Idk about The Beautiful Person (2008)
[SPEAKING FRENCH…]
I was really dragging my feet with this movie—mostly because I thought I’d added it exclusively for Louis Garrel (which seemed to be a decision made with the heart, not the head), and I was in for an interminable 90 minutes of liaisons not-so dangereuses. So imagine my delight when I discovered it was a film by Christophe Honoré, whose Love Songs, a bicurious tip of the beret to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was (once upon a time) v important to a young gay Francophile. And A Beautiful Person, while not quite so twee, is a lovely return to that world: where the male gaze rests steady on an endless crocodile of catalogue-ready Frenchmen with rose-tinged cheeks, whose hearts swell, then shatter, as they cross and recross their Roman noses like fencing foils. Honoré’s Paris is always gray, it’s always rainy, but somehow, there’s never an ounce of humidity in the air: every boy’s hair is thick but wispy, oily but dry enough to run a thousand thoughtless hands through. Louis Garrel is (naturally) their ringleader, wobbling round in a velvet suit like he’s Doctor Who, and I’ll admit it took me half an hour to determine whether he was a student or a professeur. From what I understand, the movie’s a loose adaptation of Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves, which I’ve never read, but there’s something deeply comprehensible (comforting?) about a plot pegged to the line of a 17th century novel: there’s a great to-do about a letter, which probably seemed life-or-death in the 1600s, but in the context of aughties-France, feels a little trifling; boys throw themselves from buildings, they make sweeping declarations of love and vengeance, they fail to organize a class trip to Italy; to all of which, like so many tigers in the zoo, Léa Seydoux says “pooh pooh”. Perhaps it’s not a great film, but there’s something snug, indulgent about the whole affair—with a woolen scarf draped round every neck, as if to protect them all from the scratch of Nick Drake’s voice, lilting dolefully through the tiered arcades…
Cons:
Where is Ludivine Sagnier.
Next time! We might see the devil through the cracks in our fingers!