The filmmaker shot his fiftieth film, “Love is better than life”, “a comedy not so dramatic as that”, where we find the elements of his cinema.
For as long as he’s been saying that cinema is better than life, and that life is still a good screenwriter, Claude Lelouch has put it all together in his fiftieth film, “Love is Better than Life” (to be released on January 19). He, who has told many love stories, tells this time the story of an ultimate love. The last sentimental station before the highway to eternity.
Close to the Normandy beach where he shot the mythical scenes of “A Man and a Woman”, Lelouch presented at the Deauville Film Festival what should be the first episode of a trilogy, “A Waltz in Three Times”. The director was surrounded by some of his actresses and actors, Gérard Darmon, Philippe Lellouche, Sandrine Bonnaire, Elsa Zylberstein, Kev Adams … before the screening of this film, “a comedy not so dramatic that it is”, which is perhaps also a drama not so comic that it is.
Gérard Darmon plays a sick man, who knows he is going to die, and has fun pulling a funeral face when he has lunch with his buddies; they (Philippe Lellouche and Ary Abittan) would like him to have a peaceful end of life by offering him a last love story. They then contact a professional of the thing, director of an escort agency (played by Sandrine Bonnaire) who, sensitive to this story, will give of her person.
Time, death, life, love, friendship…
In this fiftieth opus, Lelouch does Lelouch, and he is well placed to make such a film, a mixture of life and fiction, with back and forth between moments of cinema and banal scenes, a catch-all in which he evokes time, death, life, love, friendship … It gives a rather messy cinema, as often with him, but his audience appreciates this assortment sometimes awkward but sincere, this cinema that allows “to make love stories last.
In this fiftieth film, Claude Lelouch revisits some of his previous ones: it contains “still some notes of Francis Lai” (his regular composer who died a few years ago), Robert Hossein appears “for the last time on screen”, even Lino Ventura makes an appearance with an excerpt from “Adventure is adventure”, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Bernard Tapie (also recently deceased) are announced in the sequel… If artists are the “darlings of the good Lord”, this great manipulator, according to Lelouch, a strange transformist Jesus crosses this film, sometimes cab driver, sometimes interrogated by policemen, or even dancing with the devil, because it is indeed “humans who transform paradise into hell”.
Patrick TARDIT
“Love is better than life”, a film by Claude Lelouch (released on January 19).
