Les Chansons d'Amour / Love Songs (2007)

Director:Christophe Honoré
Cast: Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Clotilde Hesme

I am not sure if this is a beautiful film or just plain French. In true musical style the characters converse here in songs every now and then, and the film successfully maintains a fine balance between being too cheesy (the most common pitfall for most musicals) and too real. Though through subtitles, I liked the lyrics, it was pure poetry and refreshingly different (my French friends told me the original were even better). And the music is so good that you actually wait for it (unlike the Bollywood numbers in most of the times, where you fast forward them).

The Parisian society portrayed here is no different than the regular world, with family bonding and sexual experiments, curiosity and hatred, homophobia and post-mortal melancholy. But the human mind works here in a strange way that one can imagine only in a world created by wishful thinking. A couple very much in love get another girl to make it better, straight girls kiss each other passionately, and the mourning husband falls for another guy who is gay. It is not just about being liberal / experimental / adventurous, I am rather unsure if it works that way at all in real life! May be all the characters are bisexual or something. Or just French! Though set in real world, for this one reason (and for the beautiful songs), all these look like the parts of a fantasy that is smooth and poetic. But even if one can digest all that, what haunted me more was the fact that everyone in the movie are extremely beautiful (with the sole exception of the dog, which was little unkempt). I mean everyone, the hero, heroine, her two sisters and her parents, the other girl in their relation and her boyfriend, the kid brother of the boyfriend, literally everybody! I can't really say I had seen so many goodlooking people in my tour to Paris.

The movie was not very big budget, and eventually has become a cult-favorite among the French youth. One critic has described the climax balcony scene as "the best balcony scene since Romeo and Juliet". I wasn't so much exited probably because I was not much convinced with the fact that this can actually happen, but liked it nevertheless. Overall, it is a beautiful film, very different from the usual musicals churned out by Hollywood.