"An escape from the dull logic of ordinary life"

After the angular, chain smoking glamour noire of Coco Before Chanel, this charming romantic comedy sees Director Pierre Salvadori reunited with Audrey Tautou, to create a film that is all about sass and prettiness. Everything about it is easy on the eye – set in a French harbour town, drenched in sunlight and blossom and populated by effortlessly chic French beauties. Natalie Baye, who plays Emilie’s (Tautou) mother even manages to give a sexy edge to the nightdress, bed head and bare feet ensemble she sports when chasing the man she believes is in love with her through the cobbled streets. The story’s concept is how a series of lies can eventually lead to the truth – and whether or not the lies in the plot are necessarily all beautiful, the film certainly is.

Based around mistaken identity and a series of loveletters (real and false), the plot makes use of the same devices for making sure the path of true love doesn’t run smooth that have always served romance writers well, from medieval times through Shakespeare and Jane Austen. There’s even a generous dose of pride and prejudice thrown into the mix of the characters’ trouble-causing emotions. These tried and tested plot motifs give the film an old fashioned, innocent feel that adds to its ability to delight.

But it’s not just froth. Salvadori says one of his preoccupations in the plot was the extent to which a person can help and betray someone, love and betray them in the same breath, and the behaviour of the characters certainly gives the audience this to puzzle over. Meanwhile, playful filmmaking techniques explore stylistically different and misleading ways of seeing the world. Just as the private emotional perspective of each character distorts the reality around them that the audience can clearly see, we’re shown scenes up-ended in the reflection of a river, or misted through a speeding train window and we observe the characters watching each other through coloured stained glass, or silhouetted as shadows. There’s even perhaps a bit of classic French existentialist worry in there. If what we think to be reality is actually only that we can ever see and feel around us, then reality is a pretty inadequate concept. As this film shows us, what goes on when you’re not there is often where the real truth is.

Apart from the utter chicness of this film, its ‘Frenchness’ is also shown in its unwillingness to be sentimental. Although the film is designed for prettyness and a happy ending it doesn’t do schmaltz. Audrey’s Emilie isn’t the whimsical goody goody that Amelie was near the start of her career – she’s a flawed and insecure vodka-swilling heroine with a sizeable cruel streak. While I liked her complexity, my friend found her a bit too sharp to really like and to root for.

The eventual resolution of all the perpetuating misunderstandings revolves around a revenge from mother against daughter that is at the same time a gift and a reconciliation. Not as impossible as it sounds,  but it certainly doesn’t make for a straightforward happy-ever-after ending. Despite Salvadori’s self-confessed struggle with the plot and his efforts to make this unlikely love story believable by rejecting sentimentality, it’s not exactly realism. The love story is neatly and suddenly tied up at the end and all the comic misadventures along the way are quickly put back to rights – its preposterous in fact – but that’s exactly how I like my romantic comedies. An escape from the dull logic of ordinary life.