“Three Friends”, the Seasons of Love

Emmanuel Mouret directs Camille Cottin (Alice), Sara Forestier (Rebecca) and India Hair (Joan), who play the Three Friends (Trois amies, 2024) in his film that premiered in competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival. The director, who turns his exquisite miniatures into sentimental filigrees with an everyday appearance, last seduced us two years ago at Cannes with Chronicle of an ephemeral love, and this time he returns, albeit briefly and mainly as narrator, with Vincent Macaigne in one of the male roles in his choral film, which is completed by Grégoire Ludig, Damien Bonnard and Éric Caravaca. Mouret traces, under the friendly tent of romantic comedy, small stories spun through the amorous ups and downs of his protagonists, who beyond falling in or out of love, cheating or adapting to different ways of living a relationship, actually tell us about themselves, through their experience of love and how it affects others.

The different plots that intertwine in the lives of the three friends experience unexpected twists, worthy of Rohmer’s romantic comedies, explore through them the thousand faces of love, the facets that each one adopts according to her desires or her personality, and chance. From there, the love, marital and sexual issues are divided like a delta and delicately, like an observer (perhaps as ghostly as one of the characters), he invites us to accompany these young women, from the sentimental prism, as if the rest of their lives, even their children were of the least importance. It is not the lives of this small group that are described but the way they are affected by the vicissitudes of the heart, the different seasons of love (as Battiato wrote: New possibilities to know each other/and lost horizons never return./The season of love will return,/with fear and bets,/this time how long it will last) and he does so without frivolity or superficiality.

Mouret does not film sentimental dramas, but the pain in his films is real, the candor of his characters comes alive and their anguish and insecurities do not make them weaker or more neurotic. To have the courage to reflect with subtle humor on an important aspect of the existence of his protagonists without turning it into a cheesy novel or a parlor entertainment requires the subtlety of the aforementioned Rohmer, or of an Emmanuel Mouret who seemed to have already given it all to us. They live love, they talk about love, about the preference for asymmetrical relationships, where everyone has an interest as long as it works, second chances and extramarital affairs. If this sounds very French it is because it ticks all the boxes, but don’t judge the book by its covers. The delicacy and affection the director shows for his characters and the empathy with their regrets and doubts, hypocrisy, generosity or selfishness, protect him from cliché so that he can offer us portraits as beautiful as those of these three women in love.