Of all the young French filmmakers currently working, Christophe Honoré may be the most in thrall to the poses thrown by the New Wave directors of the 1950s and 60s - which partly explains his golden-boy status within the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma. After making his name internationally with a run of depressive dramas defined chiefly by leading man Louis Garrel's nicotine-stained sulk (Ma mère, Dans Paris), Honoré now appears to be working through a Jacques Demy phase: following on the heels of 2009's Les Chansons d'Amour, his new film Beloved is a 135-minute musical that trots around Europe in the company of one extended, well-to-do French family, detailing their travels and travails over a 50-year period, and somehow contriving to be glossy and glum simultaneously.
It opens with modern-gal Chiara Mastroianni telling the story of how her flighty shopgirl mother (Ludivine Sagnier) came to meet her Czech doctor husband (Rasha Bukvic) while she was on the game - inevitably, the term prostitution is too ugly a word for a bauble as notionally pretty as this to employ - and kept returning to him, even after she'd remarried, apparently sowing the seeds of romantic trauma in her eventual offspring. So far, so soapy, and so very French: the twist is that the characters keep bursting into song to express their tormented emotions, which comes as something of a surprise when the backdrop is the Prague Spring.
We move forward, in the sprightly fashion of a Soviet tank. By the late 90s, Sagnier's daughter has grown up to be herself unlucky in love; her dad has grown up to be Milos Forman (one for the cinephiles), while her mum has grown up to be Catherine Deneuve. This latter development isn't quite the credibility stretch it sounds, given the notes of Streep-like levity Deneuve has recently had inserted into her once-stiff and starchy screen persona, but it suggests just how in thrall Honoré is to the archaic notion of the star system: audiences going to Beloved simply to see La Deneuve sing probably won't be too disappointed, but one might suggest last year's Potiche had the twin advantage of a) being shorter and b) having a lot more fun along the way to the opening bars.
In a confection as attenuated and segmented as this, perhaps it's inevitable certain bits will take your fancy more than others do. Despite Deneuve's presence, the most Demy-ish material here comes early. I could watch Ludivine Sagnier dressed as a shopgirl and breathily trilling knock-off chansons about shoes just about all day, but by the time the film takes up with a polysexual love triangle of South Kensington hipsters, Beloved has become problematically Garrel-ly: slumpy and self-absorbed, with nothing much more at stake than Chiara Mastroianni's ability to turn a gay jazz drummer straight. This is a family whose members, as the final hours of September 11, 2001 play out, are still moaning about the fact they've been put up in a Montreal hotel room; I was happier when the tanks were rolling into Czechoslovakia, to be honest.
If Alex Beaupain's songs exhibit a certain craft, they're demonstrative more of a shrewdly imitative ear than anything especially original; as a potted history of French pop music, they're as heterogenous as the film itself, scrupulous in their avoidance of the African musical heritage, and overly reliant on ballads that come in only just north of drippy: it's a musical for the Coldplay generation, if ever there was. As a picture of privilege singing and dancing its way round Paris and its environs, you may be better off sticking with Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You - one of that increasingly erratic filmmaker's last real bullseyes.
Beloved opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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