(courtesy IMDb)
Let’s be clear right from the start – French Lover doesn’t exactly reinvent the romantic comedy model.
Channelling a very Notting Hill vibe but with the status of the sexes reversed, French Lover takes a charming and very funny journey of two people, one a famous A-list movie star Abel Camara (Omar Sy), the other an aspiring food truck owner-operator named Marion (Sara Giraudeau) and does pretty much what you’d expect it to do.
BUT, and this is an important because this is absolutely a rom-com worth your romance-seeking time, it takes these fairly well recognised and often used elements and creates something very ground, honest and truthful that recognises that while fairytales are lovely, they don’t always do a good job of making room for the stark realities of real life.
Helping too is the fact that Marion, who meets Abel when he inadvertently gets her fired from her café job, is even remotely starstruck nor cowed by Abel’s dazzling star status.
No matter how much Abel flashes his smile or charms Marion’s parents or sister, all of whom are consumed by Abel’s celebrity to the point where they regress to hilariously gibberish-spouting fans, Marion remains gloriously unaffected, unimpressed with the movie star baggage that surrounds Abel and which he wears with the assurance of someone long used to their entrapping effect.
It’s not that Marion doesn’t take what Abel does seriously; in fact, there are a number of key scenes throughout the film where Marion gives some very sage advice or offers a grounded perspective long lost to Abel, illustrating that she respects the art and the craft of acting without being rendered senseless by the glitzy gloss of celebrity that surrounds it.
It turns out of course that while Abel also takes his career very seriously indeed, and yes, he is every bit the pampered, paranoid, tantrum-throwing star when he wants to be, that he is at heart a down-to-earth kind of guy who doesn’t want a starlet or a singer or model on his arm but rather someone like Marion who rather disarmingly describes herself as a “basic girl” at one point.
That earthy sense of being real people is integral to movies like French Lover which rests for much of its appeal on the fact that while they do indeed come from very different worlds, that they are at heart each other’s person and that it’s that that will keep them together.
Only of course this is a rom-com so the path of true love cannot even come close to running smoothly.
French Lover embraces this near obligatory narrative element with gusto, bringing our disparate worlds’ lovers together only to send them spinning apart when lived experience and differing perspectives collide and the two find that maybe falling in love in the wondrous way only rom-coms seem to manage is not enough when real world pressures exert their push-and-pull and choices have to be made.
Now, granted French Lover is not exactly an edgy exploration of what happens when two worlds run into each other and initial fizzy, happy attraction comes face-to-face with the cold hard face of the real world.
It is at heart light and fluffy entertainment that is executed quite charmingly and with a real willingness to use montages to illustrate how blissfully how gorgeously everyone is … at least for a time.
But it wears its bright and breezy escapist rom-com credentials well and satisfies that need we all have to believe that the fairytale hopes and dreams we harbour might actually survive, and yes, thrive, in the unforgivingly bleak surrounds of day-to-day life.
We’re all realistic enough to know they likely won’t but films like French Lover, full of gleeful frippery though they may be, do their best with what little they have to make us feel like we could all fall in love with movie stars and that we might, roadblocks and obstacles aside, live somewhat happily ever after.
So how do you sell an idea that if you look too closely seems as paper thin as its possible to get?
Why you employ Sy and Giaudeau to play the parts of the film’s lovers, investing fairly insubstantial characters with enough charm and likeability that you buy the fact that a bullish, grounded would-be food truck operator might actually have a shot with a movie star who usually moves in far more rarefied climes.
You also bring in a supporting character such as Abel’s agent Camille (Pascale Arbillot) who might know how to work the ins and outs of the world of cinema but who is also a real person who at one particular crucial scene where Marion has attended a movie premiere with Abel and come out the worse for wear, is able to provide a shoulder to cry on, wise words of comfort and some much perspective.
It means that Marion is not alone in this cruel brave new world she inhabits and that even when Abel loses his ability to treat Marion as something special and not just another addition to his crammed-to-the-gills world of diversionary delights and celebrity pandering, that she’s not left alone to flounder.
Well, at least not completely.
This is a hugely opposites attract film and so much floundering happens on both sides of the romantic fence – to be fair, more Marion’s than Abel’s who is fairly well insulated against life casual vicissitudes – but French Lover rather sweetly gives Marion some sanctuary in a storyline that makes a lot of her fish-out-of-water fires to stoke the rom-com fires.
While French Lover is not the greatest rom-com to ever be made, and won’t join the laudable ranks of the greats like When Harry Met Sally or anything by Nora Ephron, it is a fun, frothy bundle of escapist romantic delights that gives you the diversion from real life you want while serving up just enough of it that it feels at least a little bit grounded in the world in which we live, the balance of the two making it just what the rom-com doctor ordered for anyone wanting to believe that fairytales can exist in the here and now.