Un + une (2015)
(On TV, July 2020) Some movies leave you with a thumbs up, others with a thumbs down, but Un + une goes for the question mark. It feels stuck in a position where it could become good, or ridiculous, or unintentionally funny, or boring. It’s from veteran French director Claude Lelouch, stars Jean Dujardin (perhaps France’s biggest star of the twenty-first century so far) as a French composer, the beautiful Elsa Zylberstein as a love interest, and even features Christophe Lambert in a veteran actor’s role as a French ambassador. Much of the film is set in India, as our protagonist travels there to score a movie and has an affair with the French ambassador’s wife. The setting is colourfully portrayed, and the first few minutes are an intriguing blend of fiction within fiction. Other things don’t work as well. There’s a significant plot point that has to do with the main characters meeting Mata Amritanandamayi, an important religious figure in India—it feels heartfelt and admirative, but it comes across as a bit extraneous to the movie. (It was notably filmed semi-secretly, the figure participating but not knowing those she embraced were movie actors.) The third act gets, for lack of a better word, increasingly French as infidelity is met with attempted infidelity, then implied conception leading to a years-later epilogue that stops just when things were getting interesting. Am I supposed to laugh at the piled-up incredulity that the film creates, or moved by some kind of love story? Or be cowed into admiration at the presence of a major spiritual figure? Or simply annoyed that this doesn’t seem to lead anywhere?
