Philadelphia Weekly

When they stormed the film scene half a century ago, the French New Wave took America's trash cinema as their major inspiration: the gangster pictures, the noirs, the seedy little B-movies. The movement wound up serving as inspiration itself, its formal invention and brittle whimsy driving Hollywood to loosen their collars for most of the '70s, to name just one debtor.

But no one has ever planted as big or as sloppy a kiss on the Nouvelle Vague as fellow countryman Christophe Honor�. Though the director's big international splash was Ma M�re, a suitably brutal take on transgressive philosopher Georges Bataille, he's since turned out Dans Paris and now the musical Love Songs--two near-sycophantic hat-tips to the movement that try to drag their stylings, kicking and screaming, into the now.

Is that the same as Fran�ois Truffaut making his own version of an RKO programmer? Not really. There's a huge amount of reverence in Honor�'s homages that was never quite present in the films that inspired them. And frankly, the aura surrounding the Nouvelle Vague can be a bit too fawning and mythical.

At worst Dans Paris and Love Songs simply reinforce this trend, presenting a Disneyland version of the Wave: people reading books in bed, dizzying on-location Paris footage, playful opening titles, fourth-wall breaks--the works. The films of Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, etc., were trying to reinvent a medium; Honor� just wants you to think about the awesomeness of Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, etc. (And that reminds me: Go buy Richard Brody's excellent new Jean-Luc Godard biography Everything Is Cinema.)

There's a strong chance this young (French) Turk will blossom into a great and wholly original talent. If so, he may look back on these bald valentines with a twinge of embarrassment, the way an established novelist winces at their early appropriations of Ernest Hemingway.

But hey, while we're young, enjoy, right? And Love Songs, even more so than Dans Paris, is a perverse kind of entertainment. Honor�'s latest is specifically smitten with Godard's 1961 A Woman Is a Woman--a musical, if an exceedingly Godardian one, where a stark relationship saga is fitted with bubbly pop songs and countless Brechtian tomfoolery.

That more or less describes Love Songs, which stars the ever-smarmy Louis Garrel, of The Dreamers and previous Honor� films, and Swimming Pool's Ludivine Sagnier as its own feuding couple.

When we first see them, they're lightly bickering over cell phones, with Sagnier confessing that she sometimes hates Garrel. But once they return to their swank Parisian flat, we discover the odd maneuver they've undertaken to save the relationship: Garrel's co-worker Clotilde Hesme--also the actor's radiant co-star in his Nouvelle Vague father's film Regular Lovers--has joined their bed as a third wheel.

Hello, nurse! Except that's not really the plot. Not a half-hour in--and after only one mild bit of hubba hubba--tragedy right out of Erich Segal strikes. Turns out Sagnier has the same movie disease as Ali McGraw in another film with "love" in the title, and just as Honor�'s getting ready to explore the emotional fissures of living menage a trois, she collapses fatally.

And so Love Songs takes a sudden nosedive into a deep, deep funk, vying to becoming the most depressing musical since Cabaret. Keyed into grief and emotional recovery in very personal and eccentric ways, it suggests a stark drama, not a movie in which people frequently burst into pop songs and light hoofing.

This isn't the pure artifice of Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You; the songs aren't there to serve as counterpoint to the misery on-screen. They take the issues head-on, with the characters addressing their feelings and problems in verse, just as they do when they're speaking. Love Songs goes to some strange but recognizable psychological places--and eventually one cinematically underexplored sexual place--and it's all the more effective for doing so in a genre not exactly known for naturalism. (And this after Once tried to give the musical a dash of realism.)

In fact, it's a damn shame about the film's one major design flaw: The love songs themselves just ain't so hot. The lyrics maybe help deepen the characters, but the tunes--a fizzy kind of generic French pop--are purely serviceable, with no melody ever ingraining itself in the mind. Love Songs is clearly aiming for a charmingly tossed-off feel, but there's nothing wrong with giving us something to hum.

Where's Serge Gainsbourg when you need him?