Camille Cottin in Emmanuel Mouret’s Newest

To say that French director Emmanuel Mouret has had one factor on his thoughts since he began making options 20 years in the past would in all probability be an understatement. Should you take the English-language titles alone of his prolific oeuvre — 11 options, together with the most recent — you get a reasonably good thought of the topic dearest to him: Shall We Kiss, Please, Please Me, The Artwork of Love, Lovers, Caprice, Love Affairs, Diary of a Fleeting Affair…

The query, maybe, is whether or not something however love and intercourse really pursuits Mouret. After making a couple of slapstick-style comedies early on, the director has determined to focus virtually completely on individuals falling out and in of affairs and relationships. And if his first few movies had been impressed by each Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, his work since then attracts closely from the worlds of each Eric Rohmer and middle-period Woody Allen — as much as utilizing the Woodster’s trademark Windsor typeface in his opening credit.

Love and intercourse are actually on everybody’s thoughts in Three Buddies (Trois amies), which follows a trio of extremely educated, pretty well-off feminine intellectuals going by way of main relationship crises on the similar time, to the purpose that their tales wind up intertwining. Handsomely directed and tactfully carried out, it exhibits Mouret reaching a peak type he’s been perfecting from movie to movie, or from one onscreen tryst to the following.

However it additionally appears like a caricature of what many think about French romantic life to be like: When individuals aren’t dishonest on their important others, they’re spending numerous time speaking about it. Or else they’re doing each. And whereas Mouret’s early work provided up a good dose of visible comedy, his new function is so verbose that it turns into exhausting.

One welcome addition in Three Buddies is the character of Victor (Vincent Macaigne), who narrates the story from past the grave. Initially of the movie, Victor’s long-term relationship with Joan (India Hair), a fellow trainer in a highschool in Lyon, is instantly in jeopardy when Joan realizes she’s fallen out of affection with him. Determined and completely depressed, Victor dies quickly after in a automobile accident, leaving Joan on her personal.

The storyline following her lengthy interval of guilt and mourning, then her gradual awakening to the potential of a brand new romance — or a number of new romances — is probably the most transferring and credible of the three plots in Mouret’s drama. It’s too unhealthy he didn’t focus extra on Joan the complete time, as an alternative of overindulging in clichés when delving into the tales of her finest pals, Alice (Camile Cottin) and Rebecca (Sara Forestier).

The previous additionally teaches in the identical faculty and has been in an extended, steady partnership with Éric (Grégoire Ludig), a person she claims loves her greater than she loves him. “Synchronized love could be very uncommon,” she tells her besties, justifying why it’s higher to seek out somebody that you simply’re content material with every day than leaping right into a torrid romance crammed with drama. Little does she know that Éric has been having an affair with Rebecca, a museum information and aspiring artist crammed with the eagerness Alice appears to lack.

Simply describing these tales can provoke some main eye-rolling, and though Mouret doesn’t all the time take them the place you anticipate him to, the infinite discussions on love — the attract of it, the facility of it, the hazards of it — can shortly develop tiresome. If there have been a ingesting recreation the place you needed to do a shot each time a personality used the phrase amour in Three Buddies, you’d wind up being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.

This doesn’t imply the movie lacks appeal, and Mouret has a approach with actors that shouldn’t be dismissed. Forestier provides one among her finest performances shortly as a lady desperately in search of happiness with the unsuitable man. Macaigne, who steps out and in of the story as Victor’s melancholic ghost, is extra subdued than normal, drumming up some emotion as he watches Joan recovering from his dying.

The solid is rounded out by Damien Bonnard, taking part in a trainer and revered writer who not solely replaces Victor, however way-too coincidentally strikes in subsequent door to Joan. And eventually there’s Eric Caravaca, who portrays a well-known painter whose telephone quantity Alice sees in one among her desires, ultimately calling him up and beginning an affair of her personal.

Lecturers, artists, writers, painters — and in addition a musician that Joan meets towards the top of movie — are Mouret’s total universe right here, and it feels so hermetically sealed off that it turns into a cliché as properly. Like Woody Allen along with his Higher East (or West) Aspect, the director limits himself to a really particular, very white mental milieu in Lyon, which is a metropolis that’s grown more and more various through the years, particularly in its surrounding suburbs.

At this level in his profession, Mouret is much less curious about exploring that actual world, whether or not in Lyon or elsewhere, than in telling the identical story time and again with slight variations. One can see the attraction in doing that — and by way of French audiences, Mouret’s previous couple of movies have carried out higher than the remainder — however maybe it’s time for the director to get out of his consolation zone and fall in love with one thing else.