Looks of love: Sur Mes Levres

Oh, hi blog, kind of forgot you existed.. oops. Blogging makes me feel totally inapt, is it supposed to?


Maybe it's just the fact that French men do more for me than the standard Hollywood types, but what is it about French films and romance? There's a couple of French films I've (re-)watched recently that just haunt me for days on end. They get under my skin. Christophe Honoré is a usual suspect, who fills his films with throwaway looks and lines that send my heart all a-flutter, but Sur Mes Lèvres (aka Read My Lips) is another favourite.

Down to lazy broadcasting, I saw the film three times in the span of six months (on Dutch and Belgian telly) and every time I see it I enjoy it more and more. Emmanuelle Devos (she gets my cutie-patootie vote over Audrey Tautou any day) is Carla, a partially deaf secretary who hires Paul (Vincent Cassel), recently released from prison. Both ignored at work, they embark on some sort of illegal deal (her lip-reading comes in handy) and in the mean time there's electric chemistry between the two of them.

I find French films really interesting to watch because not a lot happens in them, usually. The plot is usually pretty thin, can be summed up in one sentence, and still it's a captivating 100 minutes.

Looks of Love: La Belle Personne

Y'know, not to get overly pretentious or anything, but Hector Berlioz once described Beethoven's Mondschein Sonata as "one of those poems that human language does not know how to qualify." Why am I bringing this up? Because it's exactly how I feel about film and specifically certain scenes that show you the exact moment a person falls in love.


Christophe Honoré is quickly taking over Francois Ozon's position as my favourite French director. My favourite of his is obviously Les Chansons D'Amour, but I really enjoyed La Belle Personne recently.

While Ozon works with better scripts, Honoré manages to include little moments of feeling that you don't see anywhere else. Also, I love how he's just doing his own thang; in both Dans Paris and La Belle Personne he lets characters put on a record and he simply forces a certain tune on the audience for about three minutes.

So my love for Honoré might also have to do with the fact that he cast Louis Garrel in nearly all of his films and I might just have a teeny-tiny crush on Garrel. What can I say, I have a thing for noses.

In La Belle Personne, Garrel plays an Italian teacher who falls in love with a 16-year-old student (the stunning Léa Seydoux) who just transferred to his school. She's actually the lead in the film but other than the fact that she cries a lot and everyone falls in love with her, I didn't get much from her character. Garrel is deliciously pervy in the way he looks at her -- only in France!

Here's my favourite scene from the film, where he asks her to read a poem in Italian in class and then translate it. The way she makes eye contact at him when she says "parce que je t'aime", and his mouth twitches into a sneaky smile, then she says it later in the poem and he smiles again? Oh, you slay me, Garrel.

Louis Garrel sings 'Ma Memoire Sale'

So, I have a huge thing about musicals, and one of my all-time favourite films is Christophe Honoré's Les Chansons D'Amour. There's no doubt I'll do a post on that film some day, but for now, here's a clip of Louis Garrel singing 'Ma Mémoire Sale' at one of Alex Beaupain's gigs. He wrote the (beautiful!) songs for the film and it's amazing to me that three actors would take the time to perform songs from a film they did over three years ago live. There's a couple other clips with Clothilde Hésme and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet singing as well, but this one actually brought tears to my eyes.