After the success of his “Grand Bain”, the filmmaker hits rock bottom with a second (very) feature film that is formally bloated and quite nauseating in its subject matter.
After The Great Bath (2018), the shipwreck therefore. Of Gilles Lellouche’s previous film, we kept a fond memory, that of a sentimental comedy down tempo who knew how to unite through the touching representation of a weakened masculinity. Stripped bare (figuratively speaking) and in (swimming) underwear, a little slumped and quite wet, such appeared the bath pack of Great Bath, male community, almost exaggeratedly caring, but endearing in the way they wear their vulnerability in a scarf.
Love phew explores the opposite side of the previous opus, namely a masculinity not at all deconstructed, all in filtered impulses of domination, eruptive violence and desire for a fight. Of course, Gilles Lellouche offers an incriminating vision – at least in his explicit speech. As if the two films constituted a diptych: first the salvation of all by the adoption of a sport usually gendered for women (synchronized swimming), then the hell of a demonstrative virility, destructive for all and first for yourself.
False lyricism and outdated romanticism
Yet, Love phew is anything but clear in its relationship to this fighting cock ethos. The film spends its time eroticizing violence (that of Clotaire, the delinquent played as an adult by François Civil) which it would like to diatribe (with, as it should be, Scorsese in its sights). Even in its form, Love phew flexes his muscles, performs the slightest scene in spectacular one-upmanship and overfilms everything he watches as if each shot were a weight lift.
At the end of nearly three exhausting hours based on false lyricism, outdated romanticism about mad love (love at first sight, stainless steel of the first love, the only one, the true) and of expensive and childish cinema fantasy, Lellouche comes to conclude. He would then like to clear away all the hysterical-passionate jumble that he has unleashed until then.
The film ends with an incredible apology for docility in the face of an unjust hierarchical order.
Love, ultimately, finds the path to reason and adorns itself with educational virtues. This is the meaning of this epilogue where, in the supermarket where both of you work, Clotaire demonstrates, under the watchful eye of Jackie (Adèle Exarchopoulos), impeccable self-control and takes the humiliating reprimands without flinching. of an abject foreman.
At this point, the film would like to mark a sort of moral progress for its characters, to accompany them on the path to adulthood. However, it is precisely in this scene that we would finally find it legitimate for Clotaire’s violence to break out. The only progress that Love phew gives to his characters is that of social training.
Even if the spineless supervisor (very heavily typecast) is himself reframed by Jackie, who gives him a glimpse of the beating to which he may have exposed himself, the film ends with an incredible apology for docility in the face of a hierarchical order. unfair. This is the excellent moral of this blockbuster for the well-off, budgeted at 35 million euros: to encourage the less fortunate to accept their social destiny without flinching.
Love phew by Gilles Lellouche, with François Civil, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Vincent Lacoste (Fr., 2024, 2 h 46). In theaters October 16.
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