance oneself from the family, which might hurt the feelings of the family. In Love Songs, Julie 's family thinks of Ismaël as family, but as his life extends beyond his relationship with Julie, he comes to think of them less. "I already have a mother and father," he tells Julie's sister.

Love Songs showcases emotional details with a graceful elegance that enriches feelings of romance.The narrative isn't flattened in order to untangle emotional complexities. Honoré is faithful to his characters, honors their complexities, and doesn't "fix" them, but simply follows and observes, with a dazzling and intelligent camera that helps sharpen their emotional experiences.

This narrative technique has always been a favorite of mine for the reason that I've never truly felt like I'm the leader of all my own life's circumstances, sometimes I feel the inflluence of forces like fate, chance, chaos, catastrophe, etc. The fact is, things occur in my life outside my ideal script.

Tell you the truth, before watching it, I thought Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War was a romance movie. It isn't. But it kind of is. It's a romance with realworld intrusions, and it's fair to say their story isn't the romance Romeo (Jérémie Elkaïm) and Juliet (Valérie Donzelli) anticipated upon meeting each other. Even those names, of course, refer to a terrific romance, but after the movie swiftly establishes their love affair, a child is born, and the child and his brain tumor are almost the center of the rest of the movie.

I say "almost the center" because the movie is still so much about the love affair between Romeo and Juliet, and one can often sense their love, behind a curtain of pain, even when many later scenes are set in the hospital (this makes the outdoors romance more romantic and lovely).


Donzelli depicts realities of existence and being human, and how one's quest for love and happiness is sometimes sabotaged by outside forces. She suggests dedicated love has an immense power (Romeo and Juliet's love for their son is something brave and big), and says part of our happiness comes from a choice made about one's interpretation of circumstances. 

Funny to think a lot of family movies are about kids struggling to like their parents or parents struggling to like their kids or otherwise many variations on unhealthy, damaged, dysfunctional, or broken families. But fatal sickness and hovering death can make these problems vanish, in life as in the movie. Or rather, the problems don't vanish, but there's no greater human problem than death.

Donzelli sneaks her trysts with cinema. As a smile can break a spell of sadness, so too the movie occasionally sparkles; because if the characters are not, cannot always be, sad and dull, it follows that sometimes the voice of cinema has to sing.

I'd seen and liked Céline Sciamma's previous movie Water Lilies, but I'd never seen or read about Sciamma herself. I was delighted to discover a person whom I felt I could relate to, by her age, a curious detail in her IMDb profile, and her no-bullshit and badass IMDb photo.

The underlined portion reads: "She is  totally afraid of dogs no matter their size," and she was born November 12, 1980.

It's interesting that, before I started this entry, I wouldn't have guessed Tomboy was the movie I'd have the hardest time selecting four choice screencaps to use (out of fairness to the other two movies that were given four). I don't think the camera does a great job of moving or breathing, and I don't think the aesthetics are eye-licking, but there's an intelligence to all of Sciamma's cinematic choices, sometimes subtle or subtextual.

The first photo seems important because it portrays Laure's ability to blend with boys (as Mickäel) at her age. The second photo express physical limitations, and the third captures her physical self-questioning.

It makes sense that visuals would be important to a movie about gender identity. Sciamma tends to compose a shot to frame the human elements, and this emphasis over the purely aesthetic grants her movie a lens of empathy.

I felt like Laure and her experience and private feelings were of paramount importance. She's in most shots, and when she's not in the shot she's being talked about.

During the movie I thought a lot about what looking at people means; it was interesting to see Laure observe boys to learn their mannerisms in order to imitate them. She had a special eye, different from everyone else. I thought about how one watches other people in order to learn how to be a person.

Common to each of these three French movies is the idea that characters as the center of movies creates opportunity for anything to happen, and then anything that happens is meaningful and important and relevant. If the story is the focus, character details can be off-topic and irrelevant, but if the movie is stories happening to a person, with an emphasis on the person, it seems like really and truly anything can count. It feels like the freedom of existence, rather than the rules of storytelling.