At the beginning of Love phewa vision that young Clotaire has almost acts as a declaration of intention: on the port where the boy has lunch with his father, a puddle of gasoline forms an undulating mirror colored by the iridescent light of the sun. Hectic and colorful, this is how we could describe the aesthetic of the film, which unfolds around the thwarted love story of Clotaire (played by Malik Frikah, then François Civil) and Jackie (Mallory Wanecque, then Adèle Exarchopoulos), spread over nearly fifteen years, a festival of more or less inspired visual ideas. This is evidenced by the first sequence, centered on the beginnings of a shooting and its tragic outcome, where Gilles Lellouche connects nervous tracking shots, choreographed sequence shots, a scene of nervous breakdown lit by the bright light of a red light and an exchange of fire represented – quite elegantly – by a play of Chinese shadows. Barouf of 2h45, Love phew immediately affirms its desire to maintain, barring rare lulls, an intensity at high speed.
The horizon of romance implies above all an unleashing of passions: love, of course, illustrated from the credits by the gigantic flame escaping from an industrial chimney, but also violence. Love phew in fact looks as much on the side of the sentimental drama as the gangster film. The trajectory of Clotaire, a teenage delinquent wrongly imprisoned for twelve years before then running his own criminal empire, recalls the rise and fall Scorsesians, while a montage alternating between heist and church wedding quotes The Godfather. Lellouche precisely replays, through a long traveling shot on a steadicam in a nightclub, the famous sequence of Freed where Henry Hill sneaked backstage into the Copacabana club: doped with American neo-noir, Love phew intends to relocate the mafia fresco to the North of France during the 1980s, with Benoît Poelvoorde as an ersatz Michael Corleone. If Lellouche dreams of Hollywood, the result, more noisy than poisonous, nevertheless leans more towards Olivier Marchal’s thrillers, imposing, from armed brawls to family disputes, the exaltation of brutality as a cardinal value.
Make love and war
And Love phew often resembles a somewhat cheesy music video, the film still has a particularity: even though its staging strains the muscles, Lellouche displays astonishing candor. The virtuosity he aims for aims to transform the romance between Jackie and Clotaire into a grandiloquent melodrama with assumed kitsch, which reconciles sentimentalism with the virilist imagery of the Kourtrajmé stable. Once again, the film pulls no punches: a chewing gum passed from mouth to mouth turns into a beating heart, the lovers exchanging a kiss in the middle of a field of rapeseed worthy of Wizard of Ozetc. Despite an almost disconcerting sincerity, the film errs on the side of gluttony, often tipping into sterile hyperbole.
If, as Vincent Lacoste’s character says, “ no one likes the mundane », Lellouche seems to have fallen into the opposite pitfall – an excess of plastered originality. However, some beautiful intuitions emerge here and there, whether they are more “hushed” moments of tenderness (a delicate embrace against the backdrop of a solar eclipse) or the rhythm of certain shots (during the prologue, a tracking shot on closed car trunks in rhythm, which ends with Clotaire’s weapon thrown into the foreground). In places, Lellouche seems tempted to switch to the side of musical comedy, a fertile ground for the formal exacerbation of emotions, but the film ultimately sticks to timid dance numbers, which are added to a host of stereotypical images . Quite a symbol: Love phew ends with a gleaming postcard (a kiss at sunset, with the sea in the background) which sums up its artificiality well.
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