The Names of Love (2010)

Hysterically funny! I was laughing out loud. Sara Forestier is a revelation. Her extroverted character ridicules the prejudice, history, culture and human personalities so smoothly, it makes it impossible to stay indifferent.The free spirit is teaching the locked ones about the world and life. 10 stars for a fabulous script and acting. Intelligent and entertaining. With so much darkness and negativity in the world this casts a liberating candlelight against the cites of the political figures that have shaped the history.I highly recommend this movie!

Interesting slant.He's half Jewish, half French, has a terribly common name that belies his heritage.She's half Arabic, half French, has a very unique name that belies her heritage.Neither recognizes their foreign culture or religion; both identify heavily with French politics and culture. He is not seen as Jewish, she is not seen as Arabic, so they fit easily into French society, yet both had grandparents who were treated very badly by French authorities.He is twice her age and refuses her initial advances. She's excited by the prospect of becoming a Jewish/Arab couple, noting that this could only happen in France (thus making them very French).Their parents are deeply entrenched on opposite sides of the political spectrum. His French father spent his career in nuclear power while his mother was taught to deny her Jewish heritage. Her French mother is a staunch left-wing activist and her father is an Algerian-born people-pleaser. Their first dinner party together with at first two, then all three couples is true dark comedy.

I saw this movie literally to get out of the intense heat a couple of nights ago not expecting or even knowing that much about it and that's prob the best way to approach it. Its a very nice and deceptively light french film about the ridiculousness of people's beliefs and the ridiculousness that other people will go to to change these beliefs. Film wants to and very much succeeds in wanting to merge people's personal beliefs with their political ones but in a way that is both light and sweet and funny without being either too maudlin and sad or too lightweight.Film features a radical liberal who knowing that talk will never get anyone to change their minds prefers to let her body do the talking for her. (she engages in intercourse to get other people to change their minds--just how she does it is explained in the film although its a fair question as to whether or not it would actually work in real life or not.)One day she hears this uptight doctor on the phone and decides to seduce him--not knowing that he brings his own rather heavy baggage with him in the form of family history, parental beliefs informing his own beliefs and just about everything you can imagine really. She in turn brings her own baggage (fam history, parental beliefs, and also current relationship with parents)but she never doubts her own abilities to change anyone's minds for a second.Needless to say they fall for one another and an attachment gets made and now the 2 of them have to overcome a lot to make it work if they're gonna make it work at all. This is not a spoiler to say that this is what happens--because the bulk of the movie is the 2 leads trying to get their stuff in tune with one another so that they can continue to more or less lead the lives they were living just with each other instead of without.Its not an easy tone to pull off given the balance that is needed to offset real world beliefs with the warmth and heart needed to make a successful romantic comedy but this one managed to do it more so then any recent film i can recall seeing which is damn impressive. Its actually quite Woody Allenish in some way which is even more impressive as most who try to copy Allen can't quite get the heart part right. Much like some of Woody Allen's films this film even brings in some really heavy duty topics with an amazingly light touch. Things like the holocaust, the war of Algerian independence, and modern day conservatism vs modern day liberalism all manage to get touched upon and discussed but never in a way that's heavy handed or brings the movie to a halt. Film always amazingly manages to maintain a lightness of touch and this is in no small part because of the very zesty and very lively performance of Sara Forstier in the lead role. She is like Sophia Loren in some of her more lively performances one who clearly loves life and one who doesn't really care or need other people to tell her how she should live it and its one that should her career take off--it'll be this role that people look back on 10, 20 years from now and say Viva La France!

(Minor spoilers.) The premise of this movie is a romance between a self-proclaimed left-wing "political whore" and a (left-leaning, but not overtly political) veterinarian. Both are the children of a native French citizen and a member of a historically maligned group (Baya is half-Algerian, Arthur half-Jewish). But instead of engaging in some awful, weepy remembrance tearjerker, this movie gives its audience some credit and handles the expected poignance with humor and aplomb. Yes, the characters have secrets and conflicts which they've circumvented throughout their lives, but the specifics are irrelevant and--appropriately--elided. Rather, this is an attempt to examine how people deal with their heritage and personal lives while trying to reconcile their reactions with their beliefs--and what they feel their beliefs _ought_ to be.Moreover, while the full complexity of the characters' struggles is shown, it is always with a subtlety that keeps the movie grounded. The conversion of ancestral suffering into a cachet, to be readily exploited for the social needs of youth; the feelings of inadequacy in the presence of our parents, whose enormous ordeals seem to render our own difficulties trivial; the mental prisons we build for ourselves in order to establish emotional security; all of these intricate webs of social determinants and individual aspirations are depicted with just the right balance of sympathy and objectivity.So there is actual substance here. But what is truly remarkable is that Leclerc's use of po-mo tropes (like protagonists directly addressing the camera or characters interacting with their former selves) never feels stilted or laborious, and in fact entails a seamless fusion of form and content.