At first sight this is a typically French film about three-cornered relationships. Young men and women talk at length and apparently make things unnecessarily complex. But the ambitions of Arnaud Desplechin go much further. He makes a film about relationships that is also a refined parody of such films. His intellectual film is set in an academic environment, but is also an (occasionally grim) satire on the Paris semi-philosophical scene. It is a subtle film that is serious, occasionally melancholy, but that can be described as a comedy in its structure and tone, a comedy from the tradition of the first psychological era, that of the eighteenth-century literature of Voltaire, Laclos, Diderot, Rousseau and even Marivaux.Protagonist is Paul, who works reluctantly as a scientific assistant at a university in a drab Paris suburb. Paul is a waverer. He doesn’t know how to complete his study, how to get out of his job, how to write his thesis and above all how to get along with women. He half-heartedly finishes with his steady girlfriend Esther and has a few free and easy adventures that steer him more than vice versa. And there are his friends too, such as bosom buddy Nathan (nice role by Emmanuel Salinger, protagonist in Desplechin’s La sentinelle). Wonderfully filmed in a way that looks to be completely improvised, but is in fact written down minutely.
