HE LOVES ME… HE LOVES ME NOT

5/10

A la folie… pas du tout : France 2002 : Laetitia Colombani : 92 mins

A twisty French thriller from precocious twentysomething debutant writer-director Colombani, He Loves Me marks a somewhat drastic attempt by star Audrey Tautou to escape the cutsey vibe of her breakthrough hit Amelie. At first glance, however, her character Angelique could easily be Amelie’s Bordeaux cousin – a winsome, carefree art-student, Angelique tells her friends she’s involved in a passionate affair with married cardiologist Loic (Samuel Le Bihan). What they – and we – see seems to bear this out, and when Loic apparently drops Angelique in favour of his pregnant wife Rachel (Isobelle Carre) it’s perhaps understandable that the younger woman should enter a downward spiral into suicidal depression.

But just as Angelique hits rock bottom, Colombani freezes the action and ‘rewinds’ back to the start. We then see the ‘relationship’ from Loic’s perspective – suffice to say that in this mid-section Angelique barely figures at all: her amour fou, we realise, was very fou indeed. Finally the film catches up with itself and Loic and Angelique’s paths cross again, with violent results…

According to the film’s end credits, the script of He Loves Me won a competition for aspiring young screenwriters. That’s no surprise, because while Colombani clearly has talent and no shortage of ambition, her screenplay has the gimmicky feel of material written in order to win a contest rather than to produce a satisfying movie. It soon becomes a rather pointless exercise in cleverness, as if Colombani is smugly ticking us off for being so easily fooled by cinematic storytelling conventions: combine romantic images with romantic music, and we’ll fill in the gaps and come up with a romantic story out of thin air.

But it’s clear from much too early on that things aren’t what they seem, that Angelique is more than a little unhinged. While structured as a psychological thriller in which ‘normal’ behaviour shades into murderous psychosis, He Loves Me is fatally lacking in the crucial element of suspense - the aim seems to be a distaff Harry, He’s Here To Help, whose Sophie Guillemin is somewhat underused here as Angelique’s best friend Heloise. To make the full use of its central conceit, the first section should function as a breezy romance, which would then suddenly give way to the much darker, more disturbing atmosphere of the second section when we realise the extent of Angelique’s delusions.

By the time the commanding Le Bihan takes centre stage from Tautou, we already know everything that’s going to happen – it’s just a matter of finding out the how and the why. Colombani slots the pieces together  rather too neatly, relying on some implausible contrivances at various key stages. The end result recalls Le Bihan’s last movie A Private Affair: another tricky, self-satisfied Gallic jeu d’esprit  too busy showing off its cleverness to pursue more satisfying avenues of suspense and story development.

Things go badly downhill in He Loves Me’s last section, in which Angelique turns into a depressingly familiar ‘crazy woman’ stereotype and the film reveals a rather off-putting conservative streak. Psychiatric treatment is no good for the likes of her, it suggests: an implicitly pro-capital punishment subtext which sits all too comfortably with the film’s ongoing glorification of the conventional family unit. Colombani’s directorial contributions are similarly orthodox, employing a standard palette of visual/aural embellishments - though there are a couple of flourishes that suggest she’s capable of better: a striking aerial shot of the bridge on which Angelique considers suicide, the pale water of the river rushing below; and the death of a miniature rose-bush, the slow fall of its petals denoting the passing of time and the graceful demise of love’s young dream.