A spirited young woman falls in love with the live-in partner of the man with whom she’s having an affair.
This tale is meant to be, I believe, a simple, lovely little story about a pretty 30ish young woman who finds the kind of love she has longed for with her current lover’s rather depressive middle-aged partner, Emilie. The tagline is actually “Lose Yourself in Love.” Anaïs of the title is bouncy, rather manic, but chasing the one experience she believes has eluded her in her many sexual encounters – deep, soul-touching love. She skips blithely from lover to lover, like a honeybee searching for the sweetest flower, failing to note the emotional destruction she leaves in her wake. Or, more likely, she doesn’t care. She is the true measure of a narcissist in that way.
However, it could be argued she is a borderline personality, someone with almost no accurate self-awareness, shallow, and self-serving. Her attachment to her mother is childlike, not the supportive adult her mother needs when attacked by a life-altering disease. When Anaïs finds herself pregnant, her boyfriend is shocked at her total dismissal of the pregnancy as more of an inconvenience, a “bump” in the road, than the realization that due to her negligence, she holds a life in her hands and it seems to mean nothing to her.
Anaïs is constantly running. Yes, literally RUNNING. She runs with her bicycle through the streets of Paris and, in fact, everywhere she goes. Despite all the running, however, she is always late. No matter, though, if her lateness interferes with a meeting and leaves someone waiting on her, simply grab a bunch of flowers from a vendor, which will make up for her tardiness. She is late on her rent, late meeting her boyfriend for a movie he wants to see, and doesn’t want to miss the beginning, so they miss the entire film. You would think she would occasionally arrive somewhere on time for all the energy expended running.
Altogether, the hurry, haste, and chaos of her life seem of no real matter to her. Until she meets Daniel (Denis Podalydès), an older book publisher, and begins a sexual liaison with him, not out of affection or even desire, but in the hopes he will be able to help her out as she has sublet her apartment and needs a place to stay. While with Daniel, she sees a picture of his partner, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a beautiful, talented woman he is obviously in love with. Emilie is a well-known, quite brilliant novelist, and Anaïs is taken with her on the spot.
Poor Emilie at this point. She appears mired in depression over a career she feels will fail as she ages, plus the lines and wrinkles that tell their tale on her face. Her feelings for Daniel are mixed and held in place primarily by time together and a reluctance to call it quits. Who would love her at 46 or 56 but Daniel? At first, she doesn’t realize that her number is up and control of her life and emotions is passing, unbeknownst to her persistence and obsessiveness of Anaïs. Anaïs sets traps to meet and engage Emilie with the obvious but subtle intention of dragging her into a relationship, which she does. Once snared, Anaïs has no intention of letting Emilie get away and is a master at touching all the right chords to keep her hanging on.
This film is meant to be a romantic comedy but fails miserably. Two women walking the edges of mental illness aren’t authentic enough to be genuinely romantic nor empathic enough to lose themselves in love. They are sad, and their story is tragic. Perhaps being a Westerner, not a Frenchwoman, leaves me at a disadvantage but so be it. My advice is this: If you see Anaïs in love, and coming for you, just get lost!
In Theaters Friday, April 29th, and On-Demand Friday, May 6th
