30/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: Emmanuel Mouret spins a sophisticated and brilliantly directed web of feelings and flirtations in pure paradoxical Rohmer-esque style

Camille Cottin, India Hair and Sara Forestier in Three Friends

"Lyon is the main setting. Things are going to happen here, here and there, and here and there too. Do you see that man, Thomas? He’s important but he’s not the main character. There’s the main character, Joan - she teaches English. And there’s Alice, her best friend. Thomas is replacing someone at the high school. There he is, in my classroom. I miss my students. But I digress, the story starts far earlier, a little over a year ago. It might not be at that exact point, but it’s where I’ve chosen to start".

Welcome to Three Friends [+see also:
trailer
film profile], unveiled in competition within the 81st Venice Film Festival, and to the wholly recognisable film universe of French director Emmanuel Mouret, an expert in romantic fluctuations and oscillations teetering between truth and lie, comedy and the banal tragedy of life, the dissatisfying yet profound perfection of a loving relationship, exciting and guilt-inducing duplicity, thwarted impulses and dreams of escaping, paradoxical friendships, the evanescence and complex reciprocity of feelings... It’s an immense and playful web whose mysteries the director now wields masterfully, adopting his trademark style whereby he sidesteps intensity ("there’s no need to add to the drama") in favour of calm, lightness and irony (though without ever judging), and taking up a literary distance to observe the human ants that we all are when it comes to our hearts and heavenly desires, which relentlessly interfere in our down-to-earth lives.

At the heart of the story (brilliantly developed by the filmmaker in league with Carmen Leroi) are three women, three friends, the interlinked romantic lives of three modern-day teachers, three relationships exploring the very straightforward, dizzying heights of love. Joan (India Hair) no longer loves Victor (Vincent Macaigne) who tries in vain to piece their relationship back together; Alice (Camille Cottin) would rather pretend to love than suffer in love, though she ultimately finds herself tempted by a small inner voice; and Rebecca (Sara Forestier) is secretly involved with Alice’s husband, Éric (Grégoire Ludig). Add to this an accidental death, the passing of time, and the arrival of Thomas (Damien Bonnard) who would love for Joan to love him, and we’ve got all the ingredients for a plot about the search for happiness, with airs of Marivaux and Éric Rohmer, and a hint of sweetened Bergman.

Carried by the voice-over of its ghostly narrator, this new opus by the mischievous Emmanuel Mouret artfully offers up a "happy complexity" of intimacy, and sketches out a tender treatise on love which is never lacking in humour. Enveloping it all is an elegant and sophisticated small-theatre-style mise en scene, which is in keeping with this serious yet unpredictable director whose singular signature approach sees modernity colliding with timelessness ("taking on a 446-page classic is a terrifying thing") and who will inevitably earn himself some highly devoted admirers.

Three Friends was produced by Moby Dick Films in co-production with Arte France Cinéma and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma. Pyramide International are steering international sales.

(Translated from French)

Photogallery 30/08/2024: Venice 2024 - Three Friends

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Emmanuel Mouret, Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier, India Hair, Damien Bonnard
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