Trite love affair thrives on clichés
Marc Maronnier (Gaspard Proust) is a young literary critic whose wife has filed for divorce. Soon, he’s a single man again. He tries to keep his spirits up, but it’s not an easy task considering he didn’t want the separation in the first place. Things start looking up when he meets stunning, lively Alice (Louise Bourgoin) at his grandmother’s funeral. The catch is that she’s engaged to another man, none other than Marc’s cousin (Nicolas Bedos). However, neither Marc nor Alice seem to see that as a problem: they embark on a love affair.
The real problem is that Marc is the author of a recently published best seller called Love Lasts Three Years, even if he wrote it under a pseudonym. A book that Alice happens to find both misogynistic and adolescent — the work of a skeptic who has never experienced true love. But some secrets can’t be kept forever: soon or later, all hell is going to break loose. French writer-turned-filmmaker Frederic Beigbeder’s Love Lasts Three Years (L’Amour dure trois ans) attempts to be a romantic story with a dose of drama and some humour. It tries to be engaging and sharp. It wants to stand out from the crowd. But the truth is that it doesn’t fulfill any of its aspirations (not by a long shot), and instead turns out to be trite and predictable.
Love Lasts Three Years follows the mould of US mainstream dramatic comedies, but it does it all wrong. For starters, some performances are too rehearsed, and so all possible cheerfulness vanishes as soon as the actors enter the scene. Other times, they are simply as generic as they come. In any case, they fail to elicit any empathy and identification from viewers. Then there’s the dialogue, which may ring true here and there, but for the most part it’s not as natural and colloquial as it pretends to be. Likewise, forget to find witty one-liners — which, incidentally, are a must in a well written dramatic comedy.
But what’s most inexcusable is that the entire film is derivative of so many other features that you get the feeling you’re watching a series of scenes where commonplace is the sole protagonist. And we’re not talking about paying homage. No wonder there’s no fun at all: you are likely to experience indifference and boredom. It’s not even the kind of film that is so bad it becomes entertaining.
The very uninspired and flat mise-en-scène doesn’t say anything about the characters and their environment. Love Lasts Three Years is simply mediocre, from the first frame to the last.
