Anaïs In Love (2021) played at festivals, if I remember correctly like the French Film Festival, and feels like it would have been overshadowed by The Worst Person In The World coming out in the same year. There’s a resemblance between the two leads – lithe brunette white women – and they’re both chaotic presences who run through a lot of their scenes. Now I liked TWPITW but I also felt that the filmmakers got distracted from the main character, and felt more connected to the comic-book artist boyfriend in the end. Directed and written by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, Anaïs In Love allows its lead character, Anaïs (played by Anaïs Demoustier, an actor I remember from the Juliette Binoche film Elles), to retain centre stage.
“You’re like a bulldozer” is how Anaïs’ boyfriend describes her and the first scene is her running breathlessly from a flower shop with a bouquet in hand. Studying at university and pressured to complete her thesis, Anaïs is impulsive and distracted by her desires. Often there are scenes where characters talk to her, and her replies relate to her own predicament, not even listening. Bouncing from one situation to the next, a story takes shape when she has an affair with an older man, a publisher Daniel (Denis Podalydes), who is married to a writer, Emilie (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). While the affair feels half-hearted and Daniel is barely committed, Anaïs becomes intrigued and ultimately obsessed with Emilie, reading her books, watching video interviews, and feeling a strong connection. When Anaïs bumps into Emilie, and sees that she is on a writer’s retreat conference out in the coastal countryside, she drops everything and heads there in pursuit.
I was laughing heartily throughout, and there are great farcical moments, nicely set up for payoffs in observed reactions to situations, such as when Daniel arrives at the retreat unannounced, as the attraction grows between Anaïs and Emilie. But the film is not a complete farce, and with one of Anaïs’ family dealing with an illness relapse, there’s some depth given to this impulsive character. And ultimately the film gives itself over to being a lesbian romance with charged moments of tension, particularly with Tedeschi’s measured gravity playing off Demoustier’s excitable presence. A very French film in its frothy quality, its focus on writers and academics, and its summer-y, idyllic locations, much in the tradition of Eric Rohmer but with a stronger comical and sensual energy at different moments.
Available to stream on Binge. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 