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'He Loves Me' successfully plays on audience's assumptions
Stars: Audrey Tautou, Samuel Le Bihan, Clement Sibony
MPAA rating: Unrated, but PG in nature for mature content
Now playing: Manor, Squirrel Hill
Being played by the irrepressible wide-brown-eyed gamine Audrey Tautou ("Amelie"), Angelique would have our attention anyway.
We find something sweet, if manipulative, about her imploring a poor florist to deliver the single rose she's sending her lover on the anniversary of their meeting.
Notice shortly afterward how she paints her lover's face onto a charcoal of the Christ-like model swathed in sheets she's supposed to be rendering in art class.
We're pleased to learn she's to receive an art scholarship and must do 15 paintings for an exhibit by fall. And that her guy is a cardiologist; she'll live comfortably and paint with less pressure. Her late painter-father probably would approve.
Not so fast. The cardiologist is Loic (Samuel Le Bihan), who is married to Rachel (Isabelle Carre), who is five months pregnant.
Must Angelique be a home wrecker when the available and earnest David (Clement Sibony) seems incomparably more attentive to her than Loic?
Can best friend Heloise (Sophie Guillemin), a single mom, give her no hints about handling romantic miscalculations while they're waitressing at a Bordeaux, France, cafe?
The more time we spend with Angelique, the more annoying she becomes. She's willful, inconsiderate, selfish and infuriatingly immature.
She says Loic is on the verge of leaving his wife. She contrives trouble between them. She destroys her property and others'. A deliberate hit-and-run. An assault. Wait, two assaults. And a possible murder.
All this over a cold fish of a guy she allowed to use her for 15 minutes? Who is this wild child?
Just at the point where Angelique becomes most unbearable to be around, "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" stops and rewinds in a flash.
And then, in a hybrid of "The Sixth Sense" and "Gambit," the story replays from a different vantage, trumping assumptions by rising above the characters' limited views of themselves to a level of objectivity that is arresting.
"She Loves Me" demonstrates how movies manipulate audiences who buy too indiscriminately into whatever's being peddled.
Co-written by first-time director Laetitia Colombani and Caroline Thivel, it's a crafty bit of chicanery that lets the audience in on its twist even earlier than Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo."
The idea isn't to catch us offguard in the final moments but to rearrange information so that we see how its configuration can influence the way we respond to it.
Pierre Aim's cinematography is a rare example today of work that could have passed muster in the big-studio era before poor lighting and chaos were mistaken for art and style.
I quibble only with the selection of the late, great Nat "King" Cole's swinging, upbeat "L-O-V-E" as the pivotal song. His ominously romantic "I'd Rather Have the Blues" (from "Kiss Me Deadly") or his delicate "Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup" would seem closer to the mark. See what you think.
