(courtesy Alliance Francaise French Film Festival 2025)
As premises for romantic comedies go, and let’s face it they are as wide and different as the days in the middle of summer are long, In the Sub for Love (A toute allure) has an absolute cracker.
A handsome male flight attendant, Marco (Pio Marmaï) with some seniority and a sparkling sense of humour, which makes him a darling of the passengers and the crew with whom he often works, has a brief moment (whch is well on its way to sex but for reasons doesn’t quite get there) with an attractive and eminently capable submariner named Marianne (Eye Haïdara) who is the XO on the boat on which she serves, and upon seeing she’s left her necklace behind when she has to rush back to duty, decided to return it to her.
In person. By sneaking onto a high security French naval base. And then onto the submarine.
It’s so over-the-top ridiculous and so excessively impossible, especially when the submarine sets off a mission without anyone really securing anything, including ahem stowaways, that you simply go along with it, the charm and sweet silliness of it all propelling the plot, and the audience right along with it, with libidinous straight abandon.
The joke here, among the many, is that Marco is so instantly and completely smitten and so needing to see the lovely, competent and no-nonsense Marianne again that he doesn’t realise he has stowed away; he thinks he can find her, return the necklace and slipping drive back out of the base which, as you can guess from the trailer, is not even close to what happens.
Instead, Marco, breaking all kinds of security protocols – not that the captain, played by José Garcia, or the crew (chief among them Marianne’s BFF Fred, played by Victor Pontecorvo and the grizzled cook, Guéguen (Frédéric Maranber) or even the French secret service seems, rather comedically, all that fussed about his many clueless breaches – stays on board and briefly becomes the cook’s assistant then a locked-up prisoner before being taken off the board where, well, really nothing happens to him.
But then it’s a rom-com, and a French farce-inclined one at that, that pays no heed to the petty demands of everyday life and which offers a fun, lighthearted family romp through love, friendship and the demands of serving your country in a miliary capacity.
While In the Sub for Love (A toute allure) never hits full throttle farce, there’s enough of it liberally scattered about that you are carried from hilariously OTT scene to another, anchored by the fact for all its levity, that the film actually has its narrative roots in some very heartfelt storytelling.
For all of Marco’s uncharacteristic buffoonery and Marianne’s unusually poor decision-making, you warm to both these characters almost immediately, buoyed by the charismaticlaly sparkling performances from both the lead actors who are clearly have the time of their lives in roles that somehow manage to be comedically silly and emotionall weighty all at once.
Take Marianne for instance.
She is clearly a talented and driven career submariner who has excelled in every aspect of her career to get where she is; but while her professional life, Marco-inspired lapses of good judgement aside, is doing well, her personal life less so, her loneliness driving her to spend altogether too much time with her bestie Fred and his wife and kids.
She even goes so far as to holiday with them, and while they’re all too nice to say anything, it’s clear that she is emotionally locked away and unable to open herself to anyone in any kind of romantically substantial way and that not even Marco’s considerable charm, and his willingness to do whatever it takes to win her heart, is going to see her fall in love with the handsome idiot right in front of her.
While In the Sub for Love (A toute allure) doesn’t go too deep into Marianne’s psychic and emotional damage, it does dwell on it enough that all the effervescently silly comedy, which works a treat pretty much all the time, feels weighted and grounded in the best possible way.
So, yes, you laugh and affectionately roll your eyes at how far the film pushes the bounds of believability, but you really care about what happens to the characters and you really want these two people, who clearly belong together, to open their hearts – well, Marco’s is well and truly there; it’s just Marianne who needs to catch up – and end up together.
In fact, for a movie that sits at the more OTT end of the rom-com spectrum, In the Sub for Love (A toute allure) does a finely tuned and surprisingly affecting job of making the nascent romance between Marco and Marianne feel like it has legs.
Any less of the vulnerable human moments, or if they were absent altogether, would have meant lots of jokes and laughs, yes, but not really much in the way of actually giving a damn which is key to any rom-com if it’s to have any appeal, immediate, long-lasting or otherwise.
But you do care, and you keep on caring, even during the more absurdist scenes and it’s a tribute to director and co-writer (with Florian Mole) Lucas Bernard that you care as deeply and enduringly as you do; in fact, by the end of In the Sub for Love (A toute allure), while you’re still laughing at the hilarity of it all, you also have a nice, cosy glow inside, the kind that can only come when true love has prevailed and the lovers, against all odds, have found each other and are on the way to a life happily-ever-after.
In the Sub for Love (A toute allure) is a joy in a lot of ways, combining robustly clever writing with fine performances and a pace that never tips too serious or too silly, and it leaves, as all good rom-coms should, feeling like love is possible, no matter the circumstances and that true love can overcome pretty much anything given the chance.