Shall We Kiss?

A light-toned exploration of sex turns dark.

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Apr. 14, 2009

Directed by Emmanuel Mouret
B-

“We’ll kiss now and get it over with, and then we’ll go eat. We’ll digest our food better,” suggests Woody Allen to Diane Keaton very early into their first date in Annie Hall. In France the thirtysomething writer/director/actor Emmanuel Mouret is considered, at least by himself, to be a handsome, Gallic version of Woody Allen. His latest, the amusingly bone-dry Shall We Kiss?, seems to have taken the aforementioned classic moment of intellectualized romance as its inspiration, turning a variation on a mere gag into a full-on feature.

Mouret plays a mousy, neurotic teacher who one day realizes, mid-lesson, that he suffers from what he calls a “lack of physical affection.” After an aborted romp with a prostitute, he turns to his best friend, happily married hottie Virginie Ledoyen (Cold Water, 8 Women). In cool, logical, but vaguely pained tones he lays out his case: She should sleep with him because he needs sex; they obviously don’t love one another; there could be hurt feelings with a stranger, etc.

Unfortunately, it’s a fantastic shtup, and soon enough the two have rationalized a second go. And a third. And a fourth. And so on.

They’re obviously in synch, sexually, and even more obviously drawn to each other. But they painfully argue for the sex and against a relationship, in turn holding the very ideas of love, romance and carnal lust up to scrutiny.

It’s a funny idea, made all the funnier by the hesitant and utterly serious manner with which Mouret and Ledoyen, both excellent, ploddingly debate each of their moves down to the most minute detail.

Perhaps if these scenes were even more comically drawn out, Mouret would have reached feature length without a problem. Alas, he feels compelled to throw in a) a wraparound story, in which a woman (Julie Gayet) tells the Mouret-Ledoyen cautionary tale to an attracted stranger (Michael Cohen), and b) a third act involving Ledoyen’s cuckolded husband, played by an actor (Stefano Accorsi) who appears to believe he’s in a far more serious movie.

Mouret does his best to sustain a light and deadpan-detached tone, with a hint of the dreamy stories-within-stories of late Buñuel. But the bubble pops and Shall We Kiss? becomes the wrong kind of serious.
 

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