In “Trois amis”, the filmmaker Emmanuel Mouret orchestrates a romantic round to a funeral tune

THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED

Comedy is based on calculation, it is the daughter of numbers and combinations. It is therefore no coincidence that the latest feature film by Emmanuel Mouret, an amiable painter of romantic inconsistencies, bears the number 3 on the pediment, a sign of a ternary structure and a syncopated rhythm. But, precisely, Three friends Is it still in a comic vein? It seems that, for once (at least since the attempt at melodrama Another life, in 2013), Mouret seems to be looking for a deeper emotion, a more serious note. Here, we would rather be dealing with a sort of « play drama »as Jean Renoir said about The Rules of the Game (1939), or even a musical suite which would constantly oscillate, beyond opposing tonalities, from major to minor. From the clear line of his previous films, Mouret now moves to the broken line, with mixed feelings, from playful humor to cyclothymia.

We are in Lyon. Joan (India Hair) and Alice (Camille Cottin) teach in the same high school. The first, torn, suffers from no longer feeling for her companion, Victor (Vincent Macaigne), a French teacher, and feels held towards him by a demand for honesty. The second, assumes a dispassionate conjugality and professes to play comedy at home to protect herself from too violent romantic storms. As for the third, Rebecca (Sara Forestier), a visual arts teacher looking for a job, who, in the meantime, plays guard at the museum, is going out with “Mr. and for good reason, since he is the companion of Alice (Grégoire Ludig). The sudden death of Victor in a car accident, which leaves Joan inconsolable, will soon reshuffle the cards, bringing a newcomer to the vacant professorship, a man named Thomas (Damien Bonnard), a successful author.

Death thus makes its entrance, less shattering than subdued, into the cinema of Emmanuel Mouret, who begins to film it for the first time, almost thirty years after its debut. The story is even told from this impossible place, since, ironically, the voice-over is none other than that of the dead man, who serves as a relay for us, following the canonical model of Twilight Boulevard (1950), by Billy Wilder. This funeral part does not serve, fortunately, as a “moral” counterpart to the frivolity of the love circle: it rather defines this metaphorical distance which allows us to take a tender look at the characters, while designating the perishable nature of desire, suspended from cycles of extinction and rebirth. This responds to the gently autumnal slope of a film which carries the characters through broken halftones, fading days and deep nights.

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