Romantic comedies, especially those that have come from Hollywood since the 90s, tend to respond to the same structure. Boy meets girl, they like each other, they meet their friends, they flirt, there are problems, they argue, they make up and end up together. Over time there have been small variations, but the formula usually remains intact. Although the genre seems to be in crisis, the arrival of platforms has revitalized it. Netflix, Amazon and company once again bet on a genre where being original seems increasingly complicated.
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Now imagine a movie that begins not with the moment they meet, but when they’ve already met and have arranged to have sex. To continue turning the clichés around, the actors are not young, nor do they respond to canonical bodies. They are normal people, with normal bodies and normal professions. The romantic comedy begins to separate itself from the cliché. To finish squaring the circle, their relationship will only be told through their sporadic encounters, without us ever knowing anything about them. We don’t see when they lie down, hardly even when they kiss. Only what they talk about in those small meetings in parks, bars or museums. What we know of their lives is what they tell each other. We don’t know his wife or his daughter. Friends are not the funny secondary, and we do not know how they behave in their day to day.
Even the staging breaks the formula. A scene where they both grope in the car that is told from outside the vehicle while only being heard? This is what Emmanuel Mouret proposes in Time.news of an ephemeral love, film that offers a different look at love relationships. Mouret seems bent on deconstructing the genre, as he already demonstrated in his previous film, The things we say, the things we doand in analyzing the dynamics of sentimental relationships from a tone that appears light, but really isn’t.
A tone that they have defined as a mixture of Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer, a description that he appreciates and accepts, although he believes that the cinema that really influences him is more classic, and he shamelessly quotes Buster Keaton, Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. “My cinephilia is very classic, I admit it,” says Mouret before mentioning Buster Keaton again to talk about the inspiration for the construction of the main character, a brilliant clumsy Vincent Macaigne, without tables and with a completely diluted masculinity in contrast to the torrent of spontaneity that is the character of Sandrine Kiberlain.
“It is true that in my films I have a certain penchant for clumsiness, especially in the male characters. I mentioned Buster Keaton because I think that since I was a child I have liked clumsy movies, characters and actors. There is something that touches me deeply in clumsiness. It seems to me that it can deeply express something of our intimacy, something intimate, something about us as human beings who are always forced to adapt to new situations and hide our vulnerability, but the characters who show it move me, and I think they also move others. For me, Buster Keaton is a beautiful and profound image of film history. He has an almost metaphysical depth. A character who falls, straightens up, and starts over without accusing the world. No grudges ”, he tells of his way of understanding his characters.
When you make films, it is true that you base yourself on what you like, but above all, you make films against films that you did not like.
Emmanuel Mouret
— Director of dinner
He confirms that his film does not rely on the tired and common formulas in the cinema, but refuses to attribute all the blame to Hollywood for our conception of love and romantic comedy: “I don’t think Hollywood is solely responsible. There is the Hollywood of classic cinema. I am not going to point out and look for the person responsible, because in France, especially on television, it also happens. I’m more interested in looking at the filmmakers I like, the ones who make me want to make movies. Films that you don’t like, and Truffaut said this, are also interesting, because when you make films it’s true that you base yourself on what you like, but above all you make films against films that you didn’t like, and to me The ones I don’t like are not only those from Hollywood, there are many others”.
Everyone says that his cinema always revolves around love, but he stirs and corrects himself by saying that it is about desire, although when he explains it it seems like a way of not getting his fingers caught. “It is a precaution to say that, because love is more of a question. When we talk about love it seems that we all agree, but as soon as you try to reflect on the subject and be more precise, you realize that each person has an opinion, usually a divergent one. That’s why I think love is more of a question than evidence. However, desire is much more evident than love. In fact, when you see people, you don’t know if they love each other or not, or they can change their minds, while I think desire is more concrete, and desire can turn into love, ”he says.
Mouret adds another interesting reflection on his favorite theme, desire: “Once you feel it, many questions arise. Beginning with knowing if it is reciprocal, and guessing that is already a great job, and that is what the word is for. It is a kind of investigation that each one does and in which there are also customs. There are things that are said and others that are not said. Things that are done and others that are not done. For this reason, all the questions about desire are very well organized socially, and for this reason the stories of desire end up talking about the human being and his place in society.
It is curious that in a film whose theme is desire there are no sex scenes. Mouret’s camera records the post-sex, when the lovers talk. She is interested in what is said before or after, and all for a cinematographic issue. “What I like as a spectator in the cinema is the suspense, that you expect something to happen, but in the sex scenes is where desires come together and are satisfied. A sex scene is interesting if there is suspense, if it raises questions. I often take the example of basic instinct, where there are sex scenes, but because the suspense is in whether he will kill you with the ice pick from behind. There sex is interesting, as it is also when there is a desire that is not up to the other desire, but for me there always has to be something at stake to show it ”, he ditch.
This idea of suspense is also found in its narrative construction, which leaves out almost all the daily life of the protagonists to focus on what they tell each other when they see each other, because for the director “writing is finding the balance between what is shown and what is hidden. “I like the idea that cinema plays with what is hidden and that the viewer is like a detective. He is going to insert something from his own life, from his privacy, and that is why cinema is that kind of fusion between what is seen and what each spectator imagines ”. A cinema that leaves room for reflection and that finds “the danger today from the platforms, since the televisions had an obligation to invest in French production and the power that our cinema had is being diluted in favor of the platforms that come , almost all, from the US”.