La naissance de l’amour

Sober, subtle and intimate film about the unhappy love lives of two artists and friends who are neither particularly young or successful any more. The actor Paul (a major role by Lou Castel) and the writer Marcus (played by a tragi-comic Jean-Pierre Léaud). Paul stays with his Fanchon because of the children, but really loves Ulrika (a supporting role by Johanna ter Steege, who had previously played a leading role in Garrel’s J’entends plus la Guitare). Marcus loves his girlfriend Hélène, but she leaves him. Paul cannot get down to writing any more; he only thinks, for instance about his children. Marcus makes desperate attempts to regain the affections of his Hélène.Both private cares and grand themes (the Gulf War, the Fall of Communism) come up in the dialogues between Paul en Marcus; this serves to strengthen the realistic strength of the film. The crises in their personal life and in the world at large run parallel; both demand a moral stance of the characters.La Naissance de l’Amour emerges from Garrel’s need (in this and other films) to relate imagination to his own suurroundings; that is why he presents the lives of artists with their everyday dramas. Moral and existential questions are completely embedded in the often trivial nature of reality. Garrel shows how his characters allow themselves to be led at critical moments in their lives by irrationality and chance. He described La Naissance de l’Amour for instance as ‘a study of the chance events that precede love’.