3 Couers (Three Hearts)
DIRECTOR: Benoît Jacquot
CAST: Benoît Poelvoorde, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, André Marcon, Patrick Mille
CLASSIFICATION: 13S
RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes
RATING: ***
The gently perfumed air of impending doom suffuses 3 Hearts, a mildly intriguing romantic drama from Benoît Jacquot.
In subject matter, this atmospheric bagatelle is the stuff of either melodrama or screwball comedy, with its twists, turns, coincidences and domestic disasters. Depending on the film-maker’s mood, each could be open to either tragic or hilarious spin. Jacquot goes for the former, adding a tense, menacing tone that gives an already sombre morality tale the taut dynamics of a thriller.
3 Hearts opens as Marc (Poelvoorde), a rumpled tax inspector, just misses his train back to Paris from an unnamed provincial town. At a loss, he repairs to a nearby cafe, where he spies Sylvie (Gainsbourg). Later, on the street, he bumps into her again, and they spend the night walking and talking, vowing to meet a week later at a designated spot in Paris.
Fans of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise cycle might think they know how this ends. But Jacquot takes 3 Hearts in a decidedly less lyrical direction, sending Marc and Sylvie down unexpected paths that will result either in blissful true love or thwarted desire.
Adding complications to the mix are Sylvie’s mother and sister, played by real-life mother and daughter Deneuve and Mastroianni, who play increasingly significant roles in a story that ultimately amounts to little more than a minor diversion.
There’s no doubt that Jacquot knows his way around a world in which smoking, longing looks over wine glasses and furtive, shadowy kisses take the place of dialogue. If he doesn’t always close the circle on some of his fore-shadowings and subplots (one involves Marc’s investigation of the small town’s mayor), he manages to hold the viewer’s interest, heightened by frequent Hans Zimmer-esque “thromps” of foreboding minor-key chords.
Poelvoorde isn’t entirely convincing as a man with whom women instantly fall in love, but all three actresses are believable as people hurtling toward Jacquot’s downbeat conclusion: let’s just say that everything in the title winds up broken. – Washington Post
If you liked Jules and Jim, you will like this.