“Where do things truly start?” wonders the narrator of Emmanuel Mouret’s relentlessly middlebrow romantic comedy Trois Amies, a story of three women and their relationships that never feels like it’s ever going to end. Though it lasts just under two hours, it feels as bright and breezy as a flight from Newark to Singapore, spinning a complicated web of emotional intrigue that, finally, seems to go on and on just for the sake of it.
The French like these kinds of films, and their big-name directors stuff them with their equally famous friends, leading to waffly ensemble pieces that can be as endearingly cheerful as Julie Delpy’s family memoir Skylab (2011) or as insufferable as Guillaume Canet’s Big Chill ripoff Little White Lies (2011). Trois Amies sits somewhere, lumpenly, in the middle, and it’s hard to imagine what the Venice Film Festival programmers were thinking when they invited it into the main competition.
We open on the French town of Lyon, which the narrator helpfully points out over a series of local landmarks is “the main setting of this story.” He shows us a teacher on his first day at school. “He’s shaking a lot of hands,” he says, “because he is new. He is here to replace me.” The story then shifts back a year, and the voice identifies himself as Victor, husband of teacher Joan (the fantastically named India Hair). We soon find out that Joan has two best friends; one, Alice (Camille Cottin), teaches alongside Joan; the other, Rebecca (Sara Forestier) works at a museum, an outlet for her artistic tendencies.
Joan is married to Victor, Alice is married to Eric, and Rebecca is pursuing “Mr. X”, aka “Adrien”, aka Alice’s husband Eric. And the story begins in earnest when Joan drops a bombshell on Alice, telling her that she has fallen out of love with Victor. Alice warns Joan that she should never have fallen in love with him in the first place, claiming that she is with Eric purely for platonic reasons. Neither Joan nor Alice know that Rebecca is seeing Eric, or that Eric feels so guilty that he is giving serious thought to leaving Alice.
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At home, Joan tells Victor, and Victor is shocked, thinking that work has befuddled her brain since taking on some extra teaching work (mind you, looking at everyone’s apartments, you can get a lot on a teacher’s wages in Lyon). Victor promises to give some space, saying, “I’ll try to be a little more distant, a little less clingy,” soothing words that would placate — oh, that’s right — no woman ever. Nevertheless, Victor forces the issue and push comes to shove: after a night on the sauce, he attempts to drive home and ends up in the morgue. Yes, Victor is narrating the movie from beyond the grave. Or at least, he is for the time being; he ends up literally haunting it.
The French have made great movies about the many facets of love — Max Ophüls’ La Ronde, to name but one — and doubtless will do again. Trois Amies, however, is ghastly reminder of the time that the once impressively arthouse Alain Resnais turned his hand to dinner theater after encountering British farceur Alan Ayckbourn. Things become so ridiculous that Alice dreams a phone number, calls it up, and falls in love with a famous painter whose “distinctive” works look like something you might see in the window of a charity shop, every time you walk past it. Rebecca thinks this is her chance and encourages Alice to play away so she can spend more time with Eric. In the meantime, the replacement teacher has fallen for Joan, but her feelings for Victor get in the way of her reciprocating. There’s more, much more, but it seems churlish to spoil it, since this review has to wrap up at some point.
Fans of French frippery will find things to admire, and the women definitely come out of it better, even if they are given far too much to say and not enough to do. The men, though, are interchangeable; dowdy, disheveled blokes who look much of a muchness (in stark contrast to the three very distinct female leads) and whose drab outfits clearly didn’t give the costume designer too many sleepless nights.
Mia Hansen-Løve could make a better film in her sleep, and may well have done for all we know, since she’s so very good at painting sympathetic but relatable portraits of the petite bourgeoisie. Trois Amies, however, is a soul-sapping soap that you’ll likely have forgotten, or want to, long before it finishes.
Title: Trois Amies
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Emmanuel Mouret
Screenwriters: Emmanuel Mouret, Carmen Leroi
Cast: Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, India Hair, Grégoire Ludig, Damien Bonnard, Vincent Macaigne, Éric Caravaca
Sales agent: Pyramide International
Running time: 1 hr 58 mins