Love Me If You Dare

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This film reminds the viewer of low budget "Amelie", but without the originality of its model. The characters of the film are as obnoxious, as the games they play. Julien and Sophie deserve one another, but unfortunately, we have to sit through this dud of a movie to realize we've been conned by its director, Yann Samuell. Let's say the end is just great, why didn't it come sooner??? Marion Cotillard and Gillaume Canet are attractive actors, but they deserve a better film. And yes, the playing of "La vie en rose" throughout the film by different artists of different styles is about the only thing worth remembering.

I think the French title sums up this film best, but not in the way it intends. I love romantic crap like this normally, especially offbeat stuff -- but the characters never seem to grow up, they remain children playing children's games. This prevented me from really caring about their eventual joined fate. Especially when the stakes are raised, and the lovers takes on spouses and have children, they never really grow up and these people have no bearing on their infantile love-battle with each other. The fact that these outsiders disappear conveniently when they are not needed in the story shows how shallow the storytelling truly is. Admittedly, a movie I like very much, SHE'S SO LOVELY, features a similar storyline where childish people are separated by time and when they come back together, they throw away everything that has happened in the intervening years just to be together again. The difference is that that film was written with an emphasis on character, not on style, and while it is not wholly successful, it remains a better portrait of l'amour fou than this film.

SPOILER BY WAY OF INTERPRETATION###### Most movies have one thing sinisterly in common with life. Both pretend that while people are good, life is full of bad things that happen to them which sometimes make them do bad things later. This is true, too, of villains. They are always justified by a bad child-hood or society. This movie is not much different. Sophie is abused because of her heritage/race (in French films this is allowed to be a background detail, in an American film they only mention it if that's what the movie's about in the first place, and even then they feel compelled to include a moral lesson about it {basically in order to deny that it is a facet of everyday life}). Julien's loss of his mother is his own motivation. But seriously folks the character's motivations are exactly what this movie is NOT about. They live their lives the way they do, not out of self-defense, but out of love of life. The ending makes perfect sense when viewed from this perspective. Do you dare to live life? Do you have unlimited control of your actions? If you did AND you had someone calling you on it at every point then your life would be as wild and nonsensical as these two fantasy figures. Wuthering Heights? Maybe. Romeo and Juliet? More likely.