He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not (2003)

Reminded of the sweet film Amélie when talking to a fellow IMDber about the Cinema Du Look movement,I felt that it was the perfect time to catch a glimpse of its lead star: Audrey Tautou.Planning to get Tautou movies on DVD,I got very lucky and stumbled on a movie of Tautou's online (with English Subs!) which led to me getting ready to pull the petals of love.The plot:Running into neighbour Dr.Loïc Le Garrec, Angélique finds herself quickly falling in love.Becoming obsessed with Garrec, Angélique starts making plans for them to go on holiday and to start a family. Learning that a patient is suing Garrec after they got into a fight, Angélique decides to pay the patient a visit,which causes the patient to die of fright. Seeing these events as making their love stronger, Angélique soon discovers that Garrec has a completely different perspective on their romance.View on the film:Taking the bones of the Erotic Thriller,the screenplay by co- writer/(along with Caroline Thivel) director Laetitia Colombani turns the sub-genre on its head with a quirky delight,which gives the extreme distance that Angélique goes to express her love a distinctively quirky edge. Cutting the title in half on a specific event,the writers brilliantly switch the films mood from playful Comedy to dark Thriller via giving Angélique's side a lightness that keeps everything skin-deep,which digs in as Garrec starts to becoming aware of the unfolding nightmare.Going blue for Garrec,director Colombani and cinematographer Pierre Aïm play the love game with a kind of blue,as stylish deep blue's soak up the romantic, breezy mood Garrec casts over Angélique.Opening up her private life, Colombani whirls the movie in a maze of colour, scatted across the screen in eye-catching, ill- fitting patrons matching the odds and fading ends that Angélique has used to make her dream romance painting. Trapped in an unknown romance, Samuel Le Bihan gives a great performance as Garrec, fuelled by Bihan giving Garrec busted nerves over the "gifts" Angélique sends him.Looking like a broken china doll, Audrey Tautou gives an excellent performance as Angélique,whose quirky warmth Tautou cleverly uses to boil a peculiar viciousness,which spills over as Angélique wonders if her loves me,or he loves me not.

Despite not being in my mother tongue, this movie proved to be one of my favorites. It starts off rather slowly with a simple, seemingly innocent and sweet girl and the affair she is having with Loic, a married cardiologist. However, it contains one of the most unexpected twists in history. Nothing in the movie quite prepares you for the twist about 40 minutes into the movie when the director reverses the films perspective, showing the preceding events from Loic's point of view. The casting of Audrey Tautou as Angelique was brilliant as he Bambi eyes and heart-shaped face will never prepare you for the amount of crazy she is. A clever way of showing how a kind gesture and chance meeting can be interpreted in very different ways.

He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not... is a French psychological thriller film directed by Laetitia Colombani. The film focuses on a young artist, played by Audrey Tautou, and a married cardiologist, played by Samuel Le Bihan, with whom she is dangerously obsessed. The film studies the condition of erotomania and is both an example of the nonlinear and "unreliable narrator" forms of storytelling.Isabelle Carré,Clément Sibony and Sophie Guillemin play supporting roles.It is a black comedy with a dramatic twist.Talented art student Angélique is wildly in love with Loïc, a married cardiologist whose wife, Rachel is expecting their first child. She sends him mash notes and gifts, and tells her friend, Héloïse that, despite appearances, Loïc plans to leave his wife. Angélique also ignores the attentions of her lovesick friend, David, who begins to resent the way Loïc treats Angélique. As Angélique grows less discreet in her affections, Loïc's home life begins to fall apart. His wife grows suspicious, and then miscarries. His career is jeopardized when a patient accuses him of assault. All the while, Angélique is desperate to be by his side.The film is deft, delicious work, but a very different romantic fantasy than you probably expect.It's about love, obsession and revenge and Tautou bewitches us from the very first scene.Finally,this romantic thriller puts Tautou's sweetheart Amelie image to good use. Even though she's very young, she managed to portray her character with precision.

He Loves me, He Loves Me Not – The very title conjures up images of lovelorn girls bemoaning their romantic tribulations, falling in and out of love and pursuing the un-pursuable. At first it seems like the director makes the typical plot work, with a vibrant visual eye and knack for keeping the relationship at a fast but believable pace. For a time it's ridiculously but bearably sugary, even the opening credits are laid over images of love heart merchandise, with a delightful bells and whistles score chiming out for new romance in the background. As expected he state of the relationship gets progressively worse, the tone then fades slowly into a darker one, becoming like increasingly like a tragic melodrama. Angelique, the central character, goes overboard and overreacts to the downward slide – As happens due to love, so we sympathise. Then everything changes, a monumental twist occurs and the film changes into a different one. The audacity in such a move isn't because it's especially deceptive or unjustifiable (ala The Usual Suspects), but because it so fluidly and intelligently reinvents everything we've already seen – But yet still ties in with all we've witnessed, making complete sense because of how it is implemented within the boundaries of the film. The sweetness tastes bitter, pleasant events become darkly comedic and the emotional tragedies of the first half have to be urgently reconsidered.Audrey Tautou, as well as playing the Amelie charm and feminine charisma wonderfully, adds a new level of oddity and disturbance rarely seen in roles played by young women. In tune with the films development her characters real nature comes out gradually, but because she plays up the quintessential lightness it's almost hard to believe when more is revealed about her. I found myself asking "How could Audrey Tautou do that???", which was obviously the reaction the director and Tautou herself wanted to project – With her image adorned to the character, the eventual narrative twists and re-assessments that follow are made all the more hard to swallow but even more interesting to consider. An inspired piece of casting and one of many brilliant uses of subversion the film employs. The cinematography carries the same structural and performance development, with the first section making use of slow-motion, colour and intentionally formal methods, in many ways lulling the viewer and taking advantage of the expectation that what we see is the one and only truth. The second half appears more shadowy, with an emphasis on hand-held movements. More scenes are inside with a greater feeling of paranoia and worry, with very little bright light or colour. The background appears to be out of focus more often than not, whether this is the case or I just was more aware of it, looking out for another threat, after the sudden burst of unpredictability the twist unleashes.Even with the elements of romance and suspense, the director manages to squeeze a perfect amount of dark humour out of genuinely macabre situations. Not a single joke is told, but through manipulation of musical and narrative cues and clues, there are some hilariously dark and bizarre comedy elements at play – Not the kind of humour I personally would expect from the romance genre, least of all French romantic cinema. Equally intelligently worked in are some of the more grim strands, looking at the film as a whole some of the revelations are quite shocking, but the subtle humour and tragedy are both secondary to the expertly weaved story structure and character expositions. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is riveting because of the director's ability to celebrate, indulge in, and subvert convention. In a "Why didn't I notice that?" fashion the director toys with the fundamentals of perception, in the internal sense of character focus and reaction, and the external case of playing with the viewer's engrained expectations of structure and narrative. The plot does slightly peter out towards the end, as all of the pieces of the puzzle have to naturally fall into place, but we're left looking at a pleasantly surprising, challenging work of great excitement. One for those who like a little bit of everything in their cinema.