L'Amour ouf by Gilles Lellouche, with François Civil & Adèle Exarchopoulos : Our opinion

It's one of the most eagerly awaited French films of the year. The reason is its 3-star cast: François Civil, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Alain Chabat, Benoît Poelvoorde, Vincent Lacoste, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Élodie Bouchez, Karim Leklou, Raphaël Quenard, alongside newcomers Anthony Bajon, Mallory Wanecque and Malik Frikah.

Selected in official competition at last year's Cannes Film Festival,Gilles Lellouche's L'Amour Ouf is due to hit French cinemas on October 16, 2024. The story takes place in northern France in the 1980s. Jackie (Mallory Wanecque) and Clotaire (Malik Frikah) grow up between the high school benches and the harbor docks. She studies, he hangs out. Then their destinies cross and they fall madly in love. Life tries to keep them apart, but they're like two ventricles of the same heart.

Gilles Lellouche 's novelistic fresco, spanning more than 20 years, is divided into several unequal parts. The result is a very (too?) dense work that undeniably suffers from its length (2 hours 45 minutes), despite a very convincing first third that is actually superior to what follows. With a real sense of detail given to the 80s reconstruction - sets, costumes, music - the beginning of L'Amour Ouf will awaken memories in a fringe of viewers.

And it's the teenage versions of Jackie and Clotaire, played by Mallory Wanecque and Malik Frikah, who turn out to be the most touching in their immaturity and excessiveness. Much more so than their adult alter-egos (François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos), who make it difficult to distinguish between the character and the star behind them. And perhaps this - too - is what L'Amour Ouf suffers from: a cast so perfect, so expected, that it leaves them by the wayside.

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For while Lellouche is undeniably keen to show off his know-how and knowledge of cinema (one thinks of Scorsese, PTA), his direction quickly falls into excess, into overkill. The camera is never static: ultra-expressive, it strings together convoluted shots, zooms in, zooms out, becomes animated and excited to the point where simple field/counter-field dialogues are done in ultra-fast pans.

It's teeming withformal ideas, of course, but it also goes off in all directions. By trying too hard to reconcile form and content, the madness of his characters and the unstoppable fluidity of his camerawork, Gilles Lellouche forgets the very essence of a film entitled L'Amour Ouf: the feeling of love.

Despite the violence - which is very present in the film - the work never ceases to try and convince us that there is love between our two heroes. With the help of hits from those years( Billy Idol'sEyes without a Face, Yves Simon's Au pays des merveilles de Juliet ), grand kitsch flights of fancy and hyper-stylized scenes set to The Cure's cult track A Forest , bordering on musical comedy (the director claims to be a West Side Story fan), it's as if this technical plurality were a Band-Aid for a certain dearth of feeling.

In the end,L'Amour Ouf is a rather ponderous film that suffers from its director's formal and exhaustive desires, at the risk of disgusting. There are 300 grams of love too many, my dear lady, shall I put them on anyway?

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