CANNES 2024 - remote notes

[Chris Knipp]

BEATING HEARTS/L'AMOUR OUF (Gilles Lelouche)


STILL FROM EARLY IN L'AMOUR OUF/BEATING HEARTS

TRAILER

In Competition. The plot starts with two teenagers, a girl from an upper-middle-class family and a boy from the working class, who fall madly in love only to have that doomed when the boy becomes involved in crime and serves a decade in prison; but later they reunite. This is an "operatic French gangster film," Bradshaw says (it's full of great 80's and 90's hits) starring François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos, that "suffers from bloat" in what he says "aims for a Springsteenesque blue-collar energy" but "buckles under the weight of its own naivety." He gives it a damning 2/5 stars in his GUARDIAN review. The French title uses the slang word "ouf," which means roughly "wow," so it means "wow love." Audrey Diwan, Ahmed Hamidi and Julien Lambroschini adopted Neville Thompson's novel called Jackie loves Johnser OK? set near Dublin and said to be full of local slang and lingo, and transferred it to northern France. Guy Lodge in VARIETY says it's "way too long at 165 minutes but never dull," and "best when it gives in to its wildest urges." Lodge says it takes the "slender plot of innumerable B-movies" about how "time and crime collaborate" to "derail the pure-hearted romance between two pretty young things" and blows that up "to a dizzily grand scale." The latter part is a semi-musical. The ensemble cast includes Alain Chabat, Benoît Poelvoorde, Vincent Lacoste, Jean-Pascal Zadi, and Élodie Bouchez, among others. Tim Grearson on SCREEN DAILY says the first half is better when the less known, younger actors play the mad teen love story. As the film "starts to lose its luster," Grearson writes, "eventually bogged down in Clotaire’s criminal enterprises and Jackie’s convoluted complications regarding her husband, the moony atmosphere and rocking tunes fail to provide adequate compensation. The best musicals feel lighter than air," Grearson concludes: "BEATING HEARTS strains to create the illusion of effortlessness." A French review comments it's not "amour ouf" but "amour bof" - not wow love but meh love.