BENOÎT POELVOORDE AND CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG IN 3 HEARTS

Tragedy of errors

Benoît Jacquot's new romantic tragicomedy hinges on several implausibilities and would be nothing if it were not for its casting of Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni in their actual relationship as mother and daughter again (as they have been by Christophe Honoré) with the addition of Charlotte Gainsbourg as the sister and inseparable friend: three French celebrity icons. To this rock-solid triumvirate (or as Peter Debruge of Variety puts it "film-royalty trifecta") is added the able (but not too physically prepossessing) Belgian-born film actor Benoît Poelvoorde, as a Paris-based government tax accountant and the hapless lover of both sisters with a heart condition. From his point of view (up to a point) the story is seen and told. It's not really about him, even though the story hinges on his experiences. It's about those beautiful, aging, soulful, sad, cigarette-smoking, wine-sipping ladies. Without them, no movie.

Marc Beaulieu (Poelvoorde) rushes late at night into the train station of the southeastern provincial French town of Valence, stressed out. He has missed his train back to Paris. While he sips a mineral water at the still-open station bar, in walks Sylvie Berger (Gainsbourg). She looks sad, troubled; buys a pack of cigarettes. (And by the way, this movie would not exist without cigarettes either. Everyone smokes them -- except Gabriel (Thomas Doret, the Kid of The Kid with the Bike), who works in the ladies' family antique shop.

Sylvie leaves the bar, but Marc rushes out after her. She's a local, and helps him look for a hotel. But they'd really both rather walk around all night. What follows is a replay of Linklater's Before Midnight, except that the whole evening is covered in only a few minutes and there's very little conversation. And yet we are to assume that these two, though Sylvie has a husband, are now madly in love. But Marc has lost his cell phone, and they don't even exchange last names. They just agree to meet in a week at the Luxembourg Gardens fountain. And this doesn't happen, because Marc has a heart attack. But it only delays him. He gets there. Only Sylvie doesn't wait very long, and so they don't meet.

If this is implausible, what follows is more so. Afterwards Sylvie, desolate at the failed connection with Marc, chooses to go to Minneapolis with her husband, Christophe (Patrick Mille), even though she had been at the point of leaving him. And by chance, Sophie (Mastroianni) wanders into the government tax offices and Marc helps her with her worries about the accounts of the antique shop, and they immediately fall in love, and subsequently marry, with Marc moving to Valence. Sophie is already in a fragile state when she meets Marc because of the departure of Sylvie. The two sisters have always been companions and best friends. Now they are reduced to Valence-Minneapolis Skype conversations.

Bruno Coulais' score is as essential as the "film-royalty trifecta," our suspension of disbelief, and cigarettes, because it often makes use of what Debruge calls "that ominous foghorn sound so popular since Inception." Our expectation that Marc will eventually discover he has married his true love's sister -- an event delayed as long as possible -- with Coulais' help, fills us with a feeling of dread combined with suspense, stress, and doom (if you can combine all these in one feeling). And it's compounded with a very real fear that Marc will have a heart attack. He is a workaholic, and continually stressed, continually late. Hence the heart attack on the way to the Tuileries Garden meeting, no accident. After the attack, the doctor tells him to stop smoking and drinking and avoid stress: but he does not do any of those things. And our sense of dread (and the rest) is compounded by the hangdog looks of Chiara and Charlotte.

Deneuve's presence is essential, but also largely ceremonial. She does little but urge people to have a piece of cake (even when rushing off to catch a plane), or to wonder why anyone would think they were smoking too much. But her beautiful, iconic face is always there, at family meals, at the wedding reception. A minor theme is Marc's decision to pursue an investigation of the mayor of Valence's tax irregularities, despite the mayor's indignation and the Berger family's friendly relations with him. This sub-thread may seem tacked on; but it helps to augment the tension that surrounds the character of Marc, who begins to seem hell-bent on trouble in more than one way.

In the end, because of its actors being good as well as iconic, because the settings are beautiful and the direction, cinematography, and editing are elegant, one realizes this isn't just a depressive rom-com but a meditation on chance and romance, missed opportunities and hasty decisions. To refer to Peter Debruge again, he suggests that even if Jacquot wasn't thinking of it, this film particularly illustrates his preoccupation with basic themes of the romantic values of Marguerite Duras, with whom he worked at the outset of his career forty years ago, "love at first sight, spontaneous tears, all-consuming desire and impossible, self-destructive decisions." With the sketched-in prelude and the implausible (and tragicomic) coincidence as its necessary linchpins, 3 Hearts is a poem to ponder filled with such sweet sadness. This is a movie mélo that's a lot more tense and anxiety-inducing than any ordinary rom-com.

3 Hearts/3 Cœurs, 106 mins., debuted at Venice; also at Toronto and a dozen other international festivals. French theatrical release 3 September 2014, when it was well received (AlloCiné press rating 3.6). A Cohen Media Group release, it opens theatrically in NYC 13 March 2015 (at Lincoln Plaza) followed by a national roll-out. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-UniFrance joint series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, where it will be the opening night film 6 March, its US debut.

(Coming from Benoît Jacquot in April 2015: a new version of Gustave Mirabeau's Diary of a Chambermaid, with Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.