Review of Love, etc.

Marion Vernoux is good at pain and relationships and even better at painful relationships (she worked on the screenplay of Tonie Marshall's brilliant Venus Beaute' and wrote and directed the wonderful Rien a faire which translates as nothing doing) and here, straying into Jules et Jim territory she applies scalpel and probe to expose the diseased tissue in a melancholic menage a trois. Yvan Attal, an excellent writer director himself, and Charlotte Gainsbourg have long been an offscreen couple and often act together so it's not unusual that they make it look easy. The fatal flaw in all this is Charles Berling, a fine actor as he's demonstrated time and again but woefully lacking in the charm and charisma which we are constantly informed is Pierre's stock in trade - where other unprepossessing men sometimes laugh women into bed we can only assume that Pierre has bored his string of girl friends into bed. Apart from Jules et Jim we're also in the Forbidden Fruit ballpark here; Hitherto it's Pierre who inhabited the Fast Lane love/sex-wise while Benoit couldn't get arrested but when Benoit, against all the odds, meets and marries Marie, Pierre cannot and will not rest until he has seduced her away from his best friend and as someone once said, with friends like that ...

Vernoux contrives to inject a delicate Chekhovian melancholy into even the happier scenes and for those who insist on reading deeper meanings into even Police Academy it could be argued that Benoit is a Vanya who actually wins his great love only to lose her and wind up attempting to balance the books of his emotional life without even a niece to assist him and share his misery. If Rien a fair remains Vernoux's finest film (to date) by a mile Love, etc is an honourable second.