Here's a selection of reviews for SHALL WE KISS? presently playing in the following Canadian theatres:
. VARSITY CINEMAS, TORONTO
. PARK THEATRE, VANCOUVER
. BYTOWNE CINEMA, OTTAWA
Lip-locked lovers
Shall We Kiss? is a French romance about the dangers of attraction
By Jay Stone, Canwest News ServiceApril 10, 2009
SHALL WE KISS?
Starring: Emmanuel Mouret, Virginie Ledoyen, Julie Gayet, Michael Cohen
Directed and written by: Emmanuel Mouret
Running time: 96 minutes
PG: Nudity, sexual situations, adult themes.
(In French with English subtitles)
- - -
The French of our imaginations -- that is, the French of the movies -- are expert in all things to do with love, but the French of Shall We Kiss? don't seem to have the foggiest notion of how it works, how it doesn't, and what to do about it. Shall We Kiss? is a sort of romantic farce, a love story reminiscent of something Woody Allen would do: it's not wise about the complications of romance, but it's wise about how we view the complications. This isn't a movie about love as much as it is a movie about the audiences for French movies about love.
As such, it's beautifully dressed for the occasion. Writer-director Emmanuel Mouret, also one of the film's stars, uses a palette of white and beige, with minimalist rooms decorated with pictures of famous composers.
Tchaikovsky and Schubert score the film's long talks about love and even a man's meeting with a prostitute -- is that a bassoon in your orchestration or are you happy to see me? -- and everyone is tastefully fashionable. A man wouldn't even think of going outside without a scarf knotted in some complicated way around his neck.
The plot also has an impeccable structure. Emilie (Julie Gayet) is on a business trip to Nantes when she meets Gabriel (Michael Cohen). They both have partners in life, but they are attracted to each other. Gabriel tries to kiss Emilie; it would be a kiss without consequences, he tells her. But she refuses. Instead, she tells him a story of a friend who once kissed a man, and with dire consequences. Shall We Kiss? -- or, wonderfully, Un baiser s'il vous plait -- is the story of that kiss.
The film within the film concerns single man Nicolas (Mouret) and his married pal Judith (Virginie Ledoyen), platonic best friends until the day Nicolas reveals that he needs something more: he needs physical affection.
Their solution is a long seduction scene that comes to the screen as Woody Allen by way of Eric Rohmer: she sits on the bed and he sits beside her, awaiting instructions. May he touch her breast?, he asks. Now the other one? There is a small debate about a kiss: he finds it necessary, but she warns him that if there is no magic in it, the deal is off. "You run the risk of me being reticent later," she says. It's not so much passion as a clinical checklist, a romantic parody in which the formality of friendship runs right up against the surrender of erotic attraction.
Eventually Nicolas and Judith embark on an affair filled with guilt, which they try to assuage by having sex as frequently as possible "to take the mystery out." Predictably, this doesn't work. The problems are Claudio (Stefano Accorsi), Judith's loving and handsome husband -- Accorsi looks like an Italian Paul Rudd -- and Caline (Frederique Bel), Nicolas's sweet girlfriend. They're being betrayed, and the farce of Shall We Kiss? gives way to something more mournful as the lovers try to find away around this.
Alas, there doesn't seem to be one. This is just what Emilie is trying to tell Gabriel back in the present, but unfortunately, this is a location that is designed in much warmer and vibrant colours and therefore seems to be a place where a kiss would have a better chance. Shall We Kiss? seems to be telling us that such wine-fuelled thoughts are as foolish as they are irresistible, but the people are so removed from their passions that resistance feels possible, if not preferable. Un baiser? Non, merci.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
---
---
Shall We Kiss?: Sophisticated and witty
by
JASON ANDERSON
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Shall We Kiss?
(3 stars out of 4)
Starring Virginie Ledoyen, Emmanuel Mouret and Julie Gayet. Directed by Emmanuel Mouret. 100 minutes. At the Varsity. 14A
A romantic comedy that owes less to any Hollywood precedents than the traditions of Molière and Marivaux, Shall We Kiss? is a quintessentially Gallic sort of charmer. Applying a light touch to his cautionary tale of friends who become lovers against their better judgment, French filmmaker Emmanuel Mouret displays much the same finesse as his venerated forebears when it comes to presenting matters of the heart.
That's not to say the premise of Shall We Kiss? couldn't be repurposed for a Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey matchup down the line. It seems inevitable that some enterprising producer will believe it can be improved with shots of glistening pecs.
But any such remake is likely to lack the philosophical bent and theatrical manner of this fourth feature by Mouret, an actor and director who's made a string of successful comedies in his native France.
Here, he plays Nicolas, a schoolteacher whose nervous demeanour makes him anything but a ladies man. Despairing over the lack of "physical affection" in his life, Nicolas resorts to visiting a prostitute but flees when he discovers that he's not allowed to kiss her.
Out of a mixture of sympathy and curiosity, his happily married friend Judith (Virginie Ledoyen) agrees to alleviate Nicolas' suffering in what might be the most amusingly awkward love scene ever filmed.
Intended to be a one-time encounter, they are upset when they realize it meant something more. They resolve to make love again, only much more badly to kill off any attraction. "We'll do it on the floor," Judith helpfully suggests. "It'll be more uncomfortable."
That this doesn't work either isn't surprising, especially considering the story of Nicolas and Judith is actually being told by another character to a suitor in hopes of convincing him there's no such thing as a kiss without consequences.
The archaic nature of the storytelling and the characters' old-fashioned naivety both make Shall We Kiss? seem like it belongs in another century. But it shares its droll yet sweet sensibility with Woody Allen's most effervescent movies about romantic complications (especially Manhattan), as well as the gentlest films of French New Wavers like Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut.
And while it's hardly novel to see the lives of lovers thrown into disarray by a series of misunderstandings, missed signals and well-intentioned lies, Shall We Kiss? carries it all off with a rare degree of sophistication and wit.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment